I kneel.
My hands are steady. I don't know why. A wolf the size of a small horse is two feet from my face and by every measure I should be shaking.
I put my hand out. Palm up. Let him come to me.
He does. One step. Two. His nose presses into my palm — wet, warm, the breath huffing against my skin. His nostrils flare as he takes my scent and the trembling eases. His ears, flat against his skull, lift. His tail drops to neutral.
He knows me. The wolf knows me the same way the boy does. The bond doesn't care about the shape.
I move my hand to the side of his face. Fingers in the thick fur behind his ear. He leans into it. His eyes close. The whine becomes something else — a low rumble that vibrates through his skull into my hand and up my arm and settles in my chest.
"There you go," I murmur. "You're okay. You're still you."
His head drops into my lap. Heavy. I'm kneeling on frozen ground with a wolf's head in my lap and my fingers in his fur and the bond between us is — quiet. For the first time since the fence, it isn't pulling or burning or demanding. It's settled. Resting. Like this is what it wanted all along. Not the urgency or the heat. Just this. Contact. Presence. My hand in his fur and his weight against me.
Something flickers behind my eyes.
A memory fragment. Half a second. Hands — my hands? — and claws. Dark, curved, pushing through the fingertips. The pressure of something coming through.
Gone. Leo's head is in my lap. The frozen ground soaking through my pants. Underneath the warm, present moment, the fragments are getting sharper.
Leo stirs. His body shifts — the wolf form loosening, the edges blurring. The change back is slower. Gentler. Fur receding. Limbs lengthening. The human face surfacing through the animal like someone emerging from water.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." His voice is raw. Shredded. But there. "I came back."
"You came back."
He curls into me. Shaking — from the shift, from the effort of being unmade and remade. I pull my jacket off. Put it over him.
Stone appears with a blanket. He drapes it over Leo without a word. Then he stands back and watches. The look on his face isn't professional observation. It's recognition. A man who has been the wolf on the ground. Who knows what it costs.
He pulls out his phone. Types something. Brief, deliberate.
"What are you logging?"
"Evidence," he says. "For Lumi's bonding protocol. The Board needs to see that the bond produces stability." He pockets the phone. Looks at me. Something that isn't staff and isn't pack brother. Something simpler. Hope. "RJ's breach. Now this. That's a pattern. Patterns are what they listen to."
Leo's hand finds mine under the blanket. Grips. His skin is cooling. His heartbeat is slowing. The wolf is quiet inside him and the bond hums — warm, steady, settled.
I hold his hand and feel the cold ground under my knees and the weight of him against me.
Two stabilization events. Two mates who came through the worst of it because I was there.
And somewhere in the fragments — in the flashes that keep getting clearer, the hands and the claws and the shape — a version of me I haven't met yet. The version that's coming whether the Board approves or not.
I hold Leo's hand under the blanket.
Chapter twenty-four
The evaluation room is in the admin building. Larger than Gavin's office, windowless, a long table at the front with chairs behind it and a single chair in the center of the floor. No desk. No table. Nothing to put your hands on. Just a seat in the middle of an empty space, designed to make the person sitting in it feel exactly as exposed as they are.
I've been in rooms like this before. Courtrooms. Placement hearings where adults sat behind tables and decided where to put the girl with the dead boy on her record. The furniture changes. The feeling doesn't.
Sven walks me in. He's wearing a collared shirt under the usual jacket. He cleaned up. For this. The detail does something to my chest that I don't want to examine.
Five people behind the table.
