12. Chapter 12
Sable
He’s swaying. That’s the first thing I notice after the anger clears enough to let me see.
He’s standing barefoot on pine needles, his chest heaving, and he’s swaying.
The half-shift is still on him, jaw too heavy, shoulders humped, the tendons in his neck standing like cable.
His hands hang at his sides, and the claws extend and retract in a rhythm that matches his breathing.
Blood runs down his left side. I think he landed on a jagged rock when we tumbled out of the transport, and the wound is bleeding freely, dark against the fabric of his shirt.
My kit is in the transport vehicle. My sedative is in the transport vehicle. My communication device, my notes, my emergency supplies…all of it is in the transport vehicle, which is somewhere behind us on a road I can’t see from here.
I have the clothes on my back and a man who just broke three sets of reinforced restraints, threw an adult male through the air, and blew out the doors of an armored vehicle.
Think, Sable. Stop being angry and think.
The anger is easier. The anger has somewhere to go. But anger doesn’t assess whether the wolf standing three feet away is in control of himself. Right now, that’s the question that matters.
I watch his eyes. They’re too blue, too wide, the wolf looking out from behind a face that hasn’t committed to being human. His nostrils flare with each breath. He’s scanning the trees behind me, not looking at me, looking past me, checking for pursuit.
He hasn’t moved toward me since he set me down. His hands are at his sides. The claws extend and retract, but they aren’t reaching. His body language is defensive, not aggressive, braced between me and the direction we just came from, his weight shifted to intercept anything coming from behind.
He’s guarding. Not preparing for a kill.
That distinction is the reason I don’t run.
“Sit down,” I tell him. My voice comes out surprisingly steady.
Nothing. His eyes are still on the trees.
“There’s nobody coming. Not yet.” I have no idea if that’s true. “Sit down before you fall down.”
His legs give out before he decides. One knee hits the rock, then the other. He catches himself with one hand, claws digging into the dirt. His chest heaves. The bleeding on his side is worse now, running down into his waistband.
I crouch in front of him. My hands are shaking. I don’t try to hide it; there’s no one here to pretend for. I pull his shirt aside.
The cut is shallow but long, running along the weakest point of an old rune scar. It needs pressure, cleaning, and ideally stitches, which I don’t have materials for.
I tear a strip from my shirt hem, fold it, and press it against the wound.
He flinches. A full-body jerk that puts his claws six inches from my face before he pulls them back.
My heart slams into my throat. For one second, the reality of my situation shakes me: I’m kneeling in front of something that could kill me faster than I could stand up, and there’s no dart gun, no sedative, no three-man takedown team down the hall.
His eyes find mine. The wolf stares out. Then…something shifts. The claws retract. His hand comes up and covers mine on the cloth, pressing harder. Taking over the wound pressure.
The gesture is so practical, so human, that my pulse takes three full beats to come back down.
“Good,” I say. “Keep that there.”
I sit back on my heels. I’m shaking.
What the fuck do I do now?
The rain hits my shoulder. It’s been drizzling lightly all along, but now, it’s pouring.
“Shit,” I mutter, looking up into dark clouds, then glancing back down to where we left the road behind us. If I take him back there, he’s in a world of trouble. I listen carefully, waiting to pick up shouts, the sounds of pursuit. There’s nothing.
Maybe they went to get backup. That would make sense. They don’t know what they’re dealing with, except that he’s dangerous.
And if we walk back down that slope now, danger is all they’ll see.
The broken restraints. The unconscious handler. The ruined vehicle. Me with his blood on my hands and no good explanation for why I’m still standing beside him.
Goddammit. Why did he do that?
He watches me through the rain, silent and swaying.
The pressure to do something sharpens until standing still feels like a decision.
Rain lashes through the trees, cold enough to steal my breath.
Mountain rain. The kind that turns to sleet without warning.
Within moments, we’re both soaked. Steam rises off his shoulders, post-shift heat burning the water away almost as fast as it falls.
My teeth start to click.
We’re not going back.
Not yet.
Maybe I’ll regret that in an hour. Maybe in ten minutes. But if I take him back now, they’ll put him down harder than before, and this time, I don’t know if anyone will let him surface again.
“We need shelter,” I say. “Can you walk?”
He gets to his feet. It takes two tries. But he’s standing.
