12 Tommy
My arm had been dead since the birds started, and I wasn’t going to move it.
Somewhere past my elbow there was a hand that technically belonged to me, gone to pins and then to a fat numb nothing under the weight of her skull, and the smart play—the human play—was to slide it out an inch and let the blood crawl back in.
Move the arm, the cot creaks. Cot creaks, she surfaces.
She surfaces, the fever comes back up through her like a struck match held to an open line, and then we’re doing the whole thing again—the claws coming through, the jaw unhinging, the sound she’d made that was going to be living in the back of my skull for the rest of my natural life.
So the arm could die. Cheap at the price. I’d paid worse for less.
What I didn’t understand though was why the fever had banked.
She had entered her Heat.
Brann, Santos, Levi—they’d all warned the rest of us unmated hotshots how it went.
Warned us so we could prepare for the insatiable fire to anchor the life force of our mate with sex and to close the bond with a bite. To save. To protect.
But Kaia had fallen asleep in my arms. I could smell her Heat, but for the moment, it was banked, and we hadn’t kissed more than the once.
I wanted to. Goddess, I desired her. But that was something I had to put away for now, by force, until I understood what was going on.
Kaia lay along my bare chest, her cheek flat over my heart and one fist still curled in the hair on my chest like she’d grabbed it going under and forgot to let go.
The shirt I’d put her in had soaked through twice and dried twice and gone stiff.
Where my bare skin met hers the Heat was still wrong—not the stove-top blaze of the worst hour, but a low simmer that hadn’t backed off all night, the engine of her idling hot while it burned off whatever the Order had been pumping into her since before she could walk.
Something was different about her. And it scared me.
I had no playbook for this.
All night her smell had been the scorched-wiring reek, hot plastic cooking behind a wall, and then around false dawn it had thinned, and underneath, faint as a thumbprint, the rain-on-slate and wild-honey thread that was actually her had started coming back through.
Mine. The bond pulled on it every time I caught it, a hook set behind my sternum giving a little tug, just to remind me it was real, just in case I’d somehow forgotten in the last ninety seconds.
I hadn’t forgotten. I would never forget. I had waited for her my entire life.
The pack link had been a low roar in the back of my head since we hit the staging ground, almost twenty voices of logistics bleeding through the link at once.
—need another blanket truck on the east side, three of them are hypothermic—
—Who’s got the clipboard, we need names, we can’t process fifty women with no names—
—Beto, the burnout’s holding, line’s good, where do you want the—
—Nadia says no caffeine for the ones in shock, somebody tell Santos to dump the—
I turned the volume down the way you learn to in a fire, walling it off behind a door so I could hear my own thoughts, and what I heard was the slow steady drum, hers and mine, still matched, still impossible, an inch apart in a leaking tent at sunrise.
Romantic, the part of me said that defaulted to a joke during stress. Real candlelit-dinner energy. You absolute disaster.
A shadow crossed the canvas wall.
I knew the shape of it before he spoke—the set of the shoulders, the way he stood three feet off instead of reaching for the flap.
Reed had been at this all night, and he’d come to a stop exactly at the edge of the line Nadia must have chalked in the dirt around the tent, and he wasn’t going to cross it.
“You awake in there?” Low. Pitched to not carry.
“Define awake.” My voice came out a wreck. I hadn’t used it in hours. “I have achieved a state of consciousness. I would not operate heavy machinery.”
A breath on the other side of the canvas, almost a laugh, almost not. “She down?”
“For now. Don’t make me move and don’t make her move. We’re—” I felt for the word. “We’re balanced. It’s a balanced situation. I touch the cot wrong and the whole thing tips.”
“That’s why I’m out here.” The shadow shifted, crouched, came level with where my head would be.
“I’m not coming in, Tommy. Not because of the quarantine line.
Because I got within ten feet of that flap an hour ago and my wolf tried to climb out my throat, and I’ve got fifty civilian dormants who’ll feel it if their alpha loses his lunch in the grass.
So I’m talking to a tent. Work with me.”
The honesty of that landed somewhere soft.
He wasn’t pretending. He’d looked at the data his nose handed him and he’d named it out loud instead of dressing it up, and that was Reed, that had always been Reed—the reason I’d let him put me on a crew and never asked the questions I already knew the answers to.
