For a moment, I don’t know where I am. The ceiling above me is familiar, rough timber beams I’ve stared at a thousand times, but it takes several seconds for my brain to connect them to my cabin, my bed, the faded quilt my mother made before she died. I’m lying on my back with my arms at my sides, still wearing the jeans I pulled on somewhere between the treeline and my front door. My shirt is gone. The bandages aren’t.
I turn my head and look at the gauze wrapped around my torso. Neat, careful work, applied with the steady hands that come from training rather thanpanic. The tape is medical grade, cut to precise lengths and placed at even intervals. Whoever did this knew what they were doing.
I remember who did this.
The memories surface in pieces, waterlogged at the edges but sharp where it matters. The ground beneath me is cold and damp. Pain, the dull throb of wounds already beginning to close. A voice, female, low and calm, talking steadily, the way someone talks to a frightened animal.
I remember her hands. Small and careful against my fur, pressing gauze to the worst of the gashes with a pressure that was firm without being rough. She’d smelled of antiseptic, instant coffee, and underneath both, something clean and sharp that made my wolf go still. Not calming, exactly. Arresting.
I remember her face. Brown eyes, serious and focused, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Dark hair pulled back in a hasty knot, coming loose on one side. She’d been frightened. I could smell that too, the sharp note of adrenaline cutting through everything else. But she’d stayed. She’d been afraid of me, and she’d stayed anyway, and that single fact lodges in my chest like something I’ll never be able to shift.
I remember her expression when I opened myeyes. The way her breath caught. The way she didn’t look away.
And I remember warmth. Not from her hands, though those were warm too. Something deeper, something that started where her fingers met my fur and radiated inward until it found a part of me I didn’t know was there. My wolf had recognised it instantly, settled into it the way you settle into a chair you’ve sat in a thousand times.Home, he’d thought, and the word had made no sense at all.
It makes sense now.
I sit up slowly, testing. The wounds protest—a dull, grinding ache that sayslie back down, you stupid bastard—but they’re manageable. Pink lines of new tissue where the rogue’s claws tore through muscle hours ago. By tomorrow, they’ll be faint scars. By the day after, nothing. My body does what it’s always done, knitting itself back together with an efficiency that would give any human doctor nightmares.
The bandages, though. I leave those where they are.
I swing my legs off the bed and sit there for a while, elbows on my knees, staring at the floorboards. My wolf is quiet. Not sleeping, not restless, just settled. Content in a way I’ve never felt from him before. The constant low-grade agitation I’ve carried for years, the itch under my skin that no amount of running orfighting or avoiding my father’s calls could scratch, has simply stopped.
I know why.
Mate.
Fuck.
The word lands like a stone in still water, and the implications spread outward in rings I can’t stop.
I close my eyes and let it sit there.
She’s the new vet. She has to be. The whole village has been talking about her for a week: the city woman who moved into Ivy Cottage and set up a surgery in the extension. I’ve heard the gossip without paying attention, the way I hear most things that don’t directly concern me or the pack. Now I wish I’d listened more carefully.
I don’t know her name.
My mate was kneeling beside me in the forest, hands steady and voice calm, treating wounds that should have killed me, and I don’t know her name. The thought is absurd and painful in equal measure.
My wolf doesn’t care about her name. My wolf cares that she smelled like safety, touched us with kindness, and didn’t run when she should have. My wolf is already certain, already committed, already reshaping everything around this woman I’ve met once while unconscious and bleeding.
My human brain is not so easily persuaded.
A mate means everything I’ve spent the last decade running from. It means settling down, stepping up, and taking responsibility. It means my father will expect me to finally accept the role I was born into, because a mated wolf is a stable wolf, and a stable wolf is a wolf who can lead. Chris Mistwood has been waiting for exactly this since the day I first refused Alpha training at seventeen.
The thought makes my jaw clench.
I stand, move to the kitchen, fill the kettle. The motions are automatic, muscle memory carrying me through the mundane ritual of making tea while my mind turns the problem over and over. Outside the window, the forest is bright with mid-morning sun. I’ve been unconscious for hours.
My phone is on the kitchen counter where I left it before last night’s patrol. Three missed calls from Rebecca. Two texts.
The first:Heard you dealt with the rogues this morning. Everything okay?
The second, sent an hour later:Roan. Answer your phone, or I’m coming over there.
Rebecca doesn’t make idle threats. I text back before she can follow through.
Fine. Just needed some rest.
