On hiatus for my mental health. Still on Wattpad

A C T I

One - The Station

Two - The Chase

Three - The Cottage

Four - The Three Months

Five - The Tree

Six - The Jeep

Seven - The Room With A Lock

Eight - The Conversation

Nine - The Heat

Ten - The Examination

Eleven - The Drop

A C T I I

Twelve - The Aftermath

Thirteen - The Worst Of It

Fourteen - The Breakthrough

Fifteen - The Bath

Sixteen - The Tears

Seventeen - The Room

Eighteen - The Twenty Minutes

Nineteen - The Seven Weeks

Twenty - The Mark

Twenty One - The Aftercare

A C T I I I

Twenty Two - The Taking

Twenty Three - The Two Days

Twenty Four - The Consequences

Twenty Five - The Thing Between Us

Twenty Six - The Nightmares

Twenty Seven - The Gym

Twenty Eight - The Dream

Twenty Nine - The Morning After

Thirty - The Quiet Weeks

Thirty One - The News

A C T I I I I

Thirty Two - The Hormones

You’re aware of Simon behind you, his warmth the fixed point your wolf returns to every time the fever pulls you somewhere unpleasant, every time the strangeness at the edges of things gets louder.

You’re aware of the sounds of the base settling into its deep-night quiet.

You’re aware of the monitors and the low light and the weight of the blankets and the way your chest feels like something is sitting on it that wasn’t there yesterday.

What you’re not aware of, until it’s unavoidable, is the nausea.

It comes back without much warning — the fever spiking, probably, or just your body’s continued and emphatic opinion on the subject of having been pushed past every reasonable limit — and Simon must feel the change in you before you’ve fully registered it yourself because he moves before you do.

His arm withdraws and he’s reaching for something, and you’re trying to get upright, and then the bowl is there. Just there, in front of you, held steady by his hands, and you grip the sides of it and your body does what it’s going to do and there is nothing dignified about any of it.

He holds your hair back with one hand.

Keeps the bowl steady with the other.

Says nothing.

When it’s over you’re shaking and wrung out in a way that goes past tired into something more fundamental, something that lives in the bones, and you keep your eyes closed for a moment because you need one second that is just the dark behind your eyelids before you have to deal with anything else.

Simon sets the bowl aside. You hear him moving — quietly, efficiently, dealing with it without making it into anything — and then he’s back and there’s a damp cloth being pressed softly against your face.

You breathe and tell yourself this is temporary and your body is doing what it needs to do and you’ve survived worse. You’ve survived so much worse, a fever and a sick bowl in a military med bay is not even close to the worst thing that has happened to you in the last six months.

Simon settles back behind you.

His arm comes back around you.

You don’t say anything. You’re too exhausted and too wrung out and the fever is too loud for words, and even if none of those things were true you’re not sure what you’d say.

Thank you seems insufficient and everything else seems like too much and so the silence sits between you and it isn’t uncomfortable, which is its own piece of information that you’re putting on the shelf with everything else.

You lose time after that.

You loose it to sleep.

Not the restful kind, not the deep healing kind.

The restless fractured losing of time that belongs to high fever, where the hours pass but leave no clear record of themselves. Where you surface occasionally into awareness and then go back under into something that isn’t quite unconscious and isn’t quite not. Your wolf stays close to Simon’s warmth the whole night. She doesn’t ask your permission. She stopped asking your permission somewhere around the treeline and has shown no signs of resuming the habit.

The grey light of morning finds you depleted in ways that feel structural.

Simon shifts.

It’s a small movement — preparatory, the rearrangement of weight that comes before the intention to rise, the body communicating what the mind hasn’t yet made explicit. He’d been there all night. He’d held a sick bowl for you in the small hours and held your hair back and settled back without a word, and now it was morning and he needed to move and this was reasonable, this was completely reasonable, your body understood it was reasonable…….but your hand closed around his arm before you’d made any decision to close it.

Your fingers wrapping around his forearm and holding, and your claws — which you hadn’t felt since your wolf went dormant, which you’d half believed were gone the same way everything else had gone when she retreated — extending just enough. Just the tips. Just barely enough to catch at his skin.

Simon went completely still.

The kind of still that isn’t absence of movement but its opposite — a heightened stillness, every part of him arrested by the specific message of what your body had just said.

You stared at the wall in front of you.

Your wolf was completely unrepentant. She had sent the message she wanted to send and she was satisfied with the result. She had no interest whatsoever in your feelings about any of it. The sharp version of you — thinner than usual, the fever burning it down to something more essential — tried to formulate a response and got as far as the recognition that there was no version of this that could be framed as something other than what it was. Your claws were out. Barely, just barely, but out. In Simon Riley’s arm. Because he’d tried to move.

The silence stretched.

Simon turned his head slightly. Not away from your grip. Not testing it. Just enough that you were peripherally aware of him looking at you, taking in whatever your face was doing, reading it the way he read everything — directly, without softening what he found.

He settled back.

The intention to rise simply gave way to the intention to stay, and you felt it in the change of his body — the release of it, the weight redistributing, his chest back against your back and his warmth back around you. He didn’t do it with comment or ceremony or any of the pointed significance it deserved. He just did it.

Your claws retracted.

Your wolf made her sound.

You continued staring at the wall and said absolutely nothing and neither did he and that was, in the circumstances, the only possible way forward.

He moved later. Mid-morning, after Dr. Caldwell had come and gone for her first check, after Kyle had appeared in the doorway with the quiet efficiency of a man who had been waiting for the right moment and recognised it.

Simon unwound himself carefully, with the particular quality of someone making sure what they’re leaving is stable before they go — his hand staying at your back until the last possible moment, his warmth withdrawing by degrees rather than all at once.

“Back soon,” he said. Very quiet. Close to your ear. “Kyle’s here.

Your wolf noticed the absence. She didn’t distress — you were past the acute phase, the nest had done its work, the night had done its work — but she noticed, a low restless awareness that the specific warmth was gone.

Kyle took his place.

Not the same. Nothing about Kyle Garrick was the same as Simon Riley — not the frequency of his presence, not the quality of his warmth, not the way he occupied space or communicated through it.

Where Simon was immediate and physical and present in a way that was almost loud even in silence, Kyle was steadier. A lower note. The kind of constant that doesn’t announce itself because it doesn’t need to.

He didn’t settle behind you straight away. He sat beside the nest first — practical, giving you a moment to adjust, reading the room the way Kyle always read rooms before he acted in them. Then, after a moment that felt like a question without words, he moved closer. His arm came around you from behind, different from Simon’s in every way — not tighter or looser, not better or worse, just different, differently shaped, differently warmth — and he held you with the quiet surety of someone who had thought about what was needed and was providing it without making it into something you’d need to respond to.

Your wolf accepted it.

Not with the immediacy she’d have accepted Simon — she had her preferences and she’d made them extensively clear over the last twelve hours — but with the recognition of pack, of known, of the scent that had been wiring itself into her memory for two years alongside all the others.

You let the weight of your body go into his hold and closed your eyes.

“Thank you,” you said, and your voice was barely there but it was sincere, because Kyle had shown up with practicality and steadiness and his particular brand of undemonstrative care, and you didn’t have the defences right now to pretend that didn’t matter.

“Don’t mention it Princess,” he said. Which was exactly what Kyle would say. Literally, specifically — don’t mention it, move on, no ceremony. You found the shape of it familiar in a way that hurt slightly and was also, underneath the hurt, comforting.

You drifted.

In and out through the late morning, the fever making time unreliable still. Surfacing occasionally into awareness of Kyle’s steadiness behind you, the sound of him on his phone once, talking to someone in the low clipped tones of a man handling logistics even from a nest vigil because Kyle Garrick’s work ethic did not recognise force majeure. Once when you surfaced you found his hand over yours on the blanket, resting there with no pressure, no grip, just the warmth of it. You looked at it for a moment in the fever’s strange light.

You didn’t move yours away.

Dr. Caldwell came back mid-morning.

You heard her approach and by the time she appeared in the doorway you’d made a reasonable attempt at looking like someone who was ill rather than someone who was dying.

She conducted her examination with the efficient thoroughness that you’d come to rely on, taking your temperature with the neutral expression that meant the number was not good, listening to your chest with the focused attention of someone who was building a picture rather than confirming a suspicion.

The blood draw was quick. You watched the vial fill with the detachment of someone who had become somewhat abstract to themselves over the last twenty-four hours, your arm belonging to a general category of body rather than specifically to you.

“Your chest is more congested than yesterday,” she said. Statement of fact. “Are you finding it difficult to take a full breath?”

“Yes,” you said. The honest answer. You’d stopped performing fine for Dr. Caldwell on approximately day two of knowing her.

She nodded and made notes and then she said the thing.

“You’re not leaving the nest.”

Kyle’s arm tightened fractionally behind you. Barely perceptible. Present.

“I know,” you said.

Dr. Caldwell looked at you with the expression of someone who had expected argument and was recalibrating. “Your baseline hasn’t returned,” she said, proceeding with the explanation she’d prepared regardless. “I need you to understand that the flu is secondary to what’s happening systemically. Your body is managing three significant concurrent processes — recovery from the heat, recovery from a week of sedation, and now an acute viral illness on top of both. Your immune system is doing its job but it’s doing it from a deficit.” She held your gaze. “The nest, the pack proximity, the rest — these are medical requirements right now, not concessions. Your cortisol is down, your wolf is calm, your body is actually recovering. We don’t change the conditions.”

You looked at the ceiling.

Not negotiable, she’d said yesterday. Still not negotiable.

Your wolf received this information with the same satisfaction she received everything that kept her where she was.

“How long?” you ask.

“Until your baseline returns and the fever breaks. After that we reassess.” She closed her tablet. “Rest. Small amounts of fluid regularly. We’ll try food again this evening.”

She left with the brisk efficiency of someone who had said what needed saying and trusted it to land.

Kyle said nothing.

He didn’t need to. His hold was steady behind you and his presence was steady beside you.

That was one of the things you liked about Kyle — he understood that sometimes the right response to information was not words but continuation, just going on being what he was, and it was more useful than almost anything he could have said.

You spent the rest of the morning in the particular misery of someone who has nothing to do but be ill.

This was, in its own way, worse than the treeline.

In the treeline there had been action. Decision. The body doing what bodies do when survival demands something from them, the mind sharpened by urgency to a single point. In the cottage there had been the tasks of daily survival — the fire, the food, the map, the constant low-level planning that had kept your mind occupied and your wolf directed outward rather than inward.

Here there was nothing.

Nothing except the fever and the congestion and the chest that protested every full breath, and your wolf making sounds of contentment that you couldn’t stop, and the shelf in the back of your mind getting heavier by the hour, and the sharp version of you slowly reassembling herself through the fog and finding, piece by piece, that the landscape she was reassembling into was not quite the same landscape she’d left.

You wanted to run.

The wanting was still there.

But you couldn’t sit up without the room swimming.

You couldn’t take a full breath without your chest tightening.

Your hands had shaken too badly this morning for Kyle to let you hold your own water glass, which he’d dealt with by simply holding it himself in a matter-of-fact way that had offered you no opportunity to be embarrassed about it, which was either very kind or very strategic and probably both.

And your claws had come out for Simon.

Without your permission. Without your decision. Your body simply acting on what your wolf wanted and bypassing every careful process you’d built for exactly this kind of situation.

The weakness of it sat in your chest alongside the congestion.

Not the weakness of being ill — that was temporary, that was biology, that was the predictable consequence of six months of running on fumes finally collecting its debt.

The other weakness. The kind that had a shelf in the back of your mind that was getting so crowded you were starting to wonder whether the shelf was the right metaphor, whether what you actually had was a room that was slowly filling up with things you’d put there for later.

You were not the omega who got smaller.

You were not the omega who held the centre quietly and gave up what she wanted so everyone else could have what they needed.

But you were also, undeniably, the omega who had let her claws out for a man she was supposed to be keeping careful distance from, and had said my alphas into the dark, and had let Kyle hold a water glass to her mouth, and was lying in a nest that smelled of pack with the specific contentment of her wolf broadcasting continuously and no apparent ability to make her stop.

Something in between.

That was what you were. Something in between the two versions.

You closed your eyes.

Kyle shifted behind you, a small adjustment, his chin coming to rest near your temple. He didn’t speak. He just was, steady and warm and present in the way that asked nothing, and your wolf settled deeper into his hold and made her sound and you let her because you didn’t have the energy not to.

And because honestly, in the privacy of the feverish in-between, it felt like something you’d been holding at arm’s length for a very long time and your arms were tired.

John came in the early evening.

The light had shifted, gone gold and low through the window, the base settling into the particular rhythm of late afternoon.

