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She went to the kitchen, brisk and clearly trying to hold back everything she wanted to say. He’d seen this enough to read it. She was folding her worry behind the brisk competence, the way she always did, and the brisk competence was winning, but barely.

“Shirt.”

He pulled it up. She looked at the claw marks across his ribs and went still, longer than usual.

“That’s not minor.”

“It’s stopped bleeding.”

“The bar you’ve set is very low.” She was at the cabinet and had the kit. She sat him down at the kitchen table, efficient and unsentimental, a woman who’d decided feelings could wait until the wound was handled. “Hold still.”

He held still. She worked with the focused quiet that fell somewhere between competence and careful warmth, her hands steady. He watched her face while she wasn’t watching his. She was biting the inside of her cheek. She did that when she was more worried than she let on.

“Caves.” Still not looking up.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Three. The caves were not the problem.”

She looked up at that. He had her full attention — the real version, not the brisk, competent one. “What was the problem?”

“I’ll show you everything in the morning. Photographs. The whole of it.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Still checking him, the way she’d been since she opened the door — not the wound, him. Whether he was all right somewhere the wound didn’t reach.

“Are you okay?”

“Getting there.”

“Getting there,” she repeated, as if deciding whether to accept it. She pressed the last piece of tape down and sat back. “That’s a terrible answer.”

“It’s the honest one.”

The humor dropped. Not all the way — it never fully left her — but it shifted — the third thing beneath both, the one she didn’t lead with. She stood back from the chair, and he stayed seated. The geometry put her close enough that when she put her arms around him, it was careful on his right side and not careful at all on the left. She held on for a moment, as if she’d been carrying something all evening and had finally found somewhere to put it down.

He didn’t pull back. His arms came up.

“I’m going to be furious with you for going alone,” she said into his shoulder. “I’m putting that off until morning.”

“I’ll mark it in the schedule.”

She pulled back enough to look at him. The hour was late, and they were close, the fourteen-inch gap conspicuously absent. She gave him the look he’d been collecting — the one where wit was present but not in charge.

He kissed her.

Not the careful version. Not the first-time version or the post-fight-relief version. The quiet midnight version, warm and unhurried, her hands careful of his right side and not careful of anything else. The kind that happened when two people had stopped finding reasons not to.

When she pulled back, her forehead dropped to his for a moment, both of them quiet.

“You’re going to tell me everything.”

“Everything.”

“In the morning.”

“In the morning.” He stood. He was closer to all right than he’d been twenty minutes earlier, which was the wolf’s assessment and his own.