13. Chapter 13
Him
I wake without chemicals. The thought takes a moment to register.
I’ve surfaced so many times through the thick pull of sedation, fighting toward consciousness, that waking unmedicated feels wrong.
Too fast. Too light. No needle. No fog. Just my eyes opening and the room being there, all at once, without having to drag it into focus.
Gray dawn light. The cabin. Rain still tapping the roof, lighter now.
Her.
She’s against my chest. Her back pressed to my skin, her head tucked into the curve of my throat, my arm across her stomach.
At some point in the night, her hand settled over mine.
Her fingers are resting on my knuckles, not holding, just there.
She’s warm under my arm. Her breathing is slow.
Even. The deep, trusting rhythm of someone who fell asleep and forgot to be afraid.
I don’t move.
My body is stiff. My ribs throb. The wound on my side pulls when I breathe too deeply. But the warmth of her is doing something to the rest of it; the pain is there, but it’s manageable. As if her presence turns the volume down on everything that hurts.
She’s in her underwear. I remember that now; her stripping off her wet clothes last night, the pale flash of her skin in the candlelight, the way she said don’t get any ideas like she was daring me and warning herself at the same time.
The memory makes me smile. At least, I think I do.
It’s been so long that I don’t recognize the feeling.
I told her there’d be no ideas, and the almost-laugh she gave me was the best sound I’ve heard in years.
Her hair is against my jaw. It smells like rain, and the herbs she works with—fainter now, most of it washed away by the mountain. Underneath it, just her. The warm undertone my wolf has been tracking since the first time she touched my wrist in the locked room.
He’s quiet now. Quieter than I’ve felt him since I can remember.
The frantic pacing, the snarling, the constant push toward the surface…
all of it has eased. He’s there. Alert. But he’s not fighting.
He’s lying low in my chest, watching the door and the window and feeling her breathing, and he’s calm.
It’s the calm that lets the man surface.
I understand something I couldn’t understand in the locked room.
The wolf isn’t the broken part.
He is the part that stayed.
When I was strapped to the table, he took it. When the restraints tightened, he took it. When the lights burned through one night and into the next, he took that too. Teeth, claws, instinct, rage…all the pieces of me that could survive without asking why.
He held the body when the man couldn’t.
The problem is that he doesn’t know how to stop holding it.
Every time I reach for words, he hears exposure. Every time I try to think past the next threat, he reads the space as danger. The man surfaces, and the wolf braces for the blow that always came after.
But not here.
No straps. No sealed air. No hands forcing me down.
Only gray dawn, rain tapping through the broken window, and her breathing against my chest.
The wolf listens to the mountain.
The man gets to open his eyes.
I ease my arm from around her. Slowly. She stirs but doesn’t wake. Her hand tightens on my knuckles for a second, then releases. I slide sideways until her head rests against the wall instead of my chest, and I stand.
My legs hold. The ache is there, but it’s just an ache, not the buckle-and-fall from last night. I cross the small room to the window.
The world is out there.
I stop breathing.
Trees. Everywhere. Tall pines climbing the slope above the cabin, their branches dark and heavy with rain.
A rock face to the north, streaked with water.
The slope drops away to the east, and through the trees I can see…
sky. Not a ceiling. Not fluorescent panels.
Not the metal roof of a transport vehicle.
Sky. Gray and low with cloud, and the edges of it go on forever.
The wideness of it hits me so hard that my hand braces against the window frame.
How long has it been since I saw the sky?
Years. It’s been years.
My throat closes. I grip the frame until my fingers hurt and I breathe through it—one breath, two, three—and I watch the clouds move.
They’re shifting slowly. West to east. The wind carries the smell of wet pine and stone and cold earth, and all of it is real.
Not pumped through vents. Not filtered through glass.
Real air, and real trees, and a sky that doesn’t end at the walls of a room.
A bird calls from somewhere beyond the broken window, two notes close together, repeated from a branch I can’t see.
My head tilts before I mean it to. Not tracking for threat. Something other than the wolf turns toward the sound, and when the bird calls again, I know the interval before I know why I know it.
A minor third. Descending.
The words surface whole, carrying other things with them: the distance between notes, the tension inside a phrase, the ache of a melody leaning toward resolution. I grip the window frame harder, rain-damp wood rough beneath my fingers.
