"I've got him! Let go!"
I let go. Collapsed against the boulder, breathing hard, my injured hand a solid block of agony.
Below me, James was already repositioning the sled for the next section.
"You okay?" he called up.
"Fine." I wasn't. But we kept moving.
The terrain eased as we descended into the treeline. Snow shallower, ground more stable, the trees blocking the worst of the wind. My shoulders were rubbed raw from the harness. My hand had progressed from throbbing to genuinely frightening—the skin around the bandages hot and tight, red streaks starting to creep up my wrist.
We stopped to rest against a fallen log, and James finally said what we'd both been avoiding.
"What if he doesn't wake up?"
I'd been asking myself the same question for hours. Pushing it down, refusing to look at it directly.
"Then he doesn't wake up." The words came out flat. Tired. "And we deal with that when it happens."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have." I looked at the wolf—at my mate, whether he knew it or not. "I don't know if he's coming back. I don't know if there's anything left to come back. But I know we're not leaving him on this mountain."
James was quiet. Then he reached over and took my uninjured hand.
"When I shifted," he said slowly, "everything was chaos. Noise and fear and my body doing things I couldn't control. But through all of it, I could feel you. Like a rope in the dark. Something to hold onto."
"He's been feral for years. The rope might not be enough."
"Maybe not." He squeezed my hand. "But he has two ropes now. You and me both. That's got to count for something."
I wanted to believe him. Wasn't sure I could.
But I squeezed back, and we shouldered the harness, and we kept moving.
We hit the highway as the sun was setting.
Not the highway itself—a service road that paralleled it, rutted and overgrown but blessedly flat. The sled slid easier here, the packed snow giving way to frozen mud.
My phone found signal three miles later.
I stared at the single bar like it was a hallucination. Then I dialed Rae's number with shaking fingers.
She answered on the second ring.
"Lumi? Where the hell are you? Ivy called, she said you disappeared, Twilson is—"
"I need help." The words came out rough, exhaustion stripping away everything but essentials. "I'm on the north service road off the Denali Highway. Mile marker... I don't know. Somewhere past thirty. I have an injured hand and an unconscious feral wolf and I can't carry him any further."
Silence. Then: "A feral wolf."
"He's my mate." Saying it out loud made it real. Made it something I couldn't take back. "Mine and James's both. The bond completed when he attacked me. He's been unconscious ever since."
More silence. I could hear Rae processing—the sharp intake of breath, the questions she was choosing not to ask.
"Stay where you are," she said finally. "I'm coming. Two hours, maybe less."
"Rae—"