Royal wolf shifter bloodlines. All of them. He was collecting all of them. But for what?
I could guess the reason. More than guess.
I was pretty sure I knew exactly why, and it tied directly back to what I’d felt humming in the wellness retreat’s walls and radiating off the Inner Circle.
The Verdant Order wasn’t just draining dormant wolves to sell aurum latens on the black market.
They were stripping diverse abilities from the strongest shifter bloodlines and hoarding it for themselves.
If Reed was gathering Royals, he wasn’t just building a pack. He was building an armory.
But now wasn’t the time.
“How is she?”
Not what is she. I clocked the change.
“Alive. Fever’s down from where it was. She shifted halfway twice in the night and I—” My throat did something.
“I held her through it and it stopped. Soon as my skin’s on her skin the whole thing settles.
She quits cooking. The second I ease off to check on her it starts climbing again.
So.” I looked down at the dark head over my heart.
“Here we are. I’m a load-bearing wall now. It’s a whole new career.”
“That’s the bond.” Not a question.
“Sure. Doing exactly what Levi said it does. What Santos said. What Brann said. Except, not, right?” A pause. The numb arm throbbed once, a warning. “Somehow it’s different. She’s not demanding to mate—she’s just sleeping.”
Reed made a confused sound. “That doesn’t make sense—”
I sighed. I had wanted him to tell me it would all be fine. “No. I guess it doesn’t.”
The shadow turned its head, said something to someone behind it, and then a second shape joined the first, smaller, compact. Nadia.
Through the slim gap in the tent flap, I could see her stand at the line with her bare hands loose at her sides and her rings catching the new light, and when she spoke it was flat and clinical and aimed straight through the canvas at me like I was a chart.
“Tommy. I need to read her and I’m not coming in, so you’re my instrument. Don’t argue, don’t editorialize, just do what I say when I say it. Understood?”
“You should put that on a mug,” I said. “Sells itself.”
“Roll her onto her left side if you can do it without waking her. I need her spine facing the east wall.”
I could do it. Barely. I got my dead arm out from under her in increments, a millimeter at a time, biting down on the pins-and-needles fire as the blood came roaring back, and I turned her, never breaking contact, never letting the simmer climb.
She murmured. Burrowed her face into the side of my throat. Didn’t wake. Her fist found a new grip in the hair at the base of my neck and I let her have it.
Outside, something caught. A small dry crackle and then the smell came under the canvas—not the camp’s coffee, something older—wet ash and root-rot and the floor of a forest that hadn’t seen sun in a hundred years.
Nadia, burning her stuff.
I’d watched her do it over a kid we pulled off the Coronado fire, and once over me, when I came in green and shaking. The smell meant she was about to find out something true, and I’d never once enjoyed the things she found.
Her voice dropped into the low shaping chant, words with no edges, rising and bending. The hair on my forearms stood up. The pack link went quiet.
“Tell me when your skin warms,” Nadia said, breaking off mid-breath.
“It’s already—”
“Not her fever. My working. You’ll feel it on the side of you that’s against her. Like a sunburn coming up. Tell me when.”
I waited. Kaia breathed against my neck. The chant threaded back up, and then it came—a heat blooming along my left side, the side she was pressed to, low and crawling, an itch that lived under the skin instead of on it.
“Now,” I said. “I feel it now.”
The chant stopped.
For a second there was nothing but the generator grinding its tired belt somewhere across camp and the crackle of the burning stems and the two heartbeats. Then Nadia made a sound I had never once heard her make in all the years I’d known her. A small sound. Like the air had gone out of her.
“Run it again,” Reed said, low.
“I don’t need to run it again.”
“Nadia.”
“I’m telling you what it’s going to say.
” Her shadow hadn’t moved, but her voice had changed under it, gone tight and careful, a clinician walking the long way around a word she didn’t want to use.
The stems crackled. The chant came up again, harder, and the heat under my skin flared and then snapped off clean, and Nadia exhaled through her teeth.
“Tommy.” Flat. Even. The composed doctor face, except I couldn’t see it, I could only hear it. “I need you to listen to me and not say anything funny.”
“I make no promises but I’ll try.”