You’d drifted through most of the day — in and out, Kyle’s steadiness behind you, the monitors, the slow miserable work of being ill — and you were more conscious now than you’d been but not better, the fever sitting at its high mark with the patience of something that had decided it wasn’t leaving today.

John came in and took in the room with the brief complete inventory of someone who assesses situations as naturally as breathing. Kyle behind you. Your colour, which was probably not good. The monitors. The way you were holding yourself, the slight protective hunch over your chest where the breathing was hardest.

He sat beside the nest.

He had a cup. Small. Ceramic. Steam rising from it in the low evening light, and the smell of it reached you before he’d said a word — salt and warmth and something plain and simple, the smell of something designed for a body that had been rejecting everything else.

“Small amount,” he said. “That’s all. No pressure.”

You looked at the cup.

Your stomach had been quiet for several hours — cautiously, provisionally quiet, the way it went quiet when it was deciding whether to declare a truce or resume hostilities. The soup smelled like the kind of thing the truce might hold for. Plain enough. Warm enough. Not asking too much.

“I can hold it myself,” you said.

“I know,” he said. And held the cup out to you.

You took it. Your hands wrapped around the ceramic and the warmth of it was immediate and real and your body wanted it with an uncomplicated animal sincerity that bypassed everything else.

You lifted it toward your mouth. Your hands shook — fine and continuous, the same tremor that had been there all day — and the cup moved with them, and after a moment John’s hands came up and cupped around yours.

Not taking it. Not removing it from your grip. Just surrounding yours, steadying them, the cup held between your hands and his.

You drank.

Slowly.

Small sips the way Dr. Caldwell had said, the way John had said too. Giving your stomach the time it needed to decide whether this was acceptable. The soup was plain and warm and slightly salty and your body received it with the cautious relief of something that has been offered exactly what it can manage.

John stayed where he was. His hands around yours, the cup between you, the steam rising in the low gold light.

You finished the cup.

Your stomach held it. The truce appeared to be holding.

You lowered the cup and John’s hands withdrew, and you sat with the empty ceramic in your palms for a moment and felt the warmth of it and the warmth of the soup inside you and the warmth of Kyle behind you and the warmth of John beside you and the low constant warmth of your wolf being quietly, relentlessly, inconveniently content.

“Thank you,” you said.

Your voice was wrecked still — congested and rough and nothing like the voice that had shouted from a tree — but it was yours, fully yours, the in-between thinner now than it had been all day, the omegaspace lifting properly at the edges.

You were more yourself than you’d been since you woke up. The sharp version of you was coming back, putting herself together piece by piece through the fever’s fog, finding the landscape and taking stock of it.

The landscape was complicated.

John took the cup. He didn’t move away immediately — he stayed for a moment with the empty cup in his hand and his presence warm beside the nest and something in his expression that was not any of the things you’d have expected. Not satisfaction. Not the look of a man building toward something. Just — care. Just the specific uncomplicated quality of a person who wanted you to be alright and was relieved by the small evidence that you’d managed a cup of soup.

It was harder to maintain your position against that than against almost anything else he’d done.

“Get some rest little one,” he said quietly. And went.

You lay back and stared at the ceiling.

Kyle shifted behind you, resettling, his arm a steady weight across you. The monitors beeped. Outside the window the gold had gone out of the light and the evening was settling into the cooler blue of late day, and somewhere in the base a door opened and closed and the mechanical hum continued its indifferent rhythm.

You thought about soup and steady hands.

You thought about this morning — your claws in Simon’s arm, the way he’d simply settled back without a word, without making it into anything you’d have to address directly.

You thought about the road out of here. Whether it was where you’d left it. Whether it looked the same from this side of a fever and a nest and a week of things that were filling shelves you’d meant to deal with later.

You were still going to deal with it later.

You were.

The sharp version of you was coming back and she had not changed her position — she still knew what running meant and why it mattered and what you were protecting when you protected your freedom. She hadn’t forgotten any of it.

But later was feeling different than it had felt before.

Less like a door she was walking toward.

More like a door she was standing in front of.

Simon’s footsteps echoed in the hallway.

Your wolf knew first, lifting toward the sound of him in the corridor, cataloguing the specific rhythm of his walk, the weight and pace of it, and making her assessment before he appeared in the doorway.

He’d showered — you could tell from the damp at the edges of his hair, the clean soap smell underneath the pack scent that your wolf filed alongside everything else. He looked at you when he came in. Just looked, a direct taking-in, reading whatever your face was doing with the same unmediated directness he gave everything.

Kyle’s arm loosened. A question, directed at you — whether to stay or give Simon back the space. You felt it in the shift of his hold, the careful offer of it.

You didn’t answer it immediately.

“Seem mad with me.” You mumble, trying to summon some energy.

“I’m -“

“Not you.” You cut Simon off.

There was a pause of quiet behind you then a small sigh.

“Not mad Princess, just can’t help in any way,” he pressed a kiss to your temple.

Simon sat beside the nest. Not moving to take Kyle’s place, not assuming — just sitting, close, his forearms on his knees, his eyes on you. The question was in the air between you and it was the same question it had been this morning and neither of you had answered it then either, and it was still there, patient as everything in this room seemed to be patient.

Your wolf was very clear.

The sharp version of you, slowly reassembling herself through the fever fog, noted the clarity and noted the weight of it and added it to the shelf.

Kyle moved. Quietly, without ceremony, extracting himself from behind you with the same practical consideration he gave everything, giving you both the space and the decision. His hand passed briefly over your shoulder as he went — just that, just the warmth of it — and then he was across the room and you were sitting up slightly in the nest and Simon was beside it and the question was just the two of you now.

You didn’t tell him to stay.

You didn’t tell him to go.

Your wolf made her sound, low and continuous, and you were too tired and too feverish and too full of things you were putting on shelves to pretend you couldn’t hear it.

Simon moved. Not asking this time — reading you the way he’d read you this morning, the way he always read you, directly and without the softening of interpretation — and he settled back into the space Kyle had left, his chest behind your back, his arm coming around you, his warmth immediate and complete and exactly what your wolf had been waiting for since he’d left this morning.

You let your eyes close.

The fever was still there, patient and heavy, and your chest still ached with every breath, and your head was still a sustained disaster, and you were still weak in ways that made the fighter in you furious in a low continuous way that had nowhere to go right now.

But Simon was warm behind you.

And John had steadied your hands around a cup of soup.

And Kyle had held you close all day without asking anything for it.

And Johnny had said I’ve got you in the dark while you were sick and not made it into anything except what it was.

And your wolf was quiet and warm and completely, entirely, without reservation content.

And you were still in the nest.

And the shelf was full.

And later was coming whether you were ready for it or not.

Kyle leaving a sandwich on the corner of your desk on the days he’d noticed you hadn’t gone to the canteen, no note, no comment, acting subsequently as though he had no idea what you were talking about.

John in a doorway. John always in a doorway, present without imposing, filling space without demanding it.

Johnny teaching you a card game during a slow afternoon that had turned into three hours and neither of you had noticed.

The warmth of it. The specific, dangerous warmth of four people paying you a particular kind of attention, the kind that your wolf had been cataloguing and storing from the first week while you’d been busy telling yourself there was nothing to catalogue.

Then more recent memory arrives, still quiet, still unhurried.

The truck. The counting. The two hundred and fortieth step. Your knees hitting the ground and your fingers in the soil and the sound you’d made that had no category you could put it in. John on the floor asking. Simon’s hand in yours in the med bay, the piece of gravel, the carefulness of it. Dr. Caldwell’s voice. The IV line going cold up your arm.

Then the nest.

Then the warmth of it closing around you.

Then John’s voice, so close it could have been inside you.

We’ve got you.

And then — last, arriving with the particular quality of things your brain has been keeping to the end because it knows you’ll need a moment with them — the thing you said.

My alphas.

It lands in the soft warm haze of not-quite-conscious with nowhere to go, no sharp version of you available to receive it and process it and dismantle it into something manageable.

Language has come back but the defences haven’t, not yet, and so you do the only thing available to you in this specific in-between state — you take the memory, you note it, and you put it somewhere you are absolutely not going to look at right now. A shelf. A high shelf. You’ll deal with it later when you have the rest of yourself back and can approach it with the proper equipment.

You file it away and stay very still and take stock of what else is true.

What’s true is that you are warm.

Genuinely, completely warm in a way that your body hasn’t been since before the cottage, since before six months of stone walls and banked fires and cold air that never quite left the room no matter how well you managed the hearth.

The nest is soft around you and the blankets are heavy and the scent of pack is so thoroughly woven into everything that it’s less a thing you’re noticing and more a thing you’re simply inside of.

Your wolf is quiet.

Not suppressed. Not hidden. Quiet in the specific way of something that has been given what it needed and has finally stopped asking. A looseness in your muscles that you haven’t felt in months, a heaviness in your limbs that is not exhaustion but its opposite — the heaviness of genuine rest, of a body that has been permitted to stop.

Then you register the arm.

It’s around you. Large and warm and present, a solid weight across your ribs, a chest at your back rising and falling in the slow rhythm of someone asleep. You know the scent of them before you know anything else, before memory catches up with sensation, before you’ve fully decided to be conscious.

Simon.

The memory arrives gently, without drama. Your hands in the haze, finding him, pulling. The way you’d arranged it, managed it, manoeuvred without language or decision, pure wolf and pure want and nothing else. His arm where it is now because you put it there.

You don’t move.

You stay exactly where you are, his nose at your throat, his arm around you, and you examine the question of whether you’re staying because of the omegaspace drop or because of a choice you’ve made.

Then you examine the question of whether there’s a difference right now, and then you decide that neither question is one you have the capacity to answer at this particular moment and you let them go.

The headache arrives.

It doesn’t introduce itself. It doesn’t build gradually from something manageable into something worse. It simply appears, fully formed, behind your eyes and across your temples and at the base of your skull. The specific vicious quality of a body that has been running on cortisol and adrenaline and sheer stubborn will for six months and has finally, at the first available opportunity, decided to present its full outstanding invoice. The kind of headache that makes light feel like a personal attack. The kind that lives in three places simultaneously and connects them with a low continuous throb that matches your pulse.

Then the congestion.

Your nose is now entirely blocked. Your throat is sore. Your chest feels heavy in a way that has nothing to do with emotion and everything to do with inflammation, the specific dense heaviness of lungs beginning to fill with something they shouldn’t.

You take stock of all of this with the methodical attention you apply to everything and arrive at a conclusion that is inconvenient and unsurprising in equal measure.

Your body, which has been going and going and going — through the cottage and the cold and the rationed supplies and the sleepless nights and the constant calculation of threat and distance and escape — has stopped.

And in the stopping, like a runner who crosses the finish line and collapses, it has gotten sick.

Of course it has, you think, with a tired lack of surprise. Of course.

Simon wakes slowly.

You feel it before you see it — the change in his breathing, the subtle shift from the deep rhythm of sleep to something lighter, more aware. Then the slight movement of his chest against your back. Then his arm, which tightens. Fractionally. Automatically. The reflex of a body that knows what it’s holding before the mind has caught up with the knowing.

He goes still when the mind catches up.

Not pulling away. Not making it strange or sudden or anything that would require either of you to acknowledge it directly. Just — still, in the way that Simon goes still around things that matter to him, the specific controlled quality of a man who is very aware of what he’s holding and is not going to move wrong.

You don’t say anything.

He doesn’t either.

The silence settles between you and it isn’t uncomfortable, which is its own kind of information. It’s the silence of two people in a situation that neither of them is going to be the first to name, both of them aware of this and proceeding accordingly.

Your wolf is making a low continuous sound of contentment somewhere in your chest that you are absolutely certain he can feel given that his chest is directly against your back, and you cannot seem to stop it, and you’re choosing not to examine that too closely right now on the grounds that you have limited processing capacity and the headache is already using most of it.

You’re cold.

That registers properly now — not the ambient cold of the nest, which is warm, but the cold coming from inside you. The cold that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the fever working its way up through your system, the paradox of running hot while feeling frozen, your skin too sensitive and your bones aching and the shaking starting at the edges of you in small fine tremors that you’re working to control and not entirely succeeding.

Simon feels the shaking. You know he does because his arm tightens slightly again, the same automatic reflex, and you hear the change in his breathing that means he’s more awake now, more present, taking stock of you the same way you’ve been taking stock of yourself.

He still doesn’t say anything.

You find, with mild distant surprise, that you don’t want him to.

John was awake when you turned your head.

He was sitting close to the nest — not in it, just beside it, his back against the wall and his forearms on his knees — and he’d clearly been awake for some time, the particular stillness of a man who has been waiting without making a production of the waiting. He looked at you when you looked at him and you watched him read you, the way he always reads everything, completely and without imposing his interpretation on what he found.

