Then I let go.
And the fire, finally, began to cool.
CHAPTER 2
Griff Madoc
The med bay smelled like bleach and blood.
It wasn’t a real infirmary. It was a converted storage room inside a Watch outpost, all hard cots, steel tables, and curtained partitions that didn’t hide sound worth a damn. It was the kind of place built for stitching soldiers back together just enough to send them back out again.
Tamsin didn’t belong here.
She belonged under open sky by the warm comfort of a campfire with her knife sheathed at her thigh. She belonged in places where she could breathe.
Instead, she lay motionless on a narrow cot with a thin blanket pulled up to her waist, her skin still too pale, her lips a little too dry. A sheen of sweat clung to her temples, but it wasn’t the violent fever-sweat from before.
She hadn’t woken since we’d all marked her.
It had been hours. It felt like days.
Eamon said it was normal. That her body needed sleep the way the starving needed food. That the two venoms—lycan and wolf—had torn her to pieces from the inside out and now the pieces had to knit back together.
I believed him.
Mostly.
But my wolf didn’t do ‘mostly.’
My wolf didmine.
I sat in the chair beside her cot, elbows on my knees, hands clasped so tight my knuckles ached. I’d been in this same position long enough to memorize every freckle on her face, every faint scar she’d collected over the years, every twitch of her lashes from whatever dream she was trapped in that I couldn’t save her from.
The only sound now was her soft breath and the distant echo of boots in the corridor outside. Every time those boots got too close, my wolf rose like a snarl in my chest.
I didn’t trust this place.
I didn’t trust the people who ran it.
And I didn’t trust the man who’d dragged her into it.
Elias Kade leaned against the far wall, arms crossed over his chest like he’d been carved out of stone.
He was fifteen years older than me, give or take. His hair was tinged with gray at the temples. There was dried blood on his knuckles that didn’t belong to him.
I didn’t know much about him other than the fact that he was a natural-born wolf hiding inside the Watch. A man raised among people who would have put a bullet between his eyes if they’d known what he was. He was a wolf who’d spent his whole life pretending to be human while training human killers to hunt and murder other wolves. He should be my enemy.
Nox sat on the other side of the partition, sharpening a blade with lazy, quiet patience. He didn’t look up often, but I could feel his attention like a pressure point. There was nothing relaxed about him, no matter how still he seemed.
Nox Byrne had always been like that. He’d walked into our lives like a shadow that decided it wanted a pack, and none of us had been stupid enough to ask too many questions about what he’d done before.
There were lines you didn’t cross with men like Nox.
Bishop stood near the sink, washing his hands with a methodical thoroughness. He was lean with icy blond hair and pale blue eyes. He had never raised his voice around us. Never needed to. When he did speak, it was with the kind of quiet certainty that made other men listen.
Eamon moved between them all like a careful tide, checking supplies, wiping sweat from Tamsin’s brow with a cloth he’d boiled twice because he didn’t trust the Watch’s idea of clean. He was calm in the way only doctors could be, like he’d already accepted the worst and decided to fight it anyway.
Eamon Tierney had once been the sort of man London would have praised. Handsome in a polished way, educated, connected, with access to high society and the kind of credibility that opened doors.
