The Wolf Queen & The Alpha Brat

(Elena)

Senna gets to him in the yard.

Not in the infirmary, not in our room — in the yard, twelve meters inside the gate, because that’s as far as we get before Rhydian’s legs make their final decision and we go down and stay down. She’s been waiting. I don’t know how she knew but she’s Senna and she always knows, and she arrives with two assistants and a kit and the particular focused calm of someone who has been preparing for this specific thing since Cade came through the gate two hours ago.

She gets on her knees in the frozen mud beside him without ceremony.

"Talk to me," she says. Not to me. To Rhydian.

"I’m fine," he says.

"You’re not." She’s already working, cutting away what’s left of his shirt, and I watch her face track across the damage with the expression of a healer doing rapid triage — noting things, not reacting to them, storing them in order of urgency. I watch her face and I try to read it and I mostly can’t which is probably the point. "Where’s the pain worst."

"Everywhere," he says.

"More specific."

"Left side. Under the ribs."

She presses there. He makes a sound that is short and controlled and that I feel somewhere behind my sternum. She nods, still not reacting, and says something to one of her assistants who goes immediately.

I’m on his other side on the ground with his hand in mine. The mud is cold through my knees and I don’t care and the yard is full of people and I don’t care about that either.

"Senna," I say.

"He’s okay," she says. Not dismissively. Definitively. "He’s going to be okay. The cut on his side reopened which is what dropped him, blood loss plus the impact from last night plus—" She glances at the marks on his chest and doesn’t finish that sentence. "He needs stitching and warmth and probably two days in bed. Which I will fight him to enforce."

"I won’t fight," Rhydian says.

Senna looks at him.

"Much," he says.

Something in her face moves. She goes back to work.

I look at him. He looks at me. His color is wrong — too grey, too drawn — and his hand in mine is colder than it should be. But his eyes are clear and present and doing the thing they always do when I’m in his line of sight.

Checking on me.

"I’m fine," I say, before he can ask.

"You’re in the mud."

"So are you."

"Yeah but I have a reason."

I almost laugh. It comes out wrong, catches somewhere in my chest. He squeezes my hand.

---

They get him inside.

Brennan takes the operational weight off my shoulders the moment we cross into the Pack house, appearing at my elbow with the quiet efficiency of someone who has been holding everything in place and is ready to hand it back or keep holding it depending on what I need. I tell him what I need, which is thirty minutes and then a full briefing, and he nods and disappears.

Senna stitches the side in our room.

I sit on the bed beside Rhydian and hold the lamp where she needs it and do not look at anything except exactly what Senna tells me to look at, because looking at the broader picture of what the night left on his body is something I’m going to do exactly once, completely, in private, and process it in whatever way it requires processing, and that is not right now.

Right now I hold the lamp.

He’s quiet during the stitching. His jaw is set in that specific way it goes when he’s managing pain — not hiding it from me, he’s stopped doing that, but containing it, the way she taught him to breathe through things. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

His hand finds my knee. He doesn’t grab it, doesn’t grip. Just puts his palm there.

I put my hand over his.

Senna finishes. She does something with the bandaging that she talks through quietly, instructions about pressure and position, things I’m filing and will follow precisely. She looks at me when she’s done.

"He sleeps," she says. "Through the morning if possible. Don’t let him talk you into anything before this afternoon."

"She won’t need to convince me," Rhydian says.

Senna looks at him with the specific expression she’s developed for things he says. "You told me you were fine when you were bleeding into the ground."

"I was relatively fine."

"Sleep," she says, and leaves.

---

The briefing happens in the doorway of our room because that is my compromise — Brennan at the door, me on the edge of the bed, Rhydian theoretically sleeping six feet away and actually listening to every word.

Shadowpine’s main push didn’t come.

That’s the thing I have to sit with for a moment. The attack didn’t materialize. Dawn came, and the patrol reports came, and the eastern border stayed quiet. Which means either Varek decided the supply line damage made the engagement too costly, or Marcus lost enough operational credibility with his own general in the mess of the night’s events that the attack got pulled, or—

"Marcus hasn’t been located," Brennan says.

I look at him.

"He wasn’t in the camp when your team extracted. Varek’s wolves on the perimeter weren’t following his orders by that point — we picked up one of the flanking wolves from last night and he says there was a disagreement between Marcus and Varek at the camp before dawn." Brennan pauses. "Varek apparently didn’t appreciate Marcus going to the gorge himself. Seen as a liability rather than an asset."

"Marcus is loose," I say.

"Yes."

From the bed: "He’ll come here."

I look at Rhydian.

He’s not pretending to sleep. He’s on his back with his eyes open, looking at the ceiling, which is at least horizontal so I’m going to allow it. His voice is steadier than it was an hour ago.

"He has nowhere else to go," Rhydian says. "Varek’s done with him. The Pack won’t take him back. He’ll come here because this is the only place he’s ever known and because—" He stops. "Because he’s not finished."

Brennan and I look at each other.

"Double the perimeter," I say. "Internal gates locked after dark. And I want someone with eyes on Henrick."

"Henrick isn’t—"

"I know he’s not Marcus. But Marcus will try to contact him. Henrick is the last connection he has to this place." I pause. "Watch him."

Brennan goes.

The room is quiet.

Rhydian has turned his head to look at me. His hand is still on his chest where Senna’s bandaging sits white and conspicuous. He looks like someone who has had a very long night and is working very hard not to show how much it cost.

He’s not quite succeeding.

"The supply line worked," he says.

"Yes."

"Varek pulled back."

"For now."

He’s quiet for a moment. "The crib—"

"Is still there."

"The right side—"

"Is still wrong." I shift. Sit properly on the bed beside him instead of on the edge of it. "It’ll keep."

He looks at me. Does the thing he does where he looks properly, without the guard, without the management. The gold eyes that have been looking at me like that for two months and still catch me off guard sometimes.

"You came," he says. Again. Like he keeps needing to say it.

"I told you I would."

"You didn’t tell me that."

"I told you I’d always come for you."

"You told me that while I was half—" He stops. Something moves through his face. "I wasn’t sure you said it or I imagined it."

I put my hand flat on his chest. Over the heartbeat. Over Senna’s bandaging and everything underneath it.

"I said it," I say.

He covers my hand with his.

Outside the window the morning has fully arrived, grey and cold and completely indifferent, the settlement going about its life, the eastern border holding. Marcus somewhere in the trees. The war not over but different now, changed shape, the piece we were most afraid of already come and gone.

And this.

Just this — his hand over mine. His heartbeat under both.

"Sleep," I say.

He doesn’t argue.

He closes his eyes.

I stay where I am, hand on his chest, feeling him breathe, feeling the steady reliable fact of him still being here. The fire needs tending. The reports need reading. Brennan will be back with updates within the hour and I have a Pack to run and a decision to make about Marcus and a war that isn’t finished.

All of that is true.

Also true: his heartbeat under my palm, slow and even, getting steadier by the minute.

I stay until I’m certain.

Then I tend the fire.

Then I lay down with him.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!