He saw the residual softness at your edges, the way you hadn’t moved from Simon, the fact that you were looking at him with eyes that were yours but not quite the sharp version of yours, not the version that had negotiated from a tree and counted steps in a treeline and told him clearly and without apology what you would and would not allow.

He didn’t comment on any of it.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

You opened your mouth. Your voice came out wrecked — congested and rough and barely recognisable, like something that had been left out in the rain for a week.

“Fine,” you said.

The word was so obviously untrue that John’s expression did something brief and complicated that in other circumstances you might have found satisfying.

“Right,” he said, which was the most diplomatic possible response to that particular statement.

Kyle appeared from somewhere behind you — you heard the cot before you saw him, the specific sound of someone getting up from a camp bed that had been assembled with typical Kyle Garrick practicality, because of course Kyle had arranged a proper place to sleep rather than taking the floor, because Kyle approached even emergency overnight vigils as logistical problems to be solved correctly. He came into your line of sight and took one look at you and went immediately into the mode that was Kyle’s particular expression of care — not softness, not words, just the rapid efficient assembly of a plan.

“Temperature,” he said. To John, to the room, to the general situation. “We need her temperature.”

“I’m fine,” you said again, with slightly more conviction and no more credibility.

Kyle looked at you with the expression of a man who has run logistics for some of the most complex operations in modern military history and is not going to be derailed by one congested omega telling him she’s fine.

“Of course you are,” he said. “Temperature.”

Dr. Caldwell arrived within ten minutes, which told you Kyle had messaged her before he’d even spoken to you. She came in with her kit and her professional composure and checked you over with the efficient thoroughness of her previous examination, and when she read the thermometer she showed it to Kyle without showing it to you first, which told you what you needed to know about the number on it.

“It’s elevated,” she said to you, which was the clinical version of it’s high and we’re concerned.

“The flu,” you said. It wasn’t a question.

“Most likely. Your immune system has been operating at significant deficit for an extended period. The combination of the heat, the sedation, the physical stress of the last week — your body has been waiting for an opportunity.” She paused. “This is the opportunity.”

You looked at the ceiling. “Brilliant.”

“It’s actually a good sign,” she said, in the tone of someone who understood this was not going to be a comforting framing. “It means your system is functioning. It’s responding. When the body is truly depleted it often can’t mount an immune response at all.”

“So I should be grateful I feel terrible.”

“Something like that.” She made notes. Then she paused, with the particular quality of a pause that means a person is deciding whether to ask something. “Is there anything else I should know? Anything you’ve been managing that you haven’t mentioned?”

The omegaspace was still at the edges of things, still rounding off the sharp corners, and you were still in the in-between, and perhaps that was why — perhaps that was the only explanation — you said it without the usual filtering process. Without calculating what it meant to tell her. Without deciding in advance whether it was information you wanted them to have.

“I haven’t had my period either,” you said. “Since before I ran.”

The room went quiet.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. The specific quiet of people receiving information and choosing not to make it into something you’d have to respond to, and you were grateful for that choice even as you felt the weight of it — the awareness of what six months alone had done to your body, the full picture of it assembling itself in the room from all its different pieces. The weight. The missed heats. The scar. The arm. The temperature. And now this.

Dr. Caldwell nodded, making notes. “Stress-induced amenorrhea,” she said. “Your body prioritised survival and redirected everything else. It will resolve.” A pause. “When your system feels genuinely safe for a sustained period.”

You looked at the ceiling again.

Genuinely safe.

You thought about what that meant, what your body had apparently already decided about it without consulting you, whether the wolf who was currently pressed warm and content against Simon’s chest had already cast a vote that your conscious mind was going to have to reckon with eventually.

You thought about the high shelf where you’d put my alphas.

You thought about how crowded that shelf was getting.

“I’ll run additional bloods,” Dr. Caldwell said, and moved on with the brisk efficiency of someone who understood when a subject needed to be left where it had landed.

Johnny made you porridge.

You heard him in the small kitchen adjacent to the med bay — the sounds of it, the particular domestic sequence of water boiling and a spoon against a pan — and something in your chest did the thing it kept doing in the omegaspace, the thing where the carefully maintained distance between you and what you felt about these four people became briefly and inconveniently transparent.

He brought it in with the care of someone carrying something that mattered. Sat at the edge of the nest at a distance that respected your space while still being present, which was so precisely Johnny that it hurt slightly. Held it out to you with an expression that was attempting casual and achieving something much more honest.

“Thought you might be hungry,” he said.

Your wolf made a sound. You decided that counted as a response and took the bowl.

You were still in the in-between. The omegaspace still soft at your edges, the sharp version of you still not fully back online, and in that state your defences against Johnny MacTavish’s particular brand of uncomplicated care were essentially non-functional. You took the porridge because your body wanted something warm and because his face was doing something you couldn’t look at directly and because the part of you that refuses things on principle was currently offline for maintenance.

The first mouthful was warm and plain and your stomach received it cautiously.

The second mouthful the same.

The third mouthful your stomach made its position on the matter absolutely clear.

You made it to the edge of the nest. That was the best that could be said for it, and it wasn’t much, and the humiliation of it sat on top of everything else with the specific weight of something that is both inevitable and deeply unwelcome. Your body, hollowed out and running a temperature and fundamentally depleted in ways that a nest and four alphas couldn’t fully reverse overnight, had simply had enough.

Johnny was there.

He didn’t say anything meaningful. He didn’t comment or react or do anything except be immediately and quietly present, his hand at your back, and his voice low and continuous saying it’s alright, I’ve got you, it’s alright in the loop that belonged to him specifically — Johnny who showed up with food and warmth and the specific repetitive reassurance of someone who understood that sometimes people didn’t need to be told anything except that they weren’t alone.

You were too sick to tell him to stop.

You were, in the privacy of your own depleted feverish state, grateful that you were too sick to tell him to stop.

Afterward you felt hollowed out in a way that was different from the hollow of the last six months, not the hollow of too little but the hollow of a body that has expelled what it couldn’t hold and is now shaking and wrung out and cold in a way that has become urgent.

Your hands were trembling.

Your whole body was trembling, continuous and impossible to stop. The cold was the paradoxical cold of a fever climbing, your skin burning to the touch while every part of you felt like it had been packed in ice.

Simon was there before you’d registered him moving.

You didn’t question it, you simply turned toward the warmth of him with the directness of something that has stopped pretending it doesn’t know what it needs.

His arm came back around you. His chest was warm against your back and his chin came to rest somewhere near your temple and the shaking in your body didn’t stop but it became something you were less alone in, which wasn’t the same as stopping but was its own kind of relief.

“Cold,” you said. Your voice was barely there.

“I know sweet’art I’ve got you,” he said. Low. Close. His hand came up and pressed flat against your forehead for a moment — checking, cataloguing — and you felt him register the temperature under his palm, felt the way his jaw tightened slightly against the top of your head.

You close your eyes and let him be warm against you and tried to stop shaking and mostly failed.

Dr. Caldwell came back for the follow-up and took your temperature again and this time she showed it to you. It was higher. She adjusted her notes and said words like fluids and rest and we monitor it closely with the calm precision of someone who was not alarmed but was paying close attention, and you listened to all of it from inside the warm miserable fog of the fever and said fine at the appropriate intervals.

You tried, at some point during this — while Dr. Caldwell was finishing her notes and Kyle was doing something logistical near the door and Johnny had retreated to a respectful distance — to find the version of yourself that maintained terms and kept careful measured distance and did not allow herself to be held by Simon Riley in a nest while her wolf made undignified sounds of contentment.

She wasn’t there.

You tried to sit up straighter. Your head swam badly enough that you had to put it back down.

You tried to create some physical distance between yourself and Simon. Your wolf made a sound that was genuinely embarrassing and your body started shaking harder and you stopped trying.

You looked at John, who was watching you try with the expression of a man who was trying with everything in him not to take you into his arms.

You closed your eyes. Your head was a sustained architectural disaster. The fever was making the edges of things slightly unreal — not dramatically, not in any way that was frightening, just enough to soften the boundary between what you were thinking and what you were feeling, enough to make the careful separation of those two things more difficult than usual.

Your wolf was still making that sound.

Simon’s arm was still around you.

You had not told him to move it.

You were aware of this. You were aware of it with the part of you that was still you, still the person who had spent six months building careful independence in a cold cottage in the Scottish highlands, and you noted it the way you noted everything — methodically, without flinching — and then you put it on the shelf next to my alphas and closed your eyes.

The shelf was getting crowded.

You were going to have to deal with what was on it eventually.

Later, you thought. When your head didn’t feel like it was being slowly disassembled from the inside. When the fever broke and the omegaspace lifted completely and the sharp version of you was back at full volume. When you could look at all of it properly and decide what it meant and what, if anything, you were going to do about it.

For now you were ill and cold and your wolf was warm and quiet and Simon Riley was behind you and John Price was watching you from three feet away with that complete attention of his. And Kyle was being practical near the door and Johnny was sitting at the edge of things being exactly as much as you needed him to be and no more.

For now that was what was true.

The fever climbed through the afternoon. Dr. Caldwell monitored it with the regularity of someone taking it seriously and the calm of someone who had decided it was manageable. Fluids, she said. Small amounts.

You accepted the water Kyle gave you.

The shaking came and went. The cold came and went. The headache was a constant, faithful companion that showed no signs of leaving anytime soon.

Simon didn’t move.

At some point in the late afternoon, in the half-awake state that the fever kept pulling you into and out of, you became aware of his thumb moving. Small slow passes against your arm, just below your shoulder, barely movement at all. The kind of thing that might be unconscious. The kind of thing that might not be.

You didn’t say anything about it.

Your wolf pressed closer and made her sound and you let her, because you were too tired and too sick and too thoroughly in the in-between to do anything else, and because the honest part of you — the part that lived below the terms and the architecture and the six months of careful independence — was warm.

Just that.

Just warm.

The light through the window changed from afternoon to early evening and the monitors beeped their steady rhythm and the base hummed around you.

You drifted, feverish and congested and as far from the sharp version of yourself as you’d been since the treeline, in and out of something that wasn’t quite sleep and wasn’t quite waking.

John’s voice, at some point. Quiet. To the others.

“Let her rest.”

Your wolf made her sound.

The shelf in the back of your mind was very full.

You’d deal with it all later.

For now you let the fever have you, and the warmth have you, and the soft edges of the in-between have you, and somewhere underneath the misery of it — underneath the headache and the cold and the shaking and the humiliation of the porridge and the memory of what you’d said and what you’d let them do —

You were, despite everything, despite all of it —

Resting.

What it finds is wrong.

Not dangerous — not the sharp specific wrongness of threat, not the thing that would have had you on your feet and moving in the months in the cottage.

Just wrong in the way that a room is wrong when it contains none of the things your body is looking for. Clinical. Sharp at the edges. Antiseptic and recycled air and the faint metallic undertone of medical equipment, and underneath all of it, beneath everything —

No pack.

The recognition doesn’t come as a thought. It comes as a state. An alarm. The specific biological panic of an omega whose system surfaces from sedation into a scent landscape that contains nothing familiar, nothing safe, nothing that smells like the four people whose scent has been wiring itself into your wolf’s memory for two years regardless of every conscious effort you made to prevent it.

Your wolf doesn’t wait for you to finish waking up.

She doesn’t wait for context or orientation or the higher functions to come back online with their careful reasoning and their catalogued arguments for why this feeling should be overridden.

She surfaces with the full accumulated force of everything she’s been carrying — six months of suppression, three missed heats, three prior distress episodes that had pushed her so far inside you that you’d thought you’d lost her forever, the treeline, the truck, the two hundred and fortieth step — and she does the only thing she has left.

You come off the bed.

It doesn’t feel like a decision. It doesn’t feel like anything. One moment you’re horizontal and the next you’re not. Your body executing something your brain hasn’t caught up with yet, and what you’re aware of is the wall — solid and real at your back — and your knees at your chest and your arms locked around them and the sound coming out of you that you have never made before in your life.

Low. Continuous. Completely unwilled. Rumbling deep from your chest.

The sound of a wolf who is frightened and has been alone too long and cannot locate the thing her body is telling her she cannot survive without.

The monitors go off.

All of them simultaneously, a cascade of alarms that punches through the room and makes everything sharper and worse and louder and your wolf takes all of that incoming wrongness and adds it to everything she’s already carrying.

The sound you’re making changes pitch, becomes more urgent, and somewhere in the part of you that is still you — the part that stitched its own arm in the dark, that counted to two hundred and forty in a treeline, that negotiated terms from thirty feet up a tree — that part registers distantly and with something like horror that this is the fourth time and it is worse than all the others and you are alone and you cannot seem to stop.

Then John’s voice.

One word. Quietly. Not to you — to the others.

