Chapter 36 After the Blood
Dominic POV
Blood froze on my side before I could get a shirt on.
Someone handed me a flannel from the back of a truck. I pulled it over my head and felt the reopened tear along my ribs stretch. Fresh blood soaked through the fabric immediately, but I stayed on my feet because the West bank was full of wolves who needed to see me standing.
Both packs moved across the ice together. East wolves carried their own. West wolves carried theirs. And in the places where the fighting had tangled the lines, they carried each other’s.
I counted. Fourteen wounded that I could see. No dead on either side except Kurt, still somewhere under the ice.
Shane sat against a snowbank near the bridge approach, a borrowed jacket draped over his bare shoulders, his right arm held against his chest. The forearm wound had opened wider during the fight, and the muscle showed through the torn skin in a way that meant stitches, not bandages.
His green eyes tracked every wolf that crossed between the banks, checking for threats out of habit even while his blood dripped onto the snow.
Liza knelt beside Everett with her bandaged right hand pressed to her thigh.
She’d wrapped it with gauze from someone’s kit, but the white had already turned dark.
Everett sat with river water still running from his hair.
His face was gray with cold, but he was breathing, and when an East wolf limped past, Everett lifted his good hand in acknowledgment.
That was what I saw first.
A half-drowned man raised his hand to a wolf who’d fought on the wrong side an hour ago.
I crossed to Liza and crouched beside her. The movement pulled at my ribs. The fated bond told me how tired she was, and under it the same certainty that had taken her across the fractured ice to save a man she hadn’t forgiven.
“We need to get everyone inside,” I said. “The lodge has room.”
“Both packs?” She looked at the East wolves milling on the far bank, uncertain, some watching us and some watching the place where the ice had swallowed Kurt.
“Both packs.”
The avalanche still blocked the road. The bridge was passable on foot, but the vehicle approach on our side was buried under debris, and the afternoon light was already turning gray.
The East wolves had wounded who couldn’t walk to their own lodge, and the West wolves had wounded who needed more than field dressings and borrowed coats.
I stood up and waited out the spasm in my side.
“West Valley Lodge is open,” I said, loud enough to carry across the ice. “Both sides. Bring your wounded. Nobody gets turned away tonight.”
? ? ?
They found Kurt’s body late in the afternoon.
West and East wolves had worked together to break the ice downstream, following the current past the point where the channel narrowed between rocks.
He was wedged in a fracture where the frozen surface met a submerged boulder, his massive dark shape still and stiff in the black water. Even dead, he looked like a threat.
East wolves pulled him out. I let them. He had been theirs, and whatever he’d become, whatever damage he’d done, the body belonged to his pack. They carried him across the ice toward the East bank, and I watched from the lodge steps as the procession disappeared into the tree line.
My wolf wanted to feel satisfaction. I didn’t. I was tired, my ribs hurt, and all I could think about was whether the kitchen had enough coffee for both packs.
Liza found me on the steps.
She’d changed into borrowed clothes, a flannel shirt too large for her and canvas pants rolled at the ankles. Her right hand was freshly bandaged, clean white gauze wound tight from her thumb to her palm. She sat down beside me, careful of my side.
Through the bond, I felt her grief. I guessed it was for the weeks of violence, the wounds, and the frozen river rather than for Kurt.
“Rosa’s feeding everyone,” she said.
“I noticed.”
“She hasn’t said much to me. But she keeps bringing me coffee. She runs the East lodge kitchen, Dom. Two of the pups in that den were hers.”
I put my arm around her, and the movement cost me enough that I had to breathe through it before I could speak. “She crossed the ice for you. The words will come when they come.”
Liza rested her head against my shoulder. Her hair smelled like the river and someone else’s soap, with her own clean scent beneath both.
“Your side is bleeding again,” she said.
She pressed her lips to my jaw, and the fated bond pulled deep and steady.
? ? ?
By dark, the lodge smelled like blood, wet wool, woodsmoke, and Rosa’s coffee.
She had walked in with the first group of East wolves, found the kitchen without asking, and started working.
I heard her voice through the doorway, asking the West wolf on kitchen duty where to find the good mugs and telling him how hot to keep the water.
Within an hour, every wounded wolf in the building had something warm in their hands.
Shane sat on a bench in the infirmary while Kristen stitched his forearm. He’d refused anything for the pain because he wanted to stay sharp, but he kept up a low conversation with her throughout. The sound of his voice eased what had been clenched in my chest since dawn.
I let one of the lodge medics clean and repack my side.
Three scars from Kurt’s original attack, the deepest torn open again during the shift and the fight.
It had bled enough to soak through the flannel and leave a dark stain on the bench where I sat.
The medic said I needed to stop tearing it open or it would scar worse than it already had.
I told her I understood.
Everett sat in the corner of the common room wrapped in blankets, drinking broth that Rosa had brought him without being asked.
His left shoulder was strapped again, fresh bruising already darkening the skin from collarbone to the middle of his chest. The river had taken something out of him that wolf healing would need days to replace.
He was still pale despite the broth and blankets, and his hands shook when he lifted the cup.
But he was talking to East wolves.
He spoke with them one by one, answering without standing or leaning on his authority. A graying enforcer I didn’t recognize asked whether Kurt’s supporters would be punished.
“No one takes revenge for what happened today,” Everett said. “Not against West Valley, and not against the men who followed Kurt. They believed they were protecting their pack. Kurt lied to them, and I gave him the authority he used to make those lies dangerous. That blame is mine.”
The enforcer stared at him for a long time. Then he sat down across from Everett and accepted a cup of Rosa’s coffee.
