I could wait. I could go home and plan the perfect speech, find the right words, build a careful framework of explanation that won’t frighten her away. I could be strategic. I could be smart.
Or I could stop being a coward and go to the woman who needs me.
I walk up the path and knock on her door.
The silence that follows is long enough that I consider the possibility she’s not answering. Then I hear footsteps, slow and unsteady, and the door opens.
Phoebe looks terrible. There’s no kind way to say it.Her skin is pale and damp, her hair tangled, her eyes shadowed with the particular exhaustion of someone who hasn’t slept properly in days. She’s wearing an oversized jumper that swamps her frame, and her hands are trembling where they grip the door.
But it’s her expression that guts me. She looks at me. The relief on her face is so naked, so desperate, it cuts through every layer of self-protection I’ve built. My wolf whines inside my chest. Our mate is hurting. We let it happen.
“Hi,” she says. Her voice is rough. “I didn’t think you were coming.”
“I’m here.”
“I know. I can feel…” She stops. Frowns. Tries again. “I’m glad you’re here.”
I step inside without waiting for the invitation because the bond is screaming at me to close the distance, and because she looks like she might fall if she stands much longer. The cottage is cold. She hasn’t lit the fire. There’s a mug of untouched tea on the kitchen table and a notebook open to a page covered in handwriting so shaky it barely looks like hers.
“Phoebe.” I take her hands. They’re freezing, and the contact sends the bond flaring through us both. She gasps, and I feel her pulse jump beneath my fingers. “How long has this been going on?”
“Days. I don’t know. It’s getting worse.” She looksat our joined hands as if she can see the warmth flowing between them. “Roan, something is happening to me. I can hear things I shouldn’t be able to hear. I can smell things that don’t make sense. My hands won’t stop shaking, and I can’t sleep because the dreams…” She breaks off, and I watch her fight for the composure that’s been her armour since the day I met her. “I think I need help.”
“I know.” I tighten my grip on her hands because letting go isn’t something my body is willing to consider. “I know what’s happening to you. And I need to tell you something.”
She looks up at me with those brown eyes, exhausted and frightened and still so stubbornly intelligent that even now, even like this, I can see her filing information and looking for patterns.
“Okay,” she says. “Tell me.”
Chapter 16
The Truth
Phoebe
Roan is holding my hands,and the shaking has stopped.
Not gradually, not the slow fade of a tremor running its course. When his fingers closed around mine, the trembling cut out like a switch had been flipped. The cold that’s been sitting in my bones for days retreats to wherever it came from, replaced by heat that starts at the point of contact and radiates inward. Past my chest. Past my stomach. It settles at the base of my spine, keeps going, liquid and heavy, into the cradle of my hips. The sensation is so close to arousal that I almost pull my hands away because this is not the time. He is holding my wrists. I am falling apart.
A man’s touch shouldn’t have the power to override a physical symptom. That’s not how bodies work. That’s not how anything works.
But it is working, and I’m too exhausted to argue with results.
He guides me to the sofa. I let him, which tells me how bad things have got, because I don’t let people guide me anywhere. He sits beside me, close enough that our knees touch, and he doesn’t let go of my hands. The cottage is quiet around us, or what passes for quiet now that I can hear the mice in the walls and the boiler cycling and Maggie’s television through sixty centimetres of stone.
“You said you know what’s happening to me,” I say. “So tell me.”
He doesn’t answer immediately. He looks at our joined hands, and I watch something move through his expression that I can’t read. Fear, maybe. Or the particular tension of a man who’s about to say something he can’t take back.
“What I’m going to tell you is going to sound impossible,” he says. “And your first instinct is going to be to dismiss it, because you’re a scientist and what I’m about to say doesn’t fit inside any framework you’ve been trained to use. I need you to hear all of it before you react.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He takes a breath. “The wolf you found in the forest. The one you treated. Do you remember it?”
“Of course I remember it. I think about it every day.” The admission slips out before I can catch it, and I feel heat rise in my cheeks. “It was unprecedented. The size, the healing, the behaviour. I’ve never encountered anything like it.”
“You’re going to encounter it again in about thirty seconds.”