“Wait.”

And the room changes.

You don’t fully understand why it changes. You’re not processing at that level. But something in the quality of the air shifts, some of the additional pressure of four large bodies all moving toward you at once receding, and into that space John’s voice comes again — lower this time, lower than speech, lower than anything that requires conscious processing to receive — and it reaches the part of you that is wolf before it reaches any other part.

The monitors stop.

The silence is enormous. In it, your own breathing sounds very loud.

You hear him moving. Not toward you — not yet but within the room, and then the quality of movement changes and you look, which is the first time you’ve looked at anything since you hit the wall, and John Price is on the floor.

He’s done something with himself that should look strange but doesn’t. Made himself smaller, which is not a small project with John, settled his weight back on his heels with his hands visible and loose in front of him, and the expression on his face is one you’ve never seen there before — not the steadiness, not the patience, not the careful authority. Something underneath all of those. Something that was there before all of those, before the rank and the discipline and the years of hard things.

He moves across the floor toward you.

Slowly. Stopping when you make a sharper sound, waiting for it to ease, continuing when it does. He’s reading you the way he reads everything — completely, without imposing, without deciding in advance what he’s going to find. His voice is continuous and low and you cannot make out words but it doesn’t matter. The frequency of it matters. The register of it, pitched below conscious thought, aimed directly at the part of you that came back online first.

Your wolf hears it.

She doesn’t trust it yet. She’s too far into the distress for trust, for the kind of processing that trust requires. But she orients toward it the way she orients toward everything that has ever mattered to her, without consulting you, without asking whether you’ve decided she should.

He stops.

Close enough now that his scent reaches you properly for the first time, and your wolf takes it in with the desperation of someone who has been holding their breath for six months, and something in the continuous sound you’re making shifts slightly, changes texture.

He lifts his eyes to yours.

And he asks.

He told you he would. You told him to. And here — now, in this room, with your wolf in full distress and your higher functions barely online and six months of running and fighting and surviving sitting in the hollows of your cheeks and the corners of your eyes — he still asks. Low enough that it’s almost not sound at all, but present, but real, but a question and not a statement.

You don’t have words.

They’re somewhere else right now, somewhere that feels very far away and not very relevant, and you cannot find them and cannot find the path back to them and cannot find anything except the wall at your back and his scent reaching you and the sound of your own breathing.

But you stop pressing into the wall quite so hard.

He understands it as the permission it is.

He closes the remaining distance without rushing, without any movement that your wolf could read as predatory or urgent, and when he reaches you he does the thing that your wolf has been asking for since before you ran, since before the cottage, since the first week on the base when you’d felt the warmth of pack pressing at your edges and had told yourself firmly and repeatedly that you didn’t want it.

He pulls off the adhesive scent blocker, the doctor put on your a day into your heat.

And his nose finds your scent gland.

The side of your throat, just below your jaw. The place you’ve been keeping turned away and carefully covered for six months because exposing it means something, because it is the most direct form of scent communication available to your body, because letting an alpha nose at your scent gland is not a neutral act and you had not been willing for it to be anything other than neutral.

The contact is so gentle it barely qualifies as touch.

And it breaks something open.

Not painfully. Not violently. Not the way things break when they shatter into pieces that have to be collected afterward. The way a window breaks when it’s been shut for years and someone finally finds the right angle — not destruction, just release, just the thing that was always going to happen when the right pressure was applied to the right place.

The sound stops.

Your wolf goes quiet.

Not silent. Not suppressed, not driven back down into the deep hiding place she’s been in for six months — quiet in the way that living things are quiet when they’ve finally found what they were looking for and don’t need to ask anymore.

John stays exactly where he is, his face at your throat, and begins to scent you properly. Long and deliberate and slow. The specific communication of here and safe and known and present, the language that exists below language, that pack has always used and that your wolf has always understood even when you were pretending she didn’t and pretending you didn’t know she did.

Your breathing changes.

It happens in increments. The ragged desperate pulls becoming something slower, something with space in it, something that isn’t only about keeping enough oxygen in your body to stay upright. Your grip on your own knees loosens. Your spine uncurls by degrees from the hard angle it had locked itself into against the wall.

Your wolf is still making sounds but they’re different now. Lower. Less frantic. The distinction between a wolf who cannot find safety and a wolf who has found the beginning of it and is letting her body confirm it’s real, over and over, the way you confirm something you’ve been told and haven’t quite let yourself believe.

Behind John the others are waiting and it is costing them differently depending on who they are.

Simon is on his feet and the effort of staying there is visible in every line of him — jaw set, hands at his sides, the specific controlled stillness of a man who is exerting significant continuous force to remain exactly where he is and not close the distance and cover and gather and do every primal thing his alpha is screaming at him to do.

His eyes haven’t left you since he ran in. They won’t leave you. You’re aware of this peripherally, aware of the weight of his attention even through everything else, and your wolf is aware of it too, filing it away in the way she files everything that matters.

Kyle is at the door. He moved there quietly and practically at some point — creating a boundary, making the room smaller and more contained, his scent beginning to contribute to the air in a way that is deliberate and calm and expanding outward from where John has already laid the foundation of something.

He’s not looking at you directly. He’s looking at the room, at the perimeter of it, doing the thing that Kyle Garrick does when the people he cares about need something practical — finding the practical thing and doing it without being asked and without making a production of it.

Johnny is on the floor.

He dropped there the moment you hit the wall, you realise. Before John had moved, before anyone had said anything — Johnny had gone straight to the floor, cross-legged at the far edge of the room, far enough not to crowd and close enough to be felt.

His face is completely open. He’s not managing it at all, not doing any of the things people do with their expressions when they’re aware of being watched. He’s just — present, and worried, and something else underneath both of those things that doesn’t have a clean name.

His scent is warm and it’s adding itself to the room’s edges and your wolf knows it the way she knows all of them. Like she has always known all of them. She filed them away in the first weeks and kept them even when you were throwing everything else away.

John’s hand lifts behind him. Flat. Not a complex signal — clear enough. Simon exhales hard and stays. Kyle doesn’t move from the door. Johnny stays where he is.

You’re not tracking time properly.

The sedative is still in your system, thin now, wearing away at the edges but present. Between that and the distress receding and the warmth of John’s scent settling around you like something physical, time is doing things it doesn’t usually do. Stretching in some places. Compressing in others.

The moments when another wave moves through you — because they still do, the heat is still there underneath everything, dulled but not gone, reminding you of the biological reality that precipitated all of this — feel very long. The moments between feel very short.

John makes a sound. Low. Directed behind him and Simon moves.

He crosses the room in a way that is controlled and deliberate and still somehow communicates the force it’s costing him to be controlled and deliberate about it.

He comes to your other side and his presence hits your wolf like the first breath you take and when you come up from underwater. His nose finds your hair first — just that, just the warmth of his face close to the top of your head — and then your temple, and then the other side of your throat, and the sound he makes in his chest rough and gravely but it makes your wolf preen all the same.

It has always just been there, that sound, in the frequency range that your wolf has always been able to hear even when you were in the same room pretending you couldn’t. She turns toward it with the same lack of consultation she turns toward everything that matters.

Your grip on your knees releases entirely. Your hands fall open in your lap.

Kyle comes next.

He moves from the door with the quiet surety of someone who has waited for the right moment and recognised it, and his hand finds your hair and stays there, heavy and warm and still.

His scent is different from the others — steadier somehow, a lower note, the kind of constancy that doesn’t announce itself. It fills in the spaces between what John and Simon have already built, completes something that was incomplete, and your wolf receives it with a low sound that you feel more in your chest than hear.

Johnny comes last and he doesn’t touch you and that’s right too, that’s exactly right, because Johnny understands — has always understood, it’s one of the things about him that you’d noticed from the beginning before you’d started being careful about what you noticed — that sometimes the right thing to offer is just presence. He settles close to your knees, close enough that his warmth reaches you, close enough that his scent finishes what the others started, and he looks at you with his whole face and says nothing at all.

The room smells like pack.

It smells like your pack.

The thought moves through you and there is no resistance.

None.

The part of you that would usually catch it — name it, file it, dismantle it before it could become anything it wasn’t supposed to be — is somewhere else right now. Somewhere inaccessible, and what remains in its absence is something that has been there all along underneath the architecture of your carefully maintained independence

Your wolf knows these people.

She has always known them.

You’ve just been very busy not letting her say so.

Your head finds John’s shoulder and he goes very still and then, carefully, doesn’t move, and the hand that comes up slowly to cover the back of your head is so gentle that you register it as warmth before you register it as touch.

You feel your eyes close.

Feel the last of the tension in your spine give way, not all at once but in a long slow release, like a sound fading rather than stopping. The warmth of them surrounds you — John’s shoulder, Simon’s presence solid and close at your other side, Kyle’s hand in your hair, Johnny’s warmth at your knees — and your wolf presses into all of it with the desperation of something that has been cold for a very long time.

You say it without meaning to.

Barely sound. Barely anything. Just the shape of it against John’s shoulder, your eyes closed and your body finally, finally beginning to go heavy in a way that isn’t collapse but is rest.

“My alphas.”

The room freezes.

John’s hand stays exactly where it is at the back of your head. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t do anything except stay where he is and let your wolf have the thing she’s said, and that — the not doing anything, the simple staying — is exactly right in a way that you’ll understand better when you have language again and can think about why.

Your wolf whimpers softly.

They move you to the nest.

You’re not fully tracking it. You’re aware of warmth and of movement and of Simon’s throat close to your nose during the transition — your wolf turns toward it without asking and your nose presses there and he goes very still and makes a sound low in his chest that vibrates against your face — and you’re aware of being set down into something that is soft and warm and smells, overwhelmingly and completely and in every direction, of pack.

Your jacket is in there.

Simon’s jacket. The one you’d spent four days trying to air the scent out of and had failed at and had taken with you anyway when you ran. You’d told yourself it was because it was warm and practical and not for any other reason.

It’s in the nest. You feel the specific texture of it against your cheek and your wolf purrs with pure and uncomplicated recognition.

Nobody says anything about it.

The nest itself is everything your wolf has been asking for in the wordless continuous way she asks for things. Low and warm and enclosed, the blankets built up around the edges so the space feels bounded and safe, everything in it carrying the layered scent of the four of them and when it closes around you the sound you make is not something you’ll want them to remember. A moan unbridled into the cool air.

The four of them arrange themselves around the nest. Not in it — around it, close enough for scent and warmth and presence, far enough to give you the space your wolf has accepted and your conscious mind will have opinions about later when it comes back online.

John closest, always John closest, his presence the thing your wolf oriented toward first tonight and keeps orienting toward. Simon on the other side, not touching, close enough that his warmth reaches you through the blankets. Kyle at your back, steady and quiet. Johnny somewhere near your feet, cross-legged probably, just there.

You drift.

In and out, in and out. The sedative and the exhaustion and the heat all pulling you downward, and the warmth and the scent pulling you into something that is soft rather than dark. Something that has none of the thin terrible edges of the sedated nothing and all of the rest that nothing had promised and hadn’t quite delivered.

When you surface you reach.

It’s not something you decide. Your hand moves and finds something — a wrist, once, which you hold for a moment before going back under; fabric, twice, which you grip lightly and then release; once, in a moment you won’t remember clearly, the line of Simon’s jaw, your thumb against the sharp angle of it, a touch so soft and unguarded that he stops breathing for a full minute and John watches it happen from across the nest and says nothing.

Each time you surface and find them there your wolf settles again.

Each time you go back under the slope of it is longer and gentler and the surface is further away.

Your wolf has been asking for exactly this and now that she has it she receives each wave and rides it and settles back into the warmth without the desperate frantic edge of something that has been denied too long.

She’s still asking. She’ll keep asking. The heat won’t be gone just because she’s been scented and nested and surrounded, and in some part of you that is still you, still the person who negotiated terms from a tree and counted steps in a treeline, you know that.

You know this isn’t over.

You know there are things coming that will require the version of you that has language and arguments and the careful architecture of self-determination.

But that version is not available right now.

Right now there is only this.

The warmth and the scent and the soft fuzzy edges of everything, the world reduced to something immediate and close and manageable.

Your wolf finally quiet in a way that isn’t suppression and isn’t hiding. She’s simply — here. Present. Resting in the specific way that things rest when they’ve been fighting for a very long time and have been given, at last, permission to stop.

You go under again.

Deeper this time. The slope long and gradual and soft.

The last thing you’re aware of is John’s voice.

Close. So close it could be coming from inside you. Low in the register he uses when he’s not performing steadiness but simply being it.

When the authority is gone and what’s underneath is just him, just the man who sat on a bathroom floor and let you see his hands shaking and who asked what you wanted for breakfast the night before you ran.

