The moment Jai crossed the threshold, she made the sound. Not a cry. Something more urgent—a high, insistent noise that started in the back of her throat and carried the urgent sound of an infant who had decided that her tolerance for separation had reached its absolute limit.
Jai stopped. His good hand came away from his shoulder, blood dripping off his fingertips onto the dark walnut floor, and he looked at Grace across the fifteen feet of entry hall and said her name. Once. Low. Even. Two syllables delivered with the same matter-of-fact certainty he brought to everything that mattered.
She went quiet. Just like that. Volume off. Her small body settled against Ashe’s chest with the immediate certainty of a pup who had heard what she needed to hear, and her eyes found Jai and held there with the focused attention of someone conducting important research on the concept of reliable return.
The pack members who had followed us in from the porch went quiet. I caught it—the shift in the air pressure, the silence that happens when wolves are recalibrating something fundamental about the person in front of them.
They had been watching Jai with the careful, guarded assessment they gave anything new inside the perimeter. Now they were watching something else.
I filed it.
Reyes was already set up in the great room. Her medical bag sat open on the coffee table, contents laid out in the precise arrangement of someone who had done this enough times that the sequence lived in muscle memory.
She stood beside one of the heavy leather chairs with her arms crossed and her expression set to the brisk neutrality she deployed when the situation was real and she had no patience for performance.
“Chair,” she said. Not to me. To Jai.
He went. Not arguing. Not hesitating. Just crossed the great room with that careful economy and lowered himself into the leather with a control that cost him something visible in the set of his jaw.
Reyes was already moving, her hands finding the torn jacket sleeve with the authority of someone who did not care about rank when there was a wound that needed cleaning.
I positioned myself behind her left shoulder. Close enough to see everything, far enough that she had room to work. The great room’s stone fireplace threw low amber light across the dark timber beams overhead, and the warmth of it pressed against my back while Reyes’s scissors made short, efficient work of what remained of Jai’s jacket.
The shoulder came into view. Muscle exposed, edges ragged, a tear that ran from collarbone to deltoid where Declan’s claws had opened him.
Reyes irrigated it with saline from a squeeze bottle, the clear fluid running pink down his arm and into the towel she’d spread across his lap, and Jai sat perfectly still through all of it.
His breathing stayed even. His eyes stayed on the far wall, fixed on some middle distance that existed between pain and the place he went when pain needed to be managed rather than felt.
Reyes pressed along his left ribs. Her fingers moved with clinical precision, working from sternum to flank, and when she hit the spot—the angle where something had given—Jai’s jaw tightened. A fraction. Almost nothing. He exhaled through his nose, one controlled breath that carried no sound but told me everything.
“Not cracked, but badly bruised,” Reyes said. Not a question. A classification. “Maybe two. The imaging will confirm.”
She moved to his throat. Her thumb traced the bruising where Declan’s hand had been—five distinct points of pressure already darkening under the skin, the pattern of fingers that had been squeezing with intent.
Jai tipped his head back to give her access, and the movement pulled a thin line of blood from his split lip where the swelling had reopened the cut.
I cataloged each item the way I’d cataloged the garage floor. Shoulder torn through to muscle. Ribs bruised, likely two. Split lip, deep enough to need butterfly closures. Throat bruising that would be spectacular by morning.
Each one landed somewhere specific in my chest and stayed there, a growing list of debts that Declan Morrow had incurred and would never have the opportunity to repay.
My weight had shifted forward by increments without my noticing. I was leaning closer, close enough that the cedar-and-scotch smell of my own jacket mixed with the blood and the cherry blossom residue coming off Jai’s skin, and Reyes glanced up at me with the exasperation of a doctor who had been tolerating this behavior for longer than was professionally reasonable.
“If the two of you don’t stop hovering,” she said, looking between me and Ashe, who had somehow materialized at my right shoulder without making a sound, “I will sedate all three of you and finish this in peace.”
Ashe stepped back.
I didn’t.
Grace made a soft sound from Ashe’s arms—the gurgle that meant she had been observing the proceedings with scholarly interest and was now ready to participate.
I reached for her without thinking about it. My hand found the small of her back, fingers supporting her head, and she came into my arms with the practiced ease of something that had happened dozens of times over the past three weeks.
She grabbed my lapel. One tiny fist closed around the blood-stained fabric with a grip that had no business being that strong, and she tucked her face against my chest with the calm certainty of a pup who knew exactly where she sat in the hierarchy of safe people.
I held her with one hand supporting her back, thumb tracing slow circles between her shoulder blades the way I’d been doing since the first night she’d spent in the penthouse, and the ease of it lived in my muscles the way certain things do when you’ve done them enough times that your body remembers before your mind does.
The pack members who had been watching Jai with guarded eyes shifted their attention to this instead. I felt it—the stillness that settled over the great room when seven wolves were processing the image of their Prime Alpha in a blood-ruined suit jacket holding an infant with that unselfconscious ease.