Later Everett thanked Zeller and Kristen by name, then thanked every West wolf who had carried wounded East wolves off the ice or helped keep them alive inside.
A young East enforcer with a ragged ear came through the front door with a wounded West wolf draped across his shoulders. He’d fought on the wrong side of the ice, and now he was carrying one of mine.
He set the injured man down in the infirmary, pulled a chair beside the cot, and stayed.
Nobody sent him away. I made sure of it.
? ? ?
We ended up in the room behind the kitchen, the four of us.
It was the kind of room that existed in every working lodge: a pantry someone had cleared, a door that closed, enough space for a small table and four chairs.
Rosa’s domain was on the other side of the wall.
I could hear her washing dishes and talking to someone about whether the cornbread had burned.
Shane sat with his freshly stitched arm resting on the table, the wound sealed with neat black thread beneath a clean dressing. He looked tired but alert, his gaze moving between the rest of us with the easy attention that meant he was reading the room and deciding what it needed.
Everett sat across from him, still wrapped in a blanket, his strapped left arm held against his chest. The shaking had mostly stopped, but he was careful with his movements, and every few minutes he turned his head to check that Liza was still in the room.
Liza sat between me and Shane with her bandaged hand in her lap. The gauze was clean. I’d changed it myself half an hour ago, holding her wrist steady while she winced and told me the bandage was too tight.
The silence lasted long enough for me to hear Rosa’s dishes clinking and the low murmur of both packs’ voices in the common room beyond.
I looked at Everett.
I had hated him. Some part of me still wanted to, because it was simpler than what I felt now.
“If Liza wants both Alphas,” I said, “there won’t be a challenge between us.”
The words came out level. I’d been thinking them for hours, maybe days. Everett’s merits had nothing to do with it. Liza had chosen to save his life on the ice when she could have let the river finish what Kurt started, and I trusted her judgment more than I trusted my jealousy.
Shane spoke before Everett could answer. “What he said.” He tipped his stitched arm toward me. “And my mark isn’t going anywhere. That’s settled.”
Everett’s blue eyes moved from me to Shane and back. The old Everett would have calculated, measured the offer against his image, weighed what it cost him to accept. This Everett just looked at Liza.
“I want a place with all of you,” he said. His voice caught on the last word, and he didn’t try to hide it. “Whatever that looks like. Whatever answer she gives. I’ll take it.”
Liza hadn’t moved. She sat with her injured hand resting in her lap and her gaze on the table surface, and I felt through the bond something settle in her that had been building for weeks.
She looked up. At Everett first, because he was the one who’d broken her. Then at Shane, because he was the one who’d chosen her. Then at me.
“I want all three of you,” she said. “Together. All of it. I’m done being asked to pick.”
She sat in borrowed clothes in a pantry behind Rosa’s kitchen and told three men that she was keeping them.
Everett broke.
He put his good hand over his face, and his shoulders shook, and the sound that came out of him was small and ruined and completely human. The force of his relief filled the room.
Liza reached across the table and put her bandaged hand on his arm. Just that. The contact visibly eased whatever the open rejection bond was doing to his body. The shaking slowed.
I watched it happen, and I waited for the jealousy.
It came, a flicker of heat and possessiveness, because she was my fated mate and some deep animal part of me would always bristle when she touched another man. Beneath it, the bond carried the certainty of her choice. Even while she held Everett’s arm, she was also choosing me.
The jealousy loosened and was gone.
Shane leaned back in his chair, his stitched arm resting carefully on the table, and smiled. The grin he wore for everyone else had softened into something that reached his eyes and stayed there.
He let out a slow breath. “Good.”
? ? ?
We couldn’t share a bed that night. Shane’s forearm was too raw for any pressure against it.
My reopened tear bled through the dressing every time I turned.
Everett’s shoulder wouldn’t tolerate a position other than sitting propped against a wall.
And Liza’s hand, when she flexed it wrong, sent a hiss through her teeth that made all three of us flinch.
The lodge had rooms enough. I took the one beside the kitchen hallway, close enough to hear Rosa’s voice and the murmur of both packs settling into the common spaces.
Shane took the room across from mine. Everett took the small bunkroom at the end of the corridor, the same one he’d first occupied as a guarded guest. Liza took the room beside his.
Liza went to each of us.
She came to me last. I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my shirt off, trying to angle the hand mirror to check whether the middle scar had stopped seeping. She took the mirror from my hand, set it on the nightstand, and looked at my side herself.
“It’s slowing,” she said. “Don’t shift for three days.”
“I’ll try.”
She sat beside me on the bed. The mattress dipped under her weight, and I felt her body heat along my uninjured side and, through the bond, a deep, settled calm.
“I put a lot on you in that pantry,” she said.
“I know.”
“But I meant it. All three.”
I turned to look at her. The lamplight caught the scar on her left cheek and traced its line down to her throat. I remembered the morning our hands met on the icy stairs and the bond took hold. I wanted her with the same force now. I always would.
“I heard you,” I said. “All three.”
She kissed me. Careful, because my ribs were bad and her hand was worse, but thorough. Her mouth tasted like Rosa’s coffee, and the fated bond between us flared wide and certain.
When she pulled back, I tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear and said, “Go sleep. I’ll be here in the morning.”
She smiled. Small and tired and entirely hers. Then she left, and I heard her footsteps in the corridor and the door to her room open and close.
Down the hall, both packs settled into the lodge. Food passed between tables that had never shared a meal. Blankets stretched across strangers. Someone laughed, and someone else told them to keep it down because the wounded were trying to rest.
I lay back on the narrow bed with my fated mate’s scent still warm on my skin, and I listened to the sound of two packs learning how to breathe in the same room.