“We’ve got you omega.”

Your wolf hears it.

She stops running.

She has been running for six months — through the cottage and the cold and the rationed noodles and the self-stitched scar and every quiet strategic choice of a person who has decided that freedom is worth the cost of everything else — and she stops.

Not because she’s been caught. Not because she’s given up. But because the thing she’s been running toward has been here the whole time and she is so tired and it is so warm and your alphas are all around you and the slope is so long and so gentle.

She curls up.

She closes her eyes.

And you sleep — really sleep, deeply sleep, the kind of sleep that heals rather than merely suspends — for the first time in six months.

You didn’t.

“The second option,” she continued, “is medical sedation. A suppressant compound, administered intravenously, strong enough to carry you through the full week. It keeps your wolf suppressed, manages the physical symptoms, prevents your body from tearing itself apart trying to complete a biological process without the support structure it needs.”

Another wave moved through you. You absorbed it the way you’d been absorbing them — jaw tight, hands flat on the mattress, eyes on the ceiling, breathing through it until it passed. Dr. Caldwell waited without comment. That was the thing about her that you were already grateful for. She waited.

When it broke you said: “The second one.”

“I expected that,” she said, without judgement. “But I need you to understand the risk profile before you agree.” She glanced at the monitors, then back at you. “In your current condition — the weight loss, the nutritional deficit, the physical strain of the last six months — sedation for a full week carries real risk. Your body has very little reserve. If something goes wrong while you’re under, your ability to fight back is limited.” She held your gaze. “Before I can put you under I need to be certain you can handle it. That means a full examination. Bloods, vitals, and your arm.”

Your arm.

You looked at the bandaging. The neat, clinical white of it that covered something that had been neither neat nor clinical when you’d done it yourself in the dark of a motel with shaking hands and whatever you’d been able to find in the first aid kit you’d bought in a shitty little corner shop.

“Alright,” you said.

Dr. Caldwell nodded and stood, reaching for her equipment. You sat up.

It took more effort than it should have. Your arms shook slightly with the push of it, your body already running on fumes, the heat and the sedative and the forty minutes in the back of a supply truck all presenting their collective bill at once. But you sat up, and you looked at the four of them arranged around the room, and you said what you needed to say before anything else happened.

“Conditions,” you said.

John straightened almost imperceptibly. He was listening. He was always listening — it was one of the most unnerving things about him, the quality of his attention, the way he gave it completely and without visible effort.

“Dr. Caldwell stays in the room,” you said. “The whole time. No exceptions.”

“Of course,” the medic said.

“No one touches me without asking first.” You looked at each of them as you said it. Simon, whose jaw was set but who held your gaze without flinching. Kyle, who nodded once, steady. Johnny, who nodded immediately, almost before you’d finished the sentence. John, who simply said:

“Agreed.”

“When it’s done,” you continued, “someone keeps watch. Outside. Not in here unless Dr. Caldwell calls them.” You paused. “I don’t want to wake up with four alphas standing over me.”

A muscle moved in Simon’s jaw. Kyle looked at the floor briefly. Johnny’s mouth pressed into a line that wasn’t quite agreement and wasn’t quite protest.

John said: “Agreed.”

You looked at him for a moment. Looked for the calculation in it, the manoeuvre, the long game playing out behind those steady eyes. If it was there, you couldn’t find it. You’d never been able to find it with John, which was either evidence that he was exactly what he appeared to be or evidence that he was better at it than anyone you’d ever met.

You lay back down.

“Alright, Dr. Caldwell,” you said. “Let’s get this done.”

She worked efficiently and without unnecessary commentary, which you appreciated more than you could have articulated. Blood pressure cuff, the familiar tightening and release. The cold disc of the stethoscope. The pulse oximeter clipped to your finger, its small red light blinking steadily in the low light of the room.

She noted numbers into her tablet without sharing them, which told you the numbers were neither alarming enough to require immediate reaction nor good enough to offer reassurance.

Borderline.

You’d known you were borderline. You’d known it for a while and had made the calculation — the same calculation you’d been making since the beginning — that borderline was liveable and living was the point.

The heat moved through you in waves every few minutes. Regular now, like a tide finding its rhythm, and the sedative Simon had given you in the treeline was wearing thin, the edges of each wave a little sharper than the last. You breathed through them. You did not make sounds. You kept your eyes on the ceiling and waited for each one to pass and then returned your attention to the room.

John had uncrossed his arms.

You noticed that. He was standing by the door with his hands loose at his sides, and you thought about what that meant — whether he’d done it consciously or whether it was something he’d absorbed from the conversation you’d had three days ago without making a production of it — and then you stopped thinking about it because that line of thought went somewhere you weren’t ready to go.

Kyle was watching the monitors with the focused attention of a man who needed something to do and had found it. His eyes moved between the readouts and you in a regular pattern, checking and checking again, and every time a wave moved through you his gaze went to your face and stayed there until it passed.

Johnny was against the wall. He’d moved fully into the room at some point — you’d registered it peripherally, the shift from half-in to present. He was standing with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on you with an expression he clearly had no idea he was wearing. Open in the way that Johnny was always open, emotions running close to the surface and visible to anyone paying attention, but underneath the openness was something older and more complicated that he was working very hard to hold quietly.

Simon hadn’t moved from beside you.

Dr. Caldwell hadn’t asked him to.

You hadn’t either, and you were aware of that — aware that you could have, aware that it would have been consistent with everything you’d said and done since the treeline, aware that the reason you hadn’t was something you were filing away in the same place you filed the jacket and the hand over yours and the forty-three minutes in the back of a supply truck when you’d almost believed you were going to make it.

The medic reached your arm last.

She unwrapped the bandaging carefully, set it aside, and examined the scar with the focused, neutral attention of someone who had seen a great deal of field injuries and was now unfazed by the sight of them.

She ran two fingers along the length of it, gentle, precise. You felt her pause at a specific point — midway along, where the scar tissue was thicker, where the stitching had pulled unevenly because your hands hadn’t been steady enough and the light had been bad and you’d been working by feel more than sight.

“Who did this?” she asked.

“I did,” you said.

The room changed.

The quality of the silence shifted in a way you felt in your chest — something tighter, something that had weight to it. The specific texture of people absorbing information they’d suspected and are now having confirmed. You didn’t look at any of them. You kept your eyes on the ceiling and let the silence be what it was.

Dr. Caldwell’s expression didn’t change. “The stitching held reasonably well,” she said, which you understood was the most generous true thing she could say about it. “But there’s something in the scar tissue.” She pressed gently at the point where she’d paused. “Can you feel that?”

“Yes,” you said. You’d always been able to feel it. A small resistance, something that didn’t belong, that you’d told yourself was just the way scar tissue formed sometimes and had declined to examine too closely because examining it would have meant admitting it needed attention and admitting it needed attention would have meant finding someone to give it.

“It needs to come out before we sedate you,” she said. “If there’s debris in there and you’re under for a week, we risk infection, inflammation, complications we don’t want.” She held your gaze. “I need to open it, clean it properly, and remove whatever’s in there. It’s minor. But it needs to happen.”

“Fine,” you said.

She held your gaze. “It will be uncomfortable. Do you want someone to stay close?”

You looked at the ceiling.

The automatic answer was no. The automatic answer was always no — you don’t need anyone, you’ve managed worse, you stitched the thing yourself in the dark with shaking hands and bad light and you can certainly lie still while a qualified medic does it properly.

But you were so tired.

And the heat was still moving through you in waves.

And the automatic answer felt very far away right now.

You didn’t say anything.

You didn’t have to.

You looked at Simon and instantly he moved to your other side — not the side Dr. Caldwell was working on, not crowding her, just the other side — and sat down and put his hand on the bed near yours. Not taking it. Not gripping. Just putting it there, available, the same way he’d put everything forward tonight. Quietly. Without demanding receipt.

You looked at his hand for a moment.

Then you turned your face toward the ceiling and put your hand in his.

He didn’t say anything.

Dr. Caldwell began to work.

She was precise and efficient and explained each step before she did it, which you were grateful for in the way you were grateful for everything she did — the directness of it, the respect of it, the treating you like someone who deserved to know what was happening to her own body. The antiseptic was cold. The work was uncomfortable in the specific way of something being done carefully to an area that had been left too long, scar tissue that had formed around something that shouldn’t have been there.

Simon’s thumb moved once against the back of your hand.

Small. Slow. You didn’t think he knew he was doing it.

You didn’t say anything about it.

Dr. Caldwell found it twelve minutes in — a small piece of gravel, she confirmed, worked deep into the tissue, probably from whatever surface you’d hit when the wound happened. She removed it with the clean efficiency of someone who did this well.

You felt the release of it, small and physical, something your body had been quietly compensating for so long it had stopped registering the compensation.

“Done,” she said.

Simon’s hand was still under yours.

You became aware of this at the same moment you became aware that you’d been holding it rather than the other way around — your fingers closed around his, at some point during the last twelve minutes without your noticing, and you were holding on with the specific grip of someone who needed something to hold and had reached for what was nearest.

You didn’t let go immediately.

Dr. Caldwell began bandaging your arm, brisk and neat, and you stared at the ceiling and registered the warmth of Simon’s hand under yours and put it on the shelf with everything else.

She reviewed her tablet. She looked at the monitors. She said the things you’d been waiting for her to say, the things that mattered.

“It’s borderline,” she said. “Your body has been under significant sustained stress and I want that clearly documented. But the sedation is viable. We can do this safely if we’re careful.” She looked at you directly. “Do you consent to the procedure?”

“I do.”

You thought about the cottage. The fire, the map, the moment your wolf had surfaced and said here and you had whispered okay into the empty room like a promise you weren’t sure you were making to her or to yourself.

You thought about the treeline. The two hundred and fortieth step. Your fingers in the soil and the wave that had taken language away and left only the raw animal fact of how much it hurt.

You thought about John’s hand over yours, shaking, not hidden.

You thought about Simon’s hands on yours just now, unhurried, careful, asking for something without words because some things don’t have them.

You looked at the IV line Dr. Caldwell was preparing.

Then you looked at the four of them — John by the door, Kyle at the foot of the bed, Johnny against the wall, Simon still beside you — and you said it the way you always said things. Clearly. Without softening it. Because clarity was the only currency you had left and you were not going to spend it on something that wasn’t true.

“I’m still not yours.”

The room held its breath.

Simon’s hand moved. It squeezed yours.

John looked at you.

“We know,” he said.

Dr. Caldwell adjusted the IV line. You felt the cold thread of it move up your arm, and your wolf made one last sound — not surrender, not submission, not the desperate broadcast of the treeline — something quieter than all of those.

The ceiling blurred.

The room softened at its edges.

Simon’s fingers were still against yours, and the last thing you were aware of before the sedative took you was the warmth of them — just that, just warmth — and the sound of John’s voice saying something to the others that you couldn’t quite hold onto as the dark came up to meet you.

The monitors beeped steadily in the quiet.

Dr. Caldwell made her final notes with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this many times and understood that the people in the room needed her to finish and leave. She gave them the schedule — vitals twice daily, check-ins every four hours, her number on the board, call for anything — and gathered her equipment and went without ceremony.

The door closed behind her.

None of them moved for a while.

You were asleep in a way you hadn’t been in six months — fully under, the guard finally down, the exhaustion of everything you’d been carrying visible now in the lines of your face in a way you’d never have allowed if you were conscious. Thinner than you should be. The bandaging white against your arm. The monitors tracking the slow, steady rhythm of a body that had been pushed a very long way and was finally, under chemical compulsion, resting.

Johnny spoke first. His voice was quiet, like raising it would disturb something.

“She got forty minutes,” he said.

“Forty-three,” Kyle said. “I checked the gate log.”

Johnny looked at him. Something moved between them — not quite humour, not quite grief, something that sat in the space between the two of them the way a lot of things sat in the space between soldiers who had been through things together.

“Forty-three,” Johnny said.

Simon hadn’t moved. He was still sitting beside you, and his hand was resting in yours on the bed. He was looking at your hand. Not at your face, not at the monitors — at your hand, the one that had gripped his jacket in the treeline the same way it had gripped John’s.

Kyle was watching the monitors. His jaw was set in the particular way that meant he was thinking about something he hadn’t decided how to say yet.

“Her bloods came back before Caldwell left,” he said, to the room rather than to anyone specifically. “I looked at them.”

John looked at him.

“She’s more depleted than the physical exam shows,” Kyle said. “The numbers don’t lie the way bodies do.” He was quiet for a moment. “She was running out of time. Another few weeks and she wouldn’t have been able to run anymore. Not physically.”

The room absorbed that.

“She knew,” John said.

Kyle nodded. “Yeah. I think she knew.”

Johnny pressed the back of his hand against his mouth briefly, a gesture that came and went fast, contained. “She still ran,” he said.

