One unconscious alpha. Four dazed, starving animals who followed Cal like ghosts but startled at every sudden movement. An injured human, and a medical kit that hadn't been designed for this.
Neal walked among them, checking what he could without stopping their progress. "They're severely malnourished," he reported, his voice tight. "Dehydrated. Multiple untreated injuries. The gray one has what looks like an old break in his front leg that healed wrong." He shook his head. "It's a miracle they survived this long."
"They had him." I nodded toward the unconscious alpha. "He kept them alive."
"Barely."
"Barely is still alive."
Neal didn't argue.
The alpha was the problem.
Even sedated, he was dangerous. His body twitched and jerked, muscles spasming, jaws snapping at nothing. The drugs should have kept him under for hours, but something was fighting them — the same stubborn fury that had kept him alive all these years, refusing to surrender even to chemical oblivion.
"He's burning through the sedatives too fast," Neal said, checking the alpha's pupils. "His metabolism is... I've never seen anything like this. It's like his body is actively rejecting the drugs."
"Can you give him more?"
"Not without risking cardiac arrest." Neal's face was grim. "We need to move. Now. Before he wakes up."
We'd brought sleds for the extraction — lightweight, collapsible, designed for hauling gear over snow. They weren't meant for an unconscious wolf, but they'd have to do.
It took all four of us to load the alpha onto the largest sled. Even unconscious, he was massive — dead weight that strainedour muscles and made the sled's frame groan in protest. Cal helped where he could, using his wolf body to push and position, but the real work fell to me and James and Neal.
By the time we had him secured, my arms were shaking and my injured forearm was screaming.
"Ready?" James asked.
I looked at our strange caravan and the miles of frozen wilderness between us and anything resembling safety.
"No," I said honestly. "But let's go anyway."
The descent was brutal.
What had taken us hours to climb took twice as long going down. The sled was heavy and unwieldy, constantly threatening to tip or slide away from us. The wind picked up as afternoon faded toward evening, driving ice crystals into our faces, reducing visibility to almost nothing.
And underneath it all, the bond throbbed.
I could feel him. The alpha. Even unconscious, even sedated, his presence pulsed at the edge of my awareness like a wound that wouldn't close. Rage and pain and desperate denial, all of it bleeding through the connection we hadn't chosen.
He was dreaming.
I caught flashes of it through the bond — fragmented images, emotions without context. Snow and blood. The bear, massive and wrong, foam dripping from its jaws. Wolves running. A command given:go, run, don't look back.
Then darkness. Years of it. Cold and hunger and the slow forgetting of everything that had made him human.
But he hadn't forgotten everything.
Through the dreams, I felt it — the thing he'd held onto when everything else slipped away. Not a memory, exactly. A purpose.Protect the pack. Keep them alive. Don't let them die.
That was what had kept him going. The responsibility. The love, buried so deep under feral instinct that it was barely recognizable.
He'd sacrificed everything for them. His humanity. His sanity. His chance at ever being whole again.
And now I was trying to save him whether he wanted it or not.
I didn't know if that made me brave or cruel.
