He snorted. “Well, kind of. But my lair is a cabin and it’s much nicer than this.”
“Does it have bones in it?”
“No bones.”
“What about clean blankets?”
“The blankets are fine.” A pause. “I even have an espresso machine.”
“You mentioned that.” I pressed my face into the side of his neck for a moment, feeling the warmth of his skin and the steady pulse beneath it. “Silas. Thank you.”
His grip on my thighs tightened, just slightly. He didn’t say anything. With him, I was beginning to understand, not-saying was its own kind of saying.
* * *
The cabin sat in a clearing near the crown of a long ridge, backed by old-growth ponderosa that closed around it on three sides. It was not large but not small either, solid, built from timber and local stone with a deep-pitched roof designed for serious snow load and a covered porch that ran the full width of the front. He set me down on the porch steps and reached past me to push open the door.
“Go inside. Sit down.”
“I’m fine?—”
“You have a gash on your side that I haven’t looked at yet, and you’ve been through some serious shit today.” He looked at me with an expression that meant he was right and knew it and was being patient about my resistance to acknowledging that. “Inside, Katie.”
I went inside.
The cabin interior was warm and low-lit. The main room held a couch with worn leather cushions, a heavy timber table, and bookshelves along the wall. A kitchen opened to the left, the infamous espresso machine visible on the counter. The floors were wide-plank pine, smoothed by long use. The whole place had the same baseline scent I associated with Silas, worked deep into the walls and the furniture from many years of habitation.
It was, objectively, very nice. Better than Dana’s apartment, or my apartment, or anywhere I’d lived before really.
I sat on the couch because my legs had decided they were done for a while.
Silas came in behind me and went directly to a cabinet near the kitchen, returning with a first aid kit, a bowl of warm water, and a cloth. He studied the gash on my right side, then dipped the cloth and worked along the length of the gash with a thoroughness that stung and a steadiness that did not. His hands were careful. Not tentative, nothing Silas did was tentative, but careful.
“It’s already closing,” I said.
“I know.” He didn’t stop cleaning it. “Your body heals fast. It’ll be gone in a few days.”
“And the wolf?” I watched his face. “When will that come back?”
He looked up from the wound briefly. “It’ll come when it comes. The bond is settling. Your shift today was triggered by extreme circumstances. When it’s ready, your wolf will surface again.”
He pressed a clean dressing to my side and taped it into place, smoothing down the edges with his thumb. Then he sat back and looked at me, doing a full assessment, head to toe.
“The rest of you.”
“Is fine.”
“Katie.”
“Silas, I promise I am genuinely okay. What I’m not is warm or clean or—” My voice caught on something I hadn’t anticipated and I stopped and looked at the fire.
The quiet that followed held the weight of the last eleven days in it. The Sandias, and the feeling of being watched from the trees. Mark in his doorway with his shirt buttoned wrong. The hospital and the escape and the cabin and Dana’s apartment and themotel and the interrogation room and the cold stone floor of the lair with the skinwalker’s weight pinning me to the ground.
The fire cracked and settled.
Silas stood up. He crossed to the hearth and added a log, then straightened and looked at me. “I know, little one,” he said. “I’ll go and run you a bath.”
He disappeared down the hallway. I heard water running, and the sound of it made something in my chest ease.