“She still ran,” John nodded. There was nothing in his voice that wasn’t understanding.

Simon said, without looking up from your hand: “She stitched her own arm. In the dark. Alone.”

Nobody answered.

Nobody needed to.

The words sat in the room and did what true things do — took up space, changed the quality of the air, made it impossible to be exactly what you’d been before they were said. John looked at the bandaging on your arm and thought about a shitty motel and a woman with shaking hands and bad light and the specific kind of determination that does what needs doing regardless of the cost.

He’d known, abstractly, that the months had been hard. You didn’t run the way you’d run — the planning, the precision, the three months leaving no trace — without being built for it in some fundamental way. But there was a difference between knowing something abstractly and standing in a room looking at the evidence of it.

“When she wakes up,” Johnny said quietly, “she’s going to try again.”

“Yes,” John said.

“So what do we do?”

John was quiet for a long moment. He looked at you — at the slow rise and fall of your breathing, at the way sleep had softened the lines around your mouth, at Simon’s hand and yours.

“She told me to ask,” he said. “Not to plan. Not to manoeuvre. To ask.” He looked at each of them in turn. “So that’s what we do. All of us. We stop anticipating and we start asking. Every time.”

Simon’s jaw worked. “And if she still says no?”

John looked at him for a moment. “I have a feeling she won’t.”

Kyle looked at the floor. Johnny looked at you. Simon looked at his hand in yours.

Outside the base continued its mechanical hum, indifferent and steady, the sound of a building that didn’t know or care what was happening in this particular room. Somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed. The ventilation breathed its recycled air.

Johnny pulled a chair from the wall and sat down.

Kyle stayed at the foot of the bed.

John remained by the door.

And Simon sat beside you with your hand under his and his eyes on your face and didn’t move.

None of them spoke again for a long time. The monitors beeped, and you slept, and outside the window, the sky was beginning the slow grey process of becoming morning.

The gap between the drivers arriving and the engines starting was two minutes. Long enough.

You’d been planning since the start of the week .

It hadn’t been a decision so much as an inevitability, something you’d recognised in yourself the way you recognise hunger — not a choice but a state.

You were going to run.

The only question was when, and how, and how far you could get before they felt your absence the way you suspected they would, that pack awareness you’d seen operate between them like a sixth sense, a radio frequency you weren’t supposed to be able to tune into but always had, quietly, from a distance, in the way that told you more about your own wolf than you’d ever wanted to know.

You’d been careful not to let it show that you were planning.

Simon had left some money on the nightstand two days ago — for anything you need, he’d said, flat and without sentiment, setting it down like a challenge you weren’t supposed to take literally — you’d taken all of it.

Pushing it into the inside pocket of the spare jacket you’d found in the cupboard. Simon’s jacket, you thought, from the size and the faint scent of him that you’d aired out over four days by leaving it near the window at night.

The food you’d been rationing in a way you hoped looked like appetite fluctuation — eating less than they thought, more than you needed, keeping your body functional without giving anyone a reason to look closely at what you were putting away versus what you were not.

You had three days of food if you were careful. Enough to get somewhere. Enough to disappear again.

The night before, John had knocked on your door at nine o’clock. You’d been sitting on the bed with the map you’d reconstructed from memory across your knees — you’d left the original in your cottage — and you’d folded it in one motion and slid it under the mattress and said come in with the steadiness of someone who hadn’t been planning their exit for six days.

John had leaned in the doorframe. Not entering. Just present in the way he always was, filling space without demanding it.

“What do you want for breakfast?” he’d asked.

The question was so ordinary it took you a moment to process it.

“What?”

“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ll have it sorted before you’re up. Whatever you want.”

You’d looked at him across the room and felt something move in your chest that you didn’t have a name for. He was doing it — what you’d asked him to do. Asking instead of assuming. Such a small thing.

Such a careful, deliberate small thing.

“Eggs,” you’d replied. “Scrambled. And proper tea, not whatever Kyle keeps making.”

“Done,” he’d said, and left.

You’d sat in the dark for twenty minutes afterward and almost didn’t do it.

Almost.

You moved at 0448.

Early enough to be ahead of the yard lights, late enough that the base had settled into its deepest quiet.

That particular hush that falls over any institutional building in the small hours when the night shift has found its rhythm and stopped moving unless it has to. You knew this base. You’d worked here for two years. You knew which corridors had cameras and which had gaps, which doors were alarmed and which were legacy infrastructure that someone had meant to get around to and hadn’t.

You moved through it the way water moves through rock, not forcing, just finding.

You made it to the vehicle yard at 0456.

Four minutes to spare.

The truck was the third one in — a general supply run, you’d worked out from the markings, headed toward the nearest town before looping back. You could be off it at the first junction. You’d be on foot from there, but you’d been on foot before. You were good at it.

You lifted the tarp in the back, settled in among the pallets, and pulled it over yourself with the practiced ease of someone who’d slept in worse places for worse reasons.

You controlled your breathing.

You waited.

At 0500, the gate opened, and the truck moved, and you let your eyes close for precisely three seconds — you did it, you did it, go — before you opened them again and started counting turns.

For twenty minutes you let yourself believe it.

The truck smelled like engine oil and cardboard and the particular institutional smell of military supply chains — bleach and plastic wrap and something metallic underneath. You lay on your back in the narrow space between pallets and stared at the underside of the tarp in the dark and let yourself build the next part in your mind.

Further north this time. You’d made mistakes before — staying too close to places Johnny might know, not accounting for how comprehensively John Price could map your instincts. This time you’d go to ground in the west. Islands if you could manage it. Somewhere with one road in and a coastline on every other side.

You’d been so focused on the planning, on the comfortable familiar shape of escape logistics, that you almost missed it.

The warmth.

It started at the base of your spine. Low and spreading, like someone pressing a heated cloth against your lower back, and you shifted position and told yourself it was the truck. Told yourself it was the adrenaline. Told yourself it was residual heat from the base you’d been in for six days surrounded by four alphas whose combined effect on your wolf had clearly been doing things you hadn’t been paying close enough attention to.

You’d felt heats before. You knew what they felt like. The slow build of it, like a tide coming in. Manageable. Predictable. Something you could plan around.

This was not that.

This was three missed cycles. Six months of suppression. A wolf who had been patient beyond any reasonable biological expectation and had decided, in the back of a moving supply truck forty minutes outside a military base, that she was done.

The first real wave hit like a door being thrown open in a hurricane.

You got your sleeve between your teeth before the sound escaped. Barely. Your whole body locked against it — spine arching, legs pressing flat, hands scrabbling for purchase on the metal floor of the truck bed — and you held it. Held yourself together through sheer force of the will that had gotten you through three months in a Scottish winter alone, and when it passed you were shaking and drenched in sweat and absolutely certain of two things.

You needed to get off this truck.

And you were not going to make a sound.

The junction came eleven minutes later — you felt the truck slow, the gear change, the brief idle that happened at every stop while the driver checked his route — and you had the tarp off and the tailgate open in the three second window before it moved again. You dropped to the road in a crouch, absorbed the impact, and were moving into the treeline before the truck had fully cleared the junction.

Two hundred yards. Maybe two hundred and twenty?

You were counting because counting was the only thing keeping your head above water, the only thing between you and the second wave that you could already feel building. That low terrible warmth rising again.

Your wolf clawing at the surface with an urgency you had never felt before — nothing like the gentle persistent pressure of the last six months, nothing like the quiet approval you’d felt in the cottage — this was desperate and primal and completely beyond reason.

Your legs stopped working on the two hundred and fortieth step.

You didn’t fall so much as fold. Your knees hit the ground and your hands went down automatically, fingers spreading in the cold soil, and you gripped it — held it — like it was the only solid thing left in the world.

The wave hit then, the second one, and it was worse than the first, and you pressed your forehead toward the ground and breathed through it the way you’d taught yourself for distress episodes, slow and controlled, in through the nose, out through the mouth.

You are not going to scream.

You have survived worse than this.

You weren’t sure that was true anymore.

Your wolf surfaced.

Not gently. Not the cautious stirring of the last weeks, the tentative press of something that had been hiding for a long time.

This was full emergence, violent and complete. Six months of suppression detonating all at once, and the sound that came from somewhere deep in your chest was nothing you’d ever made before — not human, not quite wolf, something raw and beyond category that you swallowed before it could fully escape but that vibrated in your sternum like a bell that had been struck.

Your wolf wanted her pack.

Specifically, precisely, without ambiguity — she wanted those four, and she wanted them now, and she didn’t care about terms or freedom or the careful architecture of self-determination you had built over three months of frozen mornings and rationed noodles.

No, you told her, through your teeth, fingers digging deeper into the soil. No. Absolutely not.

Your wolf didn’t argue.

She just broadcast.

John felt it like a physical impact.

He’d been awake — he was always awake at this hour, sitting at the desk in his room with paperwork he wasn’t reading, when it hit him. Not a sound. Not a scent. Something older than both, something that bypassed every rational process and went directly to the part of him that was wolf and pack and nothing else.

You were in pain.

He was moving before the thought had fully formed.

He took the service stairs. He already knew you weren’t in your room — had known it, he realised, had been sitting with the knowledge at the edge of his awareness for the last forty minutes in the way that you sometimes know things your conscious mind hasn’t caught up with yet.

The yard.

The trucks.

Of course.

He’d underestimated your timeline. He’d made a choice to let you feel like you had room, and now you were in a treeline somewhere with your heat detonating around you and his alpha instincts were not — were absolutely not — responding to this with anything resembling the steadiness he was known for.

He went over the perimeter fence at the eastern point and into the trees.

His wolf found you before his eyes did. Your scent — changed now, heat-saturated, something that hit the back of his throat and made every disciplined instinct he possessed rear up simultaneously.

The need to protect and the need to claim so tangled together he couldn’t have separated them if he’d tried. He didn’t try. He just moved toward you and kept his hands from shaking through the specific effort of a man who understood that his needs were entirely irrelevant right now.

You were on your hands and knees.

Your fingers were buried in the soil up to the second knuckle. Your head was bowed, hair falling forward, and he could see from ten feet away the way your whole body was braced against the wave moving through it — rigid, controlled, fighting it with everything you had.

A sound was escaping you that you were clearly trying to prevent, low and broken and involuntary, the kind of sound that lives below language.

He crossed the distance and crouched beside you.

Not touching. Not yet. Every cell in his body screamed at him to cover you, to gather you in, to put his hands on you and his scent around you and his presence between you and everything that was hurting you — and he held all of it back with both hands and said, very quietly:

“Can I—”

“Don’t.” Your voice was wrecked, barely recognisable, ground out between clenched teeth. “Don’t you — this isn’t — this doesn’t—”

The wave took the rest of the sentence. Your knuckles went white in the dirt. He watched you ride it and didn’t look away because you deserved to be witnessed and not managed, even now, especially now, and when it broke and you were breathing again in those ragged controlled pulls, his hands were shaking.

He didn’t let you see that.

He sat down on the ground next to you instead. Not touching. Close enough that his scent was unavoidable — he couldn’t control that, his wolf was throwing everything it had at the situation and scent was the first and oldest language — and he waited, and you breathed, and after a moment that stretched in both directions, your hand moved.

You didn’t mean to. He could tell from the way you went still the second you’d done it, a fractional freeze of someone who has caught themselves doing something they hadn’t decided to do. Your fist was closed in the fabric of his jacket at his chest, and you lifted your eyes to his and they were glassy and furious and exhausted and in more pain than he’d let himself imagine over six months of searching for you.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” you hissed out, low.

“I know,” he said.

He put his hand over yours. Just his hand. Not pulling you closer, not covering you, just — his hand over yours, and the shaking in his fingers was something he decided you could see.

You looked down at it. Then back up at him.

You didn’t let go.

Simon came through the treeline at a run and stopped.

John heard him before he saw him — the specific rhythm of Simon Riley moving fast, heavier than he looked, purposeful. He emerged from the trees and took in the scene in one sweep — you on the ground, John beside you, your fist in John’s jacket, the way John’s hand covered yours — and something moved across his face in the dark that wasn’t any simple thing.

He crossed to you and crouched in front of you.

You looked up at him. He could see it — the full catastrophe of it, your wolf and your pride and your pain and your absolute refusal to let any of them win cleanly — playing out across your face, which had gotten sharper and more guarded in six months and was now, in the worst possible circumstances, stripped back to something raw underneath.

“Riley,” John said quietly.

Simon was already reaching for the kit at his belt. Field medic training so old it was muscle memory. He held up the syringe where you could see it — making sure you saw it, making sure it wasn’t a surprise — and his voice when he spoke was the flattest and most honest you had probably ever heard from him.

