I feel it more than see it — the lunge arrested, the momentum dying. He's over me. I can feel the heat of him, hear the growl still running in his chest, and I drag air back into my lungs and look up at him.
His eyes are yellow and wild and somewhere inside them, fighting to the surface, is RJ.
I growl.
It comes from somewhere below my sternum — the alpha in me, the thing that has no patience for the wolf's panic, the register that saysenoughin a language that bypasses thought entirely. It fills the room. I feel it in the floor under my back.
RJ flinches.
The growl keeps coming. I pull myself up onto one elbow — ribs protesting everything — and I don't stop, I don't look away, I hold his eyes and I hold the sound and I watch him come back.
It takes longer than it should. He fights it — the wolf fighting the pull of the alpha, the frenzy not wanting to let go. But it lets go. Slowly, terribly, in stages. The yellow fading. The growl shifting register from threat to something else. His whole body shaking with the effort of coming back.
He shifts.
The man lands on his hands and knees over me, breathing in ragged pulls. His arms are shaking. He's looking at his own hands like they belong to someone else.
I reach up and put my hands on his face.
He goes still.
"I've got you," I say. "RJ. I've got you."
He makes a sound I've never heard from him. Not a word. Something from further down than words — the sound of a person understanding what they've done while they're still in the body that did it. His head drops. His forehead almost touching mine.
"Sorry," he says. Barely audible. "Sorry — sorry—"
Not to me. To the room. To Sven on the floor across the space. The apology of a man who has come back to himself in the middle of what he's done and is staying with it rather than running from it.
"I know," I say. "Stay with me."
He collapses into me.
The full weight of him, which is considerable. My ribs remind me immediately and I breathe through it and hold on anyway — arms around him, one hand in his hair, my face pressed against the side of his head. His breathing is ragged and too fast and then it isn't. Slowly, under my hands, the shaking eases. The tension that has been running through him for weeks, built up and braced and held — it doesn't leave, but it shifts. Like something that has been clenched so long it forgot how to open, finding a crack.
He's here. He's present. He came back.
I press my face into his hair and hold on and let the ribs scream.
***
Then the room arrives.
Staff pour in — three, four, more behind them. Gavin is there, face controlled, assessing. Jake is in the corner, mountain-still, watching everything with the eyes of someone who has seen a version of this before and knows what it costs. Jim is closer than I realized — two feet away, on his feet, present.
Dalton is against the far wall where I left him. He's watching me hold RJ and his jaw is set and his hands are loose at his sides and there's something in his face — not the professional mask.
"Alex." Gavin's voice. Careful. "You need to let go."
"Not yet."
"Alex—"
"Not. Yet."
Nobody touches me. Sven is being attended to on the other side of the room — he's unconscious, two staff kneeling beside him, someone calling for medical. The sight of it costs me something I file for later.
RJ is still shaking in my arms. Less than before. Getting less.