I scan the ridge. Nothing useful. Trees, rock, slope. I pick a direction that puts the ridge at our backs and start walking. He follows. His stride is uneven, his feet landing heavy on the wet ground, but he keeps pace.
His hand finds my elbow after the first ten minutes. Not grabbing. Steadying. He leans his weight on me for a few steps, his palm burning through my wet sleeve, and then rights himself. I adjust my stride to match his. We don’t speak.
I’m trying to think about what comes next, but the thoughts keep snagging on the immediate. Every snap of a branch makes me flinch. Every time his breathing hitches, I check in my peripheral vision to see if he’s shifting.
I trust what I’ve seen: the hand opening, the claws retracting, the wolf who stopped when I asked him to. But trust and certainty aren’t the same thing, and there’s a part of me that’s weighing up the danger.
He hasn’t hurt you.
In fact, it seems like what motivated him in the first place was the guard grabbing my arm. But that’s no guarantee of anything.
Downhill is faster. The tree line gives cover. If the shift takes him fully, I can’t outrun a wolf, but I can go to ground in the rock formations on the eastern slope.
I hate that I’m thinking it. I’m thinking it anyway.
The cabin appears through the trees maybe twenty minutes later. Weathered wood, nearly invisible against the pines. One room. The door hangs crooked on rusted hinges.
He keeps walking past it. Three more steps. The wolf wants distance, not shelter.
“Hey.” I stop. “We’re going in there.”
His eyes come back to me. Rain running down his face. Dark hair plastered to his cheeks and throat.
“You’re going to drop,” I say. “And when you do, I can’t carry you. That has a roof. We need it.”
He changes direction. Concession, not agreement.
Inside, the cabin is exactly what it looks like: ten feet square, bare wood floor, no glass in the window. There’s an old woodstove in the corner, rusted shut. A stack of firewood against the wall, dry enough to burn if I had anything to light it with. I don’t.
He makes it two steps past the door before his legs give out properly.
One knee, then the other, then he catches himself against the wall and slides down it until his back is flat against the wood.
His head tips back. His eyes close. The shift fights across his face for a few seconds—jaw thickening, teeth crowding—and then it releases, and he’s just a man.
Wet, bleeding, exhausted, sitting on the floor with his hands open on his knees.
Something about the openness of those hands makes my chest tight. He’s too spent to hold them any other way.
I turn away and do a full check of the cabin.
The stove is useless. The woodpile has nothing behind it.
The window faces east; I can see the slope we climbed.
No movement on it. Under the sill, half-buried in dust, is a rusted tin box.
I pry it open. There’s a candle stub, two fishhooks, a spool of line, and a box of matches so old the heads have gone soft.
I try three before one catches. The candle flares and holds.
It’s not heat. But it’s light, and right now light matters.
When I turn back, his eyes are open again. Watching me. Jaw human, claws retracted. His hands are still open on his knees.
I wedge the door closed with a loose board. Then I cross to him.
“Wrists,” I say. “Let me see.”
He lifts his hands. The strap cuts are livid, shallow, already clotting. I clean them with strips torn from my soaked shirt. He watches me work without flinching this time.
“You broke away from that vehicle,” I say, not looking up. “Ran three miles uphill carrying a grown woman.” I tie off the cloth. “Your body is going to make you pay for all of that.”
“Already is,” he says.
It’s the first time he’s spoken. Two words. Low, rough, but he’s talking. I hide my surprise.
“Good. Then hold still.” I check his ribs. Press along the lines, feeling for displacement. “Breathe in.”
He does. The hitch is on the left side near the gash left by the rock. “Bruised. Maybe a hairline. Don’t twist if you can help it.”
I sit back. The candle throws unsteady light across the floorboards. Outside, the rain has settled into a steady rhythm. I still don’t hear any signs of pursuit.
The practical problems stack up in the silence.
No food. No clean water. No communication. No warmth. His feet are torn, and he’s half-dressed in soaked clothes, burning through calories his body doesn’t have.
Aurora’s trackers will be back. And when they find us—not if, when—everything changes.
Brenna sent me with him as his healer. She trusted me to follow Aurora’s protocols. Instead, he broke out of the transport, I didn’t stop him, and I’m sitting in a cabin on a mountain in the dark with no way to explain this that doesn’t end with me being removed from his care permanently.