“Mild sedative,” he said. “Just enough to take the edge off. Get you back.” A pause. “You can hate me for it when you wake up.”

You looked at the syringe.

You looked at him.

Another wave rolled through you and your whole body locked against it, jaw clenched so hard he could see the muscle jumping, and the sound you almost made was the sound that broke something open in his chest that he was going to have to deal with later when you weren’t looking.

“Fine,” you breathed, when it passed. The word was barely sound. “Fine. Do it.”

He did it in one clean motion. The inside of your elbow, the most accessible vein, his hands completely and utterly steady in the way that Simon Riley’s hands were always steady when it mattered, regardless of what was happening anywhere else in him.

The effect wasn’t immediate. A minute, maybe two, the worst edges beginning to blunt, your breathing shifting from those ragged desperate pulls to something that still hurt but didn’t drown. Your fist in John’s jacket loosened by degrees. Your fingers uncurled from the soil.

You didn’t pass out.

Simon could see you fighting it, the deliberate effort of keeping your eyes open and focused, and he understood you would not be carried back unconscious. You would not give them that, would not arrive back at that base as anything other than someone who had chosen to return even if the choice had been made in the worst possible circumstances.

When he reached for you, you didn’t fight him.

He picked you up with the care of someone handling something that had cost more than they could calculate, and you let him, and that more than anything told him how much pain you’d been in.

The base was forty minutes back on foot.

Simon carried you. You kept your eyes open.

Kyle was on the phone ahead of you all — he’d felt it too, they all had, that pack frequency you didn’t know you were broadcasting on — running logistics in the quiet efficient way that was Kyle Garrick’s particular genius. The medic, the room, what they’d need, everything in motion before you’d even cleared the treeline.

Johnny kept pace beside Simon, hands in his pockets, not touching you, not talking, just present in the way that asked nothing and offered everything.

John walked behind.

His wolf had not quieted. He was not going to pretend it had. He watched the way you were held and didn’t look away from it, but catalogued it with the same attention he gave everything — the way your head had tilted fractionally toward Simon’s shoulder, the way your fingers had found a loose fist in Simon’s jacket the same way they’d found one in his, the way your eyes stayed open and forward and furious through the whole of it, refusing to be anything other than a person who was awake and aware and present even when your body was doing things completely beyond your control.

You made a sound at one point. Low and involuntary, another wave moving through you despite the sedative’s blunting, and all four of them went tense in the same instant — Johnny’s hand flexing at his side, Kyle’s voice cutting off mid-sentence, Simon’s arms tightening almost imperceptibly.

“Nearly there,” Simon said, low and close to your temple. “Nearly there, sweet’art.”

You didn’t tell him not to call you that.

John noted it. Filed it. Would think about the implications of it later when he had space to think.

You were set down on the med bay bed and the sedative was thinning at the edges by then, the sharp returning. You lay on your back and looked at the ceiling and you could feel yourself coming back — awareness clicking into focus, the inventory you always took of your situation assembling itself automatically. Where you were. How you’d gotten here. What had happened in the treeline on the two hundred and fortieth step.

Your gaze moved around the room.

John by the door. Kyle at the foot of the bed. Johnny half in the hallway, like he didn’t quite trust himself to be fully present or fully absent. Simon standing beside you.

You looked at the ceiling again.

Another wave moved through you — dulled by the sedative, but present, a reminder that your body had its own agenda tonight and it wasn’t finished making its case. Your jaw tightened. Your hands pressed flat against the mattress.

You thought about the truck. The treeline. The two hundred and fortieth step.

You thought about John’s hand over yours, shaking.

You thought about Simon’s voice saying nearly there, sweetheart in his stupid accent and the fact that you hadn’t told him to stop.

You stared at the ceiling and made your decision with the same quiet finality you’d made every decision since the night you’d run from a hallway whisper six months ago.

Then you said it. Clearly. Without looking at any of them.

“I’m not mating through this.”

He’s not in uniform. That’s the first thing that catches you off guard. Dark trousers, a plain jumper, the kind of clothes that make him look less like a captain and more like something harder to argue with.

He looks tired in a way the jeep and the plane hadn’t quite shown you — not exhausted, not worn down, but carrying something. Like a man who has been patient for a very long time and has made peace with continuing to be.

“You wanted to talk,” he says.

“Sit down,” you say, because you’re not going to look up at him for this conversation. “Or don’t. But I’m not craning my neck.”

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. He pulls the chair from the small desk and sets it a few feet from the bed, turns it to face you, and sits. Forearms on his knees. Hands loose. The same position he’d held on the floor outside your bathroom, like folding himself down to your level is just something he does without making a performance of it.

You look at him.

He looks back.

“You agreed to my terms,” you start.

“I did.”

“Simon didn’t.”

“No.”

“Kyle didn’t. Johnny didn’t.”

John nods once, slow. “That’s true.”

“So explain that to me,” you say, keeping your voice level, clinical. You’d had twenty minutes to think about how to approach this and you’d decided on steady. On controlled. On not letting him see how much the realisation had shaken you, because it had — more than you’d wanted it to. “Because from where I’m sitting, I made a deal with one person. And I’m living with four.”

John is quiet for a moment. Not evasive — you’ve known him long enough to know the difference. He’s choosing words, which is its own kind of warning with John Price. He doesn’t reach for easy ones.

“Simon, Kyle, Johnny,” he says finally. “They’re pack. What I agree to on behalf of the pack carries weight. They’ll honour it.”

“That’s not the same as them agreeing.”

“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”

“So if you told them your terms had changed —”

“I wouldn’t.”

“But if you did.”

John meets your eyes. “They’d follow my lead.”

The honesty of it sits in the room like a stone. You’d wanted him to tell you it didn’t matter. That all four of them had shaken hands on it in the car park while you were unconscious against Kyle’s shoulder. That the terms were ironclad and unanimous and you were worrying about nothing.

He hadn’t said that.

“So I’m not protected by an agreement,” you say quietly. “I’m protected by you.”

John doesn’t look away. “Yes.”

“And if something happened to you.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He exhales slowly. “The pack respects you. After what happened — the chase, the tree, what you said — that changed how they see you. Not because you were difficult. Because you were right. Simon respects strength. Kyle respects logic. Johnny respects someone who can outrun him.” A pause. “You did all three today.”

“That’s still not an answer.”

“No,” he agrees. “It’s not.”

You stare at him. He stares back, and the thing about John Price that has always undone you — always, from the very first week at the base when you’d written him off as just another commanding alpha in a building full of them — is that he never looks away first. Not in apology. Not in dominance. Just in honesty. Like he thinks you deserve to see him clearly and he’s prepared to let you.

It makes you want to throw something at him.

“You should have told me that before I climbed down,” you say.

“If I’d told you, you wouldn’t have climbed down.”

“Exactly.”

“And then what?” he asks, voice still even. “You’d have stayed up there until your arms gave out. Fallen. Hurt yourself worse than you already are.” His gaze drops briefly to your arm, the bandage the medic had wrapped neatly below your elbow, then back to your face. “I made the call that got you safe. I’ll make that call every time.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” you say, and your voice comes out harder than you meant it to. “You making calls. About me. Without me.”

“I know.”

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Agree with me like it costs you nothing,” you snap. “Like you’re just waiting for me to finish talking so we can move on. It’s — “ You stop. Press your lips together. You’d promised yourself controlled. “It’s infuriating.”

John is quiet for a beat. Then, and you almost miss it: “Good.”

You blink. “Good?”

“You should be angry,” he says simply. “You’ve earned it. I’m not going to tell you that you haven’t.” He leans back slightly in the chair, and the shift makes him look different — not less certain, but less armoured. “I could sit here and list the ways I think we were right to come after you.” His voice doesn’t rise, doesn’t sharpen. It stays even, which is somehow worse. “I could make the argument that letting you run was the wrong call and we should have moved sooner.”

“Don’t,” you say, low and warning.

“I’m not making that argument,” he says. “I’m telling you I could. I’m choosing not to, because it doesn’t matter. You made a choice. You had reasons. They were yours.” He looks at you steadily. “What I want you to understand is that I also made choices. And they were mine. And I’ll own them.”

The room is very quiet.

Your wolf has been still through all of this — not hiding, not snarling — just listening, with that particular focused stillness she gets when something matters and she wants to hear it clearly.

“What do you want, John?” you ask. Not the way you’d asked Simon, bracing for the word mine like a blow. Differently. Genuinely. Because John’s answer will be different and you need to know what it is.

He doesn’t answer immediately.

“I want you well,” he says at last. “Fed. Rested. Your arm healed. Your heat managed safely.” He pauses. “That’s what I want right now. Tonight. This week.”

“And after that?”

“After that,” he says, “I want you to stop running because you want to. Not because you can’t.”

The distinction is so careful it makes your chest ache.

“You think there’s a version of this,” you say slowly, “where I just… choose to stay?”

“I think there’s a version of this where you stop deciding what you want based on what you’re afraid of,” he says. “That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“You ran because you were scared of what we wanted,” he says. “Not because you didn’t want it.”

The words land with the quiet precision of everything John Price says, and you feel the truth of them like pressure behind your sternum — not painful, just present. Inescapable. You open your mouth and close it again.

“That’s a very convenient interpretation,” you say finally.

“It’s the correct one.”

“You’re very sure of yourself.”

“About most things,” he agrees. “About you, specifically? Yes.”

You look at him for a long moment. The lamp casts warm light across the side of his face, catching the grey at his temples, the lines around his eyes that weren’t there two years ago. He looks like a man who has been doing hard things for a long time and has simply decided to keep doing them.

“The others,” you say, shifting ground because you need to. “Kyle and Johnny. If I asked them right now — asked them directly — what would they say?”

John considers this. “Kyle would tell you he doesn’t make promises he’s not certain he can keep. That the reason he didn’t agree wasn’t because he disagrees — it’s because he won’t say something to you that he can’t stand behind completely.”

“And Johnny?”

Something crosses John’s face. Brief. Complicated. “Johnny would tell you he’s sorry. That’s where he is right now. He’d spend twenty minutes apologising before he got to anything else.”

You think about the look on Johnny’s face in the jeep. The rawness of it.

“He was on the platform,” you say. “At the station. I saw him.”

“Yes.”

“He was the one I hit with the door.”

A pause. “Also yes.”

Something that might be a laugh tries to escape you. You press it down. “He went down hard.”

“He has a bruise the size of a dinner plate,” John says, and there’s the faintest warmth in his voice. “He hasn’t complained about it once.”

The almost-laugh wins this time — small, involuntary, gone almost before it starts. You press your hand over your mouth and John watches you do it with an expression you can’t quite read, something between relief and want and something older than both.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you warn, dropping your hand.

“Like what?” he asks, genuinely.

You don’t have a good answer for that. You look away instead, toward the window, the curtains drawn against the dark. The base is quieter now. Middle of the night, probably. You’ve lost track of time the way you do when exhaustion and adrenaline take turns at the wheel.

“I want things too,” you say, to the curtains. “That’s not — “ You stop. Start again. “I’m not made of stone. I know that’s what it probably looks like from your end. Someone who just runs and fights and won’t be touched. But I had a life at that base before I overheard you. I had — “ Your throat tightens unexpectedly. “I liked my job. I liked the people. I liked when Simon would come through reception and pretend he needed something from admin when he clearly just wanted to be annoying for five minutes. I liked that Kyle always knew when I hadn’t eaten and would leave something on my desk without making a thing of it. I liked — “

You stop.

John is very still.

“I liked all of it,” you say quietly. “I just also knew what it was going to cost me.”

“What did you think it was going to cost you?” he asks, voice low.

“Everything,” you say simply. “Being an omega in a pack means being the omega. The one who holds the centre. The one who soothes and steadies and softens. The one who gives up what she wants so everyone else can have what they need.” You look back at him. “I watched my mother do it my whole life. I watched her get smaller and smaller until she was just the shape the pack needed her to be. She was unhappy. She’d tell you she wasn’t unhappy.” You hold his gaze. “But she wasn’t her anymore.”

John is quiet for a long time.

When he speaks, his voice is careful in a way that tells you he’s thought about this — not just now, but before. That this isn’t a new consideration.

“Is that what you think we want from you?” he asks.

“It’s what packs want from omegas.”

“It’s what some packs want,” he says. “From some omegas.” He leans forward slightly, not crowding, just present. “You threw a tin of soup at Simon’s head.”

“I threw it at the shelf. He caught it.”

“You knocked Johnny MacTavish — who has reflexes that should be illegal — flat on his back with a door.”

“He was in the way.”

“You climbed a tree,” John says, “and negotiated terms from thirty feet up while four alphas stood underneath you, and you won.” He lets that sit. “Does that sound like a woman a pack could make small?”

You don’t answer.

