My hand was wrapped in white bandages, already spotted with red.
And on my wrist, the mark.
Two arcs. Present. Real.
“I need to see it,” I said. “The bite. How bad is it?”
He hesitated again—this time I felt his reluctance clearly. He didn’t want to show me. Didn’t want to add to my distress. But he helped me sit up and gently unwound the bandages.
The damage was worse than I’d hoped. Better than I’d feared.
Deep punctures from the canines. Ragged tears where I’d struggled. The bleeding had mostly stopped, but the flesh was swollen and angry, already edging toward infection without proper treatment.
“I cleaned it as best I could,” James said. “Used the antiseptic, packed it with gauze. But it needs real medical attention.”
“Which we can’t get until the storm passes and we’re off this mountain.”
“Yeah.”
I stared at my hand—ruined flesh, clotted blood, the evidence of violence. Then I looked at the wolf who’d done it.
He was still out. His breathing steady but shallow, his body twitching now and then—dreams, maybe. Or aftershocks of the bond overload. He looked smaller lying there. Less like a threat.
“What happens now?” James asked.
I considered it. We were stuck on a frozen mountain with an unconscious feral wolf and injuries we couldn’t properly treat. The bond was complete, but his mind was still broken. Nothing had been solved—we’d just traded one set of problems for another.
But the bond was complete.
I could feel both of them now. James—bright, warm, steady beside me. The feral—distant, faint, but undeniably present. Two threads tying me to two people who were somehow, impossibly, mine.
“Now we wait,” I said. “For the storm to pass. For him to wake up. And then—”
“Then?”
I looked at the mark on my wrist. Two arcs.
“Then we find out if a completed bond is enough to bring him back.”
James was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled me closer, careful of my injured hand, and pressed a kiss to my temple.
“It will be,” he said. “It has to be.”
I wanted to believe him.
But I’d felt what was inside that wolf’s mind—the emptiness, the chaos, the vast darkness where a person used to be. The bond was a bridge, but bridges only worked if there was something on the other side.
I closed my eyes and reached through the bond—not to James, but to the other one.
The feral.
The stranger who was somehow my mate.
Nothing. Just emptiness. A faint flutter of unconscious presence, like a heartbeat heard through water.
Wake up,I thought.Come back. Let me find you.
No response.
