And beneath that, through the bond, I felt something else.
A flicker. Faint and distant and barely there.
The feral wolf, unconscious but not gone. His presence in my mind like a candle flame in a vast darkness.
Still alive.
Still reachable.
Hold on, I thought at him.Just hold on. We're going to find you.
Then the darkness swallowed me whole.
I woke to warmth and pain.
The warmth was James—his body wrapped around mine, heat bleeding through layers of fabric and thermal blankets. The pain was everything else. My hand throbbed with every heartbeat, a deep, insistent ache that promised infection if we didn’t deal with it properly soon.
“Hey.” James’s voice was soft, close to my ear. “You’re back.”
“How long?”
“Maybe twenty minutes. Not long.” His arms tightened around me. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“Sorry.” I tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. The world tilted, my stomach lurched, and I squeezed my eyes shut against the nausea. “The wolf. Is he—”
“Still unconscious. I moved him into the cave, got the tent set up around us. The storm’s here.”
I could hear it now—the howl of wind beyond the rock walls, the hiss of snow driven hard against stone. We were trapped. Nowhere to go until the weather passed.
I forced my eyes open and took stock.
James had done well. The tent was pitched inside the cave, creating a pocket of relative warmth. The unconscious wolf lay beside us, his pale form rising and falling with shallow breaths.
James hesitated. Through the bond, I felt it—not fear, not anger. Vigilance. The kind that didn’t sleep. He glanced toward the wolf, then back to me. His jaw was tight, eyes alert even as his hands stayed gentle, helping me sit up.
“You pulled him into the tent,” I said. “You didn’t have to.”
His breath left him slowly. “Yeah. I did.”
I met his gaze. “Thank you. For helping him. For… accepting this.”
Something in his expression shifted—not surrender, not doubt. Resolve.
“The bond goes both ways,” he said. “I feel what you feel when you look at him. Even if I can’t see it yet.” His eyes flicked back to the wolf, calculating. Protective. “I don’t trust him. Not unconscious. Not feral. I’m staying awake.”
A beat.
“But I want him healed,” he added. “Because when he heals, you heal. And I won’t pretend otherwise.”
Warmth flooded the bond—steady, anchored, unshaken.
“You don’t have to be okay with this,” I said softly.
“I am.” His answer was immediate. Certain. “I don’t have to understand everything to choose you.”
The wind screamed outside the cave, rattling stone and canvas.
James shifted, positioning himself subtly between me and the wolf without making a show of it. One hand stayed on my arm. The other rested near his pack.
