The growl that moves through me is low and involuntary.
"I'm okay," she says.
"I know." I put my hand over the brace, my palm against the damage. "I know you are."
Leo is in the doorway. He nods toward the corridor.
Jim.
He stops in the doorway and takes in the room — Alex, me, Leo — running his assessment. And I look at his face.
I thought I'd never see him again after he and Jake ran away from the medical center. I can clearly picture his tawny wolf.
I breathe.
His eyes find mine.
Something passes between us that doesn't need language. Mountain history. Lost time. All of it acknowledged and set down in a single look.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey," he says.
That's enough. That's four years of everything in two words.
He comes in.
Alex is watching us. I can feel her attention moving between me and Jim, reading the thing that passes between two people who survived something together. She reaches out and takes Jim's hand.
He looks down at it. Then at her. His face going very careful and very still — the Jim-stillness, the one that means something matters.
"Come here," she says.
He sits on the other side of her. I stay where I am. Leo moves from the doorway to the far end of the bed, quiet, present. She turns toward Jim. He's watching her with the not-looking-away quality Leo described — the way Jim sees people, all the way through, nothing hidden from it. I watch her register being seen like that. Watch something in her settle.
He touches her face. Careful. One hand.
She looks at me over Jim's shoulder.
I've spent weeks following protocol. Maintaining distance. Telling myself what was necessary. Looking at her now — the brace on her ribs, the low light catching her face, Jim's hand against her jaw and her eyes finding mine — I understand that the distance was never sustainable. It was just what I could manage at the time.
I'm done managing.
I put my arm around both of them.
The bond fires the instant my skin is against them both — I feel it, the circuit completing, Jim's bond with her blazing intoexistence through the contact of all three of us. She gasps. Jim goes completely still. His eyes find mine over her shoulder.
I nod once.
He kisses her.
Slow. That's Jim. Even with the bond just opened and running bright between them, he takes his time. His mouth on hers, patient, thorough, learning her the way he learns everything — like he's already thought about it three times and has decided this is exactly what he was going to do.
She makes a sound against his mouth.
My arm tightens around them both. I press my face against her hair and breathe and feel the bond — all of it, the full constellation, every arc running through her and through me and now through Jim — and something in my chest does what it does when things are the way they're supposed to be.
Right. That's the word. This is right.