“We’ve known you for two years,” he continues. “We knew what you were from the first week. Not just your designation. You.” He says it simply, without embellishment, like it’s the most straightforward thing in the world. “No one who has spent five minutes with you has ever thought you were the kind of omega who holds the centre quietly.”

“Then what kind do you think I am?”

“The kind,” he says, “who is the centre. Whether she means to be or not. And who certainly is not small.”

The room is very quiet.

Your wolf makes a sound deep in your chest — not words, not a push toward anything — just a low, resonant acknowledgement, like something has been said correctly for the first time in a long while.

You hate it.

You hate it because it feels true and you’d spent three months in a cold cottage specifically to get away from things feeling true about them.

“This doesn’t change anything,” you say.

“I know.”

“I still—” You stop. “The terms still stand.”

“They stand,” he confirms.

“And you’re still going to try to convince me to stay.”

“Yes,” he says, without a flicker of apology. “I am.”

“By being reasonable and patient and saying things that make sense.”

“Mostly,” he agrees, and there’s the ghost of something at the corner of his mouth again. “Simon will probably undermine the effort at least twice a week.”

This time you can’t stop it. The laugh comes out short and tired and real, and John watches it happen with an expression that makes your chest do something complicated.

“Go to sleep,” he says, standing slowly. He picks up the chair and moves it back to the desk without being asked. “You’ve been awake too long.”

“I’m not tired,” you say, which is the most obvious lie you’ve told all week.

“I know,” he says, with the particular patience of a man who has learned not to argue about things that will resolve themselves.

He moves toward the door.

“John.”

He pauses, hand on the frame.

You look at him across the small room, in the warm lamplight, with your wolf quiet and aching against your ribs and three months of cold and running and surviving sitting in the hollows of your cheeks and the bones of your wrists.

“The thing my mother never had,” you say carefully. “Was someone who asked.”

John turns just enough to look at you.

“So ask,” you say. “If you want things. Ask me. Don’t plan around me. Don’t anticipate and position and manoeuvre.” Your voice is steady. “Ask.”

He looks at you for a long moment.

“Alright,” he says quietly. “I will.”

He leaves the door open a crack.

You lie back against the pillow and stare at the ceiling and press your palm flat over the place where your wolf has curled herself, warm and watchful and no longer hiding.

You don’t sleep for a long time.

But when you do, you don’t dream of running.

Your wolf lifts her nose toward it.

Eat, she says, not in words but in that low insistent press beneath your ribs.

"I know," you mutter.

You reach for the bread first. Tear a piece off. Chew slowly. The flavour hits you so hard your eyes sting and you have to look at the ceiling for a moment, jaw working, blinking hard.

Three months of rice and instant noodles.

You eat the rest without stopping.

By the time the bowl is empty your hands have stopped shaking, a warmth spreading through you that has nothing to do with the alphas on the other side of that door. Just food. Just your body remembering what it felt like to be fed.

You set the bowl down and lie back carefully, staring at the ceiling.

The base hums around you. Distant sounds, boots on floors somewhere, the low murmur of voices, the mechanical sigh of a building that never fully sleeps. You listen to it and map the exits out of habit. Corridor. Stairwell. Window two floors up, drop manageable if necessary. Supply vehicles leave at 0500.

Old instincts.

Your wolf makes a tired, disapproving sound.

"I know," you say again, softer this time.

She doesn't push. She just curls tighter against your ribs — not hiding this time, not buried — but resting. Pressed close like she's trying to share heat through the hollow spaces your three months in the cold left behind.

It aches.

You press your palm flat against your sternum and breathe.

The scar on your arm pulls faintly where the medic cleaned it. The bruise on your hip throbs low and dull. Your body is presenting its bill, the way it always does when the adrenaline finally runs dry and there's nothing left to outrun.

You think about what the medic said.

Three missed heats. The next one will feel like being torn apart.

Your wolf presses closer at that, and the ache deepens — not fear, not quite — but something old and animal that your rational mind doesn't have good language for. She's been patient. She's been buried and silent and carrying this alongside you for six months without complaint.

The next one won't be patient.

You close your eyes.

On the other side of the door, you know at least one of them is awake. You can feel it — that faint pressure of presence, careful not to push, careful not to crowd. Keeping watch without making it a cage.

John. Probably John.

Your wolf exhales, long and slow, through your whole chest.

Stop, you tell her quietly. That's not an argument.

She doesn't agree. She doesn't disagree. She just stays close, tired and aching and waiting, and lets you lie there on a real mattress in a room with a lock only you control, and think about what free actually means.

When you sleep this time, there are no dreams.

Just rest. Deep and still and dark. The kind your body has been owed for months.

And when you wake you’re not sure now long you slept only that you feel sick. Your stomach makes a loud noise. You think that was supposed to be the warning because one second you're lying still, the next your stomach clenches hard enough to steal your breath and your feet are hitting the floor before your brain catches up. You make it to the bathroom with seconds to spare, knees cracking against tile, hands gripping the cold porcelain.

Everything comes back up.

All of it. The soup, the bread, every careful mouthful you'd let yourself enjoy — gone. Your body rejects it violently, like it's forgotten how to hold food down after months of barely enough. Your eyes water. Your ribs ache with the force of it. You stay there hunched over the bowl long after your stomach has emptied itself, shaking, breathing in ragged pulls.

Too fast, your wolf says faintly. Too much. Too fast.

"I know," you rasp, and it comes out wrecked and small and nothing like the voice you used to bare your teeth at Simon Riley earlier.

The cold of the tile seeps into your knees. You press your forehead against the back of your hand on the rim of the bowl and just breathe. In. Out. Your whole body is trembling finely, the kind that comes from deep exhaustion and not enough muscle left to hold it together.

You hear the knock before you register that the sound outside was a door.

Quiet. Careful. Three knocks.

"I heard." John's voice, low and even, from the other side of the bathroom door. Not the room door. He's inside the room already, must have come in when you bolted for the bathroom. "Not asking to come in. Just letting you know I'm here."

You laugh once, broken, into the bowl. "Fantastic."

A pause. "Done?"

You assess your stomach cautiously. It clenches once, twice, then settles into a hollow miserable ache. "Yeah."

"Can you stand?"

You test the idea. Your legs don't feel entirely real. "Give me a minute."

He gives you five without saying another word.

You flush the toilet, sit back on your heels, and stare at the wall for a long moment. The trembling is easing. Your mouth tastes awful. There's a small cabinet above the sink and you drag yourself upright using the basin to hold you, find toothpaste and a wrapped disposable brush sitting on the shelf like someone anticipated this, and you scrub your mouth until the taste is gone and your reflection looks slightly less like a ghost.

Slightly.

You rinse. Grip the basin. Exhale.

Then you open the door.

John is sitting on the floor beside it, back against the wall, forearms resting on his knees. Not standing over you. Not hovering at the threshold ready to catch you. Just — sitting on the floor in the corridor of a military base at god knows what hour, waiting.

He looks up at you. Takes you in without comment.

"Sit down before you fall down," he says.

You want to argue. Your legs make the decision for you and you slide down the wall until you're sitting on the floor too, a careful foot of space between you, back against the cool plaster.

Silence settles.

"Ate too fast," you mutter eventually.

"Yes." He nods like he knew it would happen.

You tip your head back against the wall and close your eyes. Your stomach is empty and aching and your whole body feels wrung out, but the violent urgency has passed and left something exhausted and quiet in its place.

"Your stomach shrank," John says after a moment. "Three months of not enough. You'll need small amounts. Often. Not a full bowl in one go."

"Noted," you say, and you mean it to sound dismissive but it just sounds tired.

Another silence. Easier this time.

"There's water on the nightstand," he says. "Sip it. Don't drink it."

You don't move yet. Your legs aren't ready. "In a minute."

John nods and doesn't push.

Somewhere down the corridor a door opens and closes. The base hums its mechanical hum. You sit on the floor in the low light with John Price six inches away and your wolf pressed quietly against your ribs, not snarling, not retreating.

Just breathing.

"I hate this," you say quietly. Not to him, not really. Just to the air.

"I know," he replies.

"I was fine."

A long pause before he answers. "You were surviving."

Your jaw tightens. "Same thing."

"No," he says softly. "It isn't."

You don't have the energy to fight that right now. You file it away instead, tuck it somewhere you can take it apart later when you're not sitting on a bathroom floor shaking.

Eventually you manage to stand.

John rises with you — not touching, not reaching — just present in case your legs disagree with your intentions. They don't. Barely.

You make it to the bed. Sit down. Reach for the water on the nightstand and sip it slowly, the way he said.

John moves toward the door. "Small portions," he says quietly, hand on the frame. "I'll have the kitchen send something plain. Toast. Rice. Easy."

You look at him. In the low lamp light he looks tired too — not the exhaustion you're carrying, but something older. Something that's been there a long time.

"You didn't have to sit on the floor," you say.

He meets your eyes. "I know."

He leaves the door open a crack.

Your wolf watches the space he occupied on the floor for a long moment.

Then she sighs, low and deep, and lets you drink your water in peace.

* * *

For the rest of the week, you can barely move. Your body too heavy. Too tired. You're tired before eating. After eating. After drinking. After talking. After breathing. Everything is too much.

They help you. John doesn't push. But Simon does. Johnny does. And even Kyle does too.

Simon holds the spoon of strawberry jelly at your lips and you open your mouth because it's easier than arguing and the jelly is cold and sweet and your body wants it even if your pride doesn't.

Simon's expression is carefully neutral. Focused. Like feeding you is a military operation and he will not fail it.

It would almost be funny under different circumstances.

You swallow. Let him load the spoon again. And somewhere between the second and third mouthful the thought slides in quiet and inevitable, the way the most dangerous thoughts always do.

Only John agreed.

You stop.

Simon notices immediately, spoon pausing. "What?"

You don't answer him. You're too busy turning it over, examining it from every angle the way you used to examine escape routes — methodically, without flinching from what you find.

John agreed. John said your terms. No force. No marks. You choose.

Simon said nothing. Kyle said nothing. Johnny said nothing.

They just — followed. Came along. Moved with you from the forest to the jeep to the plane to the med bay to this room, feeding you jelly and sitting close and watching you sleep, and not one of them made any promise at all.

Your wolf goes very still inside you.

"Hey." Simon's voice has dropped, the edge gone out of it, replaced by something rougher and more honest. He's watching your face. "Where'd you go?"

Your eyes move to his slowly.

He's close. Closer than he usually lets himself get, careful the way all of them have been careful, giving you space you didn't have to fight for. The spoon is still in his hand. There's a small streak of red jelly on his thumb.

"You didn't agree," you whisper.

Something moves across his face. Not guilt exactly. Not defiance. Something complicated that he doesn't bother hiding.

"No," he says. "I didn't."

The honesty of it knocks the air out of you slightly.

"Kyle didn't," you continue, voice level. "Johnny didn't."

Simon sets the spoon down in the jelly jar and sits back, forearms on his knees, eyes on yours. "No."

"So what exactly —" your voice stays steady through effort "— am I agreeing to here."

Simon is quiet for a moment. The base hums around you. Down the hall you can hear Kyle's voice, low, talking to someone on the phone. Johnny's boots somewhere further away.

"John means what he says," Simon says finally. "He always does. That's not nothing."

"That's not an answer."

"No." He exhales slowly. "It's not."

You study him. The set of his jaw. The way his hands hang loose between his knees, not reaching, not crowding — but not retreating either. Simon Riley has never once in his life pretended to be something he isn't. It's terrifying and it's also the only thing about him you've ever trusted.

"Then what are you?" you ask quietly. "If you didn't agree to my terms."

He meets your gaze without flinching.

"Honest," he says. "About what I want."

Your chest tightens. Your wolf presses forward, not with want, not with submission, but with that sharp animal attention she gives things she needs to understand before she can decide whether to run from them.

"And what do you want?" you ask, even though part of you already knows and hates that you know.

Simon's jaw works. When he answers his voice is low and rough and completely without apology.

"You. Safe. Fed. Here." A pause. "Mine."

The word lands between you like a stone in still water.

"That's not your choice," you say.

"I know," he says. And the ache in it is genuine enough that your throat tightens against your will. "Doesn't change what I want."

You look at him for a long moment.

Then you reach out, pick up the jelly jar yourself, load the spoon, and eat it without his help.

Simon watches you do it.

Something in his expression shifts — not defeat, not anger. Something quieter. Almost like respect.

You finish the spoon and set it down.

"I need to talk to John," you say.

Simon nods once and stands without argument, already moving toward the door.

He pauses in the frame.

"For what it's worth," he says quietly, not turning around, "none of us stopped looking. Not for a single day."

He leaves before you can decide what to do with that.

Your wolf presses her nose against your ribs and says nothing at all.