"Nothing." He brushes a strand of hair off my face. "You've got blood on your cheek."
He wipes it away with his thumb, gentle, and kisses the spot where it was.
Then he opens the door and the cold rushes back in.
We're sitting in the plastic chairs again, his arm around me, my head on his shoulder, when the doors swing open.
The older man in scrubs comes through, pulling a mask down off his face. But I can't read his expression, not at all.
"He's a fighter," the man says.
I emit a tiny, scared whimper.
"The bullet missed the joint and all the big vessels. It tore up some muscle and cracked the edge of the scapula, but nothing he won't heal from." The vet wipes his hands on a towel. "He lost a fair amount of blood, but he was stable through the whole thing. We've got him on fluids and pain meds. He's going to be groggy for a day or two and he's going to need to take it easy for a few weeks, which—" He glances at Wolf's bloody pawprints all over the both of us. "—I get the sense will be the hard part."
"But he's okay," Afon concludes. I'm stunned to hear a wobble in his voice. "My boy is going to be okay?"
"He's going to be okay." The man smiles. "You can see him in a little while, once he's up from the anesthesia. He'll be happy you're here. The good ones always are."
And then he goes back through the doors, and it's just us again. I only get turned around halfway before Afon engulfs me in a hug so huge and relieved that he lifts my feet clean off the floor.
He's shaking. The big, stone, terrifying man is shaking, holding me in the middle of a vet's waiting room, his face pressed into my hair, and I'm laughing and crying at the same time and so, I think, is he, though he'd never admit it and I'll never tell.
"Stupid, brave idiot," he says, muffled in my hair.
"Which one of you?" I ask.
He sets me down. He looks at me, wrecked, wet-eyed, and wide open, and for once, there's no wall at all, nothing held back, nothing hidden.
"All three of us," he says.
Goddammit, he's right.
29
CAROLINE
Two black SUVs show up an hour later.
I'm sitting with Afon in the veterinary hospital's waiting room, my hand in his, when the door opens and a pair of men walk in. They're big. Not big like Afon, who's all muscle and bad attitude, but big like a caveman's club is big. These two are wearing suits under their coats. One of them has an earpiece.
"Mr. Satyrin," the first one says in the hushed, reverent tone you'd use to greet the Queen of England. "We're here to bring you in."
Afon doesn't get up right away. "The dog comes with us."
"Of course," the man says. "We've got a crate. The vet's already cleared him to travel once he's stable, and Mr. Lazarev has a team waiting on site to receive Mr. Wolf and continue his care."
Afon looks at me. I shrug. "Guess we're going."
We wait another hour for Wolf to come up from the drugs. They let us see him before we leave. He's groggy, one shoulder shaved and bandaged, an IV in his leg. His tail thumps once when hesees Afon. Afon kneels by the cage and puts his face right up to the bars.
"I love you, you silly animal," he says, real quiet. "Don't ever do that again."
Wolf licks his nose.
They load Wolf into a padded crate in the back of one of the SUVs. I sit in the back seat with Afon. The doors thunk shut. After two weeks of beans and a snowmobile and a burning cabin, it feels insane to be in an Escalade, with buttery leather seats and an honest-to-goodnessTV screenembedded in the headrest in front of me.
"This is weird," I tell Afon. "Like, very weird."
