I sat on the worn leather couch and let myself doze until Silas reappeared.
The bathroom was at the back of the cabin, small but functional, the walls the same stone as the exterior. The cast iron tub was deep, and he’d filled it with water hot enough that steam rose from the surface. He’d put something in the water too, something clean-smelling and relaxing.
I stood in the doorway and hesitated. He moved to take my arm.
“I can get in by myself,” I said.
“You’re going to let me help you anyway. Unless you’d like your bottom reddened first.”
I blushed, then let him take my arm. He guided me to the tub’s edge and steadied me as I stepped over the rim and lowered myself into the water.
The heat hit me everywhere at once and I relaxed into the tub with a moan.
“Good?” he asked.
“Extremely.”
He sat on the edge of the tub and reached for the cloth hanging on the rail, then moved it through the water and began working it along my arm, from the wrist upward, cleaning the dried blood from the motel room fight and the mountain and wherever else I’d collected it.
He worked without hurry. The cloth moved over my shoulders and down my back and along my arms, slow and thorough, and the heat of the water and the steadiness of his hands and the smell of the pine oil combined into something that made the muscles in my back surrender one by one, releasing a tension I’d been carrying for so long I’d stopped noticing it.
He worked his hands through my hair when he reached it, the heel of his palm pressing gently against the back of my skull where the headache from the tranquilizer was still sitting, and the pressure released something there too.
I realized my eyes had closed.
“I shifted into a wolf,” I said into the steam.
“You did.”
He rinsed my hair with water cupped in his hands, tipping my head back with the same careful pressure, and I kept my eyes closed and let the hot water run over my face.
“The FBI is going to be a problem,” I said.
“One problem at a time.”
“There’s a dead guard in that facility. Probably several, actually. They’re going to?—”
“Katie.” His hands stilled in my hair. “Tonight, there is no FBI. There is no investigation. There is nothing you are required to solve.” His thumb pressed once at the base of my skull.
He rinsed my hair a final time and sat back. The water had gone from steaming to warm, the temperature of a bath that has been everything a bath should be and is now ready to be over. He reached past me to pull the plug, then held out a towel.
I stood, dripping and heat-flushed, and he wrapped it around me, tucking the corner in above my chest. He worked through my hair with a second, smaller towel with the same efficiency.
He re-dressed the gash, his touch on the tape steady and light.
“Does it need stitches?” I asked, mostly to say something.
“No.”
“Are you sure, because it feels pretty?—”
“It’s already nearly closed.” He smoothed the tape. “Your body knows what it’s doing. Now come to bed.” He picked up the dressing and replaced it in the kit.
The bedroom was at the end of the hall, and it sported the same pine floors, the same stone, and a window that looked east toward where the ridge broke into open sky. The bed was large, solid, and covered in wool blankets the color of deep winter. He turned the cover back and I sat on the edge, then swung my legs in and lay down, and the mattress and the pillow and the weight of the blankets settling over me were so perfect that I stopped trying to finish even one more thought.
He came around to the other side, and the mattress dipped with his weight. Then he was there beside me, his arm pulling me against his chest, his hand flat and warm over my ribs.
The fire was still going. I could hear it from here, its crackling moving through the quiet of the cabin, and outside the wind was whipping through the ponderosas.
