The whole room smelled of wood smoke and cedar and the warm undercurrent I had stopped pretending I didn’t catalog. That specific scent—Braham’s scent, layered into the timber and the stone and the linen the way a man’s presence works its way into a space when he’s been living in it long enough—cut through the blood and the pine resin still clinging to my skin from the gravel road, and I stood in the center of the floor and let it fill my lungs because the alternative was thinking about what came next.
I was not ready for that.
I looked around. At the bed. At the fire. At the chairs positioned like an invitation. At Braham standing in the doorway with his jacket off and his sleeves pushed up and the gash across his shoulder from the garage already closing the way wolf wounds do, pink and angry and half-healed in the span of hours that would have left a human bedridden for a week.
“I feel like I should be wearing a better shirt,” I said.
Braham closed the door. The latch clicked, soft and final, and he crossed the room with the unhurried pace of a man who had already decided how this ended and saw no reason to rush the middle.
He stopped close enough that the cedar-and-scotch smell of him cut through the wood smoke, and his gold eyes held mine with the steady certainty I had been collecting for three weeks and stubbornly refusing to name.
“You’re not wearing the shirt much longer,” he said.
Flat. Certain. The kind of statement that lived in the space between suggestion and fact and didn’t bother distinguishing between them.
I turned to look at him. His face was a map of damage I’d been avoiding inventory on—the split along his jaw wheresomeone’s knuckles had connected, the bruising along his temple that the low light turned the color of old wine, the firm set of his mouth that happened when Braham Wolfe was holding something back and the holding was costing him.
“That’s very confident for a man whose face looks like that,” I said.
“Your face looks worse.”
“My face looks distinguished.” I touched the split lip gingerly. The butterfly closures pulled, and the sting was immediate and bright. “Rugged. Interesting. The kind of face that says ‘I’ve seen things’ and doesn’t feel the need to elaborate.”
“Jai.”
One word. My name in his mouth did the thing it always did—pulled tight somewhere below my sternum and released all at once, a wire snapping, the feeling traveling down my spine and settling somewhere I had stopped pretending I didn’t notice.
I dropped my hand.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
The fire popped. An ember spiraled up the chimney, brief and bright, and the light caught the gold in his eyes and held there.
Braham’s hand found the small of my back—not pushing, guiding, the particular touch of a man who had decided that my ribs took precedence over whatever dramatic entrance I might have been planning—and steered me toward the leather chairs by the window before I could open my mouth and ruin the moment with something clever.
I let him. The leather was soft, worn in the way expensive leather gets when someone has been sitting in the same spot for years, and the fire’s warmth reached the chair with the patient certainty of something that had all night to do its job.
My ribs settled into a dull, persistent ache that lived somewhere between discomfort and actual pain, and I decided,somewhere in the last several hours of blood and gravel and scotch and firelight, that fighting every single thing Braham Wolfe did was an exhausting way to live and I was officially retiring from the practice.
He sat across from me. Not beside me. Across. The kind of positioning that said he wanted to look at me, not just be near me, and the distinction landed somewhere specific in my chest.
Two glasses appeared from somewhere—Macallan again, the good stuff, the kind that cost more than my monthly rent and tasted like it—and he passed one over without comment. Our fingers brushed. His were warm. Mine were not, and I didn’t want to think about why.
Then he looked at me. Really looked. Thirty seconds of thorough, unhurried visual inventory that started at my split lip and worked its way down: the butterfly closures Reyes had applied with the brisk efficiency of someone who had heard every excuse for why a wound wasn’t that bad, the bruising along my jaw where Declan’s fist had connected, the bandaging on my shoulder visible through the torn fabric of what had once been a serviceable jacket and was now evidence in someone’s eventual crime scene photos.
I let him look. Didn’t crack a joke. Didn’t deflect. Just sat there with scotch warming my palm and fire warming my left side and let Braham Wolfe catalogue the damage someone had done to me, because the set of his jaw said he was filing each item in a place I didn’t want to examine too closely, and I had spent enough time around dangerous men to know when the silence was doing more work than words.
“My shoulder hurts more than I let on to Reyes,” I said.
His jaw went tight. A fraction. The muscle below his ear flexed once, hard, and then settled into something controlled that looked like it cost him.
He didn’t say he knew. Didn’t say he’d seen it. Just gave one short nod, the kind that meant the information had been received and processed and filed under a heading I wasn’t allowed to read.
“Declan believed he was right,” I said. “Not misguided. Not confused. Right. That’s the most dangerous kind of wrong.”
“I know.”
Neither of us said what that meant for what came next. Declan’s remaining people. The Morrow line’s claim. The investigation Ashe was already running. The calculus of territory and blood and the fact that Grace’s ability made her valuable in ways neither of us had fully processed yet.
