Page 4 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

I fought out. The hall was chaos by then, chairs overturned, wolves snarling, the mist still hanging in the air with nowhere to go. One of the shifted wolves lunged for my legs and I twisted to put my knee through its jaw, which further tore two of the slashes on my chest the claws had started and opened a new wound I wouldn't feel for hours. The door was behind me. I found it with my back, slammed through it, and the mountain air hit the exposed muscle in my chest like a blade made of ice.

I ran. I kept running until the running became walking and the walking became crawling and the crawling became the blizzard and the blizzard became a door and the door became these hands.

I come back to the hands. The memory recedes, and the cottage reassembles around me.

The healer's fingers are threading something through the torn edge of my deltoid with a rhythm that suggests she's sutured more muscle than most wolves have torn. She's sewing me together with the unhurried competence and fundamental lack of sentimentality of a woman mending a shirt.

I go under again. When I surface, the needle has moved to the second claw track, and she's talking her way through the procedure. "...drainage color indicates the infection preceded arrival. Initiated before the cold slowed the bacterial response, which means the wounds have been open and unmanaged for days rather than hours. Treatment adjusted accordingly."

The days are right. The precision of her assessment, delivered to an empty room while the patient drifts, settles over me with a weight I didn't expect.

She's not talking to me. She's thinking out loud, keeping herself company with the sound of her own expertise because solitude has made her own voice the only reliable audience. The habit tells me more about her than any introduction could.

Outside, the storm presses against the walls. I can hear it through the stone, a constant low moan that rises occasionally to a howl and drops back, and the sound is familiar because I've been inside it for days.

The blizzard saved my life. If the weather had been clear, the wolves tracking me would have closed the distance long before I reached this door.

The wolves are still out there. My wolf's attention splits between the hands on my shoulder and the memory of the scent trail I left through the mountains. The snow will have buried some of it, but how much? Whether the wolves who put these claw marks in my chest are patient enough to wait for the storm to break or reckless enough to search through it is a question I can't answer from a cottage floor.

Consciousness slides again, and when it returns the fire has changed. The log has settled lower and the light is different. The hands are wrapping something around my chest with a practiced tension that compresses the wound without restricting my lungs.

She's been working while I was absent. The silence in the cottage is total except for the wind and her breathing and the soft sound of linen pulled tight.

"The sutures will hold if you refrain from moving. They will not hold if you insist on being conscious, because conscious patients inevitably move, and movement in the first hours reopens the fascial plane I’ve spent considerable time reconstructing."

She's talking to me, or at me. The distinction is unclear, and I don't think she cares which. I can see her more clearly now, the fever haze thinning enough to register details.

Her hair is pulled tight from a face set with quiet determination. The expression says the wound will close properly and any disagreement from the wound itself will be answered with force.

Her hands move as she reaches for something on the floor beside her, and the movement is the most controlled thing I've ever seen a living person do. Every motion has been decided in advance. Every gesture is a completed thought.

I try to speak. The sound that comes out is closer to gravel than language, and the effort sends a wave of nausea through my chest that makes the suturing feel irrelevant. My wolf snarls at the hurt, and the snarl comes out of my mouth before I can stop it, low and ragged and aimed at no one.

The hands don't pause. Her tone doesn't change.

"If you’re attempting to communicate, I recommend against it. If you waste energy on words while I’m working on you, I’ll sedate you with a compound that will stop the pain and also your ability to taste anything for several days. The taste loss is a side effect I could formulate around. I choose not to."

The delivery could be a threat disguised as a medical briefing or a medical briefing disguised as a threat. Either way, it's so dry that it takes me a full breath to process what I just heard. The healer sewing my shoulder back together just told me she'll deliberately make her sedative taste terrible out of spite.

I laugh.

The laugh is a mistake. My chest contracts and the sutures pull against the torn muscle. A bolt of white-hot pain shoots from my shoulder to my sternum and lodges there. The sound that escapes me is half laughter and half something far less dignified, and the healer's hands freeze for the first time since consciousness returned.

"You tore a suture."

Her response is flat. The hands resume, threading the needle back through flesh that's now bleeding from the place where my own laughter ripped her work apart.

"I’ll replace it. Don't do that again."

The annoyance in the last sentence is real, not performed, not softened with bedside manner, just the blunt displeasure of a craftsman whose work has been damaged by the material. I'm the material. The material laughed. The craftsman isn't amused.

She works in silence for a while after that, and the silence has a different texture than the narration. The narration was a habit, comfortable, and self-sustaining. The silence is pointed.

She isn't speaking because I've proven that sound is dangerous in my vicinity, and she isn't willing to risk another suture on the possibility that I might find her medical vocabulary entertaining.

The pain settles into something almost manageable. Either that or my body has simply run out of ways to inform me about it and is trying a different approach: a low, steady burn that replaces the sharp spikes with a heat I can breathe through if I'm careful. My wolf quiets with it, the snarl retreating into watchfulness.

The cottage takes shape around me in the new stillness, stone walls and a hearth with a fire that's been fed recently, the wood popping with resin. Dried herbs overhead cast latticed shadows in the firelight. A worktable sits against the far wall with a mortar and pestle and stacked pages I can't read from this angle. One window holds the storm behind it, pressing.