Dr. Fell carved lines into my skin. She strapped me to a table and forced sound out of my chest until it became data in her file, but she didn’t take this.
The bird sings again.
I shape my mouth around the interval and whistle it back.
The sound comes out thin. Rusted. Almost nothing.
But it is mine.
A fragment of something I don’t remember learning. Nothing like the force Dr. Fell dragged out of me, nothing that bends the air or rattles the walls. Just breath shaped into music.
Mine.
“Hey.”
Her voice. Behind me. Sleep-rough and cautious.
I stop whistling and turn, almost feeling guilty that she caught me echoing a bird.
She’s sitting against the wall where I left her. She’s retrieved her shirt—now dry—and wrapped it around her shoulders. Her hair is tangled. Her legs are bare below the jacket’s hem—long, pale in the silvery light, drawn up with her arms looped around her knees.
I’ve been beside her all night. I’ve felt her breathing against my chest for hours. But I was looking at the dark, not at her.
Now I’m looking.
The wolf has been aware of her since the locked room, her scent, her voice, the pull of her that even unconscious, I couldn’t ignore. But the wolf’s awareness is territorial. Magnetic. It doesn’t have the language for what I’m seeing now.
The morning light catches the line of her collarbone where the jacket has slipped.
The curve of her calf against the floorboards.
The way her lips are slightly parted, and the shadow her lashes throw across her cheekbone.
She’s looking at me with something more open than the clinical focus I’m used to.
Like she was watching before she spoke, and what she saw isn’t what she expected.
She’s beautiful. The man knows that. The wolf knew the feeling of her before he knew she was beautiful, and the difference between those two things is the difference between instinct and sight. Both of them are looking at her now.
“Morning,” I say. My voice is rough, but not because I haven’t used it for so long.
“Morning.” Her eyes move to the window. “What were you doing?”
“Listening.” I glance back at the trees. “To the bird.”
“I heard you.” She pauses. “You were whistling.”
I don’t know what to say to that. The whistle feels private, something from the part of me that the facility didn’t own. But she heard it, and she’s looking at me the way she looked when I fixed the wound pressure last night. Like she’s adjusting a picture.
“You should eat,” she says, and then catches herself. “We don’t have anything to eat.”
“No.”
“Or drink.”
“No.”
She looks at me. I look at her. The absurdity of the situation sits between us—two wolves on a mountain with nothing.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
I take stock. My ribs hurt. The wound on my side is stiff but not bleeding. My feet are tender from the rocks. My muscles ache. But the fog is lighter than it’s been in weeks. The words are closer.
“Clearer,” I say.
She tilts her head. “Clearer how?”
“Words are…not so far away.” I tap my temple, then my mouth. “My mind…works.”
She nods slowly. “You’re more coherent today.”
I am. The sentences are still slow—each word placed deliberately before I let it out—but they’re holding. The bridge between thinking and speaking seems more stable.
She pushes off the wall and crosses to me, then stands beside me at the window. I can feel her warmth, and my wolf presses toward it without urgency. Just leaning.
“Can I see your side?” she asks. She doesn’t immediately move to put her hand on me, and something loosens in my chest.
“I like that,” I say.
“Like what?”
“When you ask.”
She’s quiet. Her eyes are on my face.
“When I ask to touch you?” she says.
“Yeah. Always ask.”
The words come out simple. Not a speech. A line drawn in the simplest way I can draw it. Her expression softens.
“They never asked,” she says quietly. “The people from that place.”
I shake my head. “No.”
The word feels heavier than it sounds.
She’s quiet for a moment. Her hand hovers near the wound on my side, but doesn’t touch. “I’m sorry you went through that,” she says. “That they did those things to you.”
I don’t answer.
I can’t.
Her apology settles differently from the others. Not like pity or fear. She says it as if she has seen the damage and would put her hands between me and every blade if time worked backward.
My throat tightens before I know what to do with it.
She checks the wound. Quick. Her fingers are light and efficient, and the touch doesn’t make me flinch this time. She’s done in a few seconds.
“Fine,” she says. “You’ll live.”
“Good.” I smile. I’m certain I do this time.
She leans against the window frame beside me. We look at the trees together. The rain has softened to a mist. The bird is still singing somewhere in the canopy. My mind is working as I take it all in.