I’ve circled the place, but never been this close to it. I’m in the back seat of the SUV with Briar gripping my hand. Every breath is a negotiation with my ribs, three cracked, maybe four, the pain settling into a pattern I’ve learned to breathe around. My left eye is swollen shut. My hands are stiff where the dampening cuffs burned into my wrists. My chest and back carry the cuts they carved there, shallow and deliberate.
The vehicle stops. Briar gets out without looking at me. She’s been holding my hand and not looking at me for seven hours —the entire drive from the staging area outside Laredo, through the stop where we’d left Viktor’s people at a safehouse, through the dawn hours when we crossed into Arkansas. Seven hours of her profile, her jaw set, her hands clasping mine, and something between us pulled tight with things she won’t say.
Conner and Briar help me out. My legs hold — barely. The ground is uneven, packed dirt and grass, which I navigate carefully because falling down in front of a hostile pack is a mistake I can’t afford.
Wolves are gathering.
Not a formal reception. The opposite; the organic accumulation of wolves who’ve heard the vehicles and have come to see what came back. They emerge from cabins, from the barn, from the lodge with the smoking chimney. Fifteen, twenty, more. They stand in the yard, and they watch me walk from the vehicle to the porch. Every face I see is measuring the difference between what they’ve heard about Garrett Forrester and the damaged man standing in front of them.
Some of the faces are hostile. A man at the back — lean, hard, the permanent fury of someone whose loss hasn’t cooled — stares at me with an expression I don’t need to be told about. He lost someone to my corridor. His wife, his children, his pack. The specifics don’t matter. The expression is the same one I’ve been seeing since Briar held me to account.
I don’t look away from it. I owe him at least that.
Brenna and Merric stride to the lodge. They stop on the porch and wait for me to catch up.
Brenna jerks her head at the door. “Inside.”
I follow her. Or try to. There are three porch steps, and each one is a negotiation with my ribs that leaves me lightheaded. Conner stays close. Briar moves ahead of me, already through the door, and I catch her scent as I pass through. Aside from the distinctive wild fragrance that I now recognize, there’s also thewarm undertone I noticed in the storage room, stronger now, richer. My wolf lifts his head.
Something. There’s something.
The wolf has been saying this since the storage room. Saying it louder since the facility, since Briar’s arms were under mine and her body was taking my weight across the yard. Something about her scent has changed in a way my wolf recognizes, even if my conscious mind can’t name it.
We move to the lodge kitchen, which is dominated by a wide table. The same one where Brenna runs everything, from the look of it: papers, coffee cups, the accumulated evidence of decisions made in this room. She gestures at a chair. I sit. The sitting hurts.
“Sable,” Brenna calls.
A woman comes through from the back room. She’s carrying a medical kit, a worn leather bag that looks like it’s been used for years. She sets it on the table and looks at me without any kind of expression I can read.
Dark hair pulled back. Brown eyes that assess without emotion. Hands that are already reaching for my jaw, turning my face toward the light, monitoring the damage with quick, impersonal efficiency.
“Shirt off.”
I pull the shirt over my head. The movement fires pain through my ribs and places where the skin’s been removed, and I can’t keep the grunt from escaping. Sable watches the way I move, reading the pain, locating it, noting the injuries from the outside in.
“Three ribs,” she says. Fingers pressing along my left side. I flinch. “Maybe four. This one—” she presses harder, and I see white. “That one’s separated. Not broken. The swelling around your eye is superficial — the orbital bone is intact. The cuts onyour back and chest are shallow. Whoever did this knew exactly how deep to go without causing real damage.”
“They were professionals.”
“They were careful. There’s a difference. Professionals would have been cleaner.” She opens the kit. Antiseptic, gauze, tape. A small bottle of something I don’t recognize. “This is going to sting.”
It stings. She cleans the cuts with a briskness that doesn’t invite conversation, her hands steady and thorough. And I sit in the chair and let a stranger tend to damage I earned by walking into a cage.
“How long since you’ve eaten?” she asks, not looking up from the cut she’s closing with butterfly strips.
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s too long.” She glances at Brenna. “He needs food before anything else. Water first. Broth, if you have it. No solids until the dehydration is addressed.”
Brenna nods at someone behind me. I hear movement, a kettle, a cupboard opening. The domestic sounds of a kitchen producing sustenance.
“The ribs will heal on their own,” Sable says. “Wolf metabolism. Two days, maybe three. The facial swelling will be gone by tomorrow. The wrist damage from the cuffs—” She takes my hands. Turns them over. The skin is raw, the grooves from the dampening runes still visible, angry red lines circling both wrists. “These will scar. The runes burned the tissue. It’s not something wolf healing handles cleanly.”
“I know.”
She nods, finishes taping the last cut, and packs her kit. “Rest. Water. Food. No shifting for forty-eight hours — the ribs need to set before your wolf’s healing kicks them into alignment. If you shift before they’re ready, they’ll heal wrong, and I’ll have torebreak them. There are others far worse off than you who need my attention, so don’t be wasting my time.”
“Understood.”