Chapter 2: Rules of the Territory

"Start talking," Wren said, once she'd yanked her wrist free and put the exam table between them. "And it better be good, because right now I'm choosing between calling the county sheriff and calling my own therapist." Kade straightened, unbothered by his own nakedness in a way that suggested he'd done this before, though he did have the decency to pull a folded towel off her supply shelf and wrap it around his waist. The man on the table — the wolf, the *other one* — was starting to stir, blinking dazed and human eyes up at the fluorescent lights. "My name is Kade Ashgrove," he said. "I'm the alpha of a pack that's lived in the Ashgrove forest, north of your town, for longer than your town has existed. That's my beta on your table. Sable. She was ambushed tonight on our border by wolves who don't belong to us, and she nearly died because of it." "She." "Sable's a woman. The wound doesn't care what shape you're wearing when you take it." Wren pressed the heel of her hand against her eye socket, willing the room to stop feeling like it was tilting. "Werewolves." "We don't love the word, but it'll do." "And you brought her to a human vet clinic instead of — I don't know — wherever it is werewolves go for stitches." "Our healer's two hours north visiting family. Sable was bleeding out. You were closer." He said it simply, like it explained everything, and in a horrible practical way it did. "I didn't have a choice." On the table, Sable's eyes had fully opened now, and they went first to Kade, checking on him with the particular quickness of someone used to watching a room for threats, and then to Wren, narrowing with open suspicion. "You told her." "She stitched your shoulder closed with her bare hands, Sable. She was always going to find out." "That's not the same as *telling* her." Sable tried to sit up and hissed, one hand flying to the shoulder Wren had just spent the better part of an hour repairing. "Humans talk." "This one won't," Kade said, and something in the certainty of his voice made Wren's skin prickle, though she couldn't have said why. "You don't know that," Wren snapped, mostly because she needed to say something that wasn't *I believe you*, even though, staring at the impossible evidence in front of her, she absolutely did. "You don't know anything about me. I could be on the phone with a tabloid in ten minutes." "You won't be." He held her gaze, and there it was again — that same fixed, searching intensity she'd felt from the wolf on her table an hour ago, like he was trying to read something written just beneath her skin. "There's a reason I can't fully explain tonight. But you're not going to tell anyone, Wren Ashby, because some part of you already knows this is bigger than a story to sell." "Don't tell me what I know." "Fine. Then believe this instead — if word gets out that wolves live in that forest, hunters come, the state gets involved, and my pack loses the only safe territory it has left. Families. Children. You'd be signing a death warrant for people who never did anything to you." His voice hadn't risen, but something under it had gone hard as iron. "I'm asking you to keep a secret. I'm not asking you to lie for us, or help us, or anything else. Just silence." Sable, watching this exchange with narrowed eyes, said something under her breath in a language Wren didn't recognize, and Kade's jaw ticked, but he didn't respond to it. "What did she say?" Wren asked. "Nothing important." "She said it in front of me, so it was clearly important to somebody." Sable's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "I said he's staring at you like you hung the moon he answers to, and it's making me want to leave this room." Heat crawled up Wren's neck, entirely unwelcome, entirely confusing. Kade didn't deny it. He didn't confirm it either — just looked, briefly, furious at his own second-in-command, and then looked back at Wren with an expression that had shuttered closed again, professional and remote, as though the last five seconds hadn't happened. "She needs to stay off that shoulder for two weeks," Wren said, because focusing on the medicine was the only thing keeping her upright. "No shifting. Shifting pulls at sutures — I don't actually know if that's true for you people, but it's true for every other mammal I've ever stitched, so humor me." "Two weeks," Sable repeated flatly, like Wren had suggested she stop breathing. "Two weeks," Kade agreed, in a tone that closed the argument before Sable could open it, and something about the easy authority in it — no raised voice, just absolute expectation of obedience — told Wren more about what he was than the shift itself had. He helped Sable off the table, murmuring something low that made the tension in her shoulders ease slightly, and then he turned back to Wren, and for a moment the mask slipped again. "Thank you," he said. "For what you did tonight. I mean that." "Don't thank me yet." Wren crossed her arms, equal parts furious and unable to stop watching him. "You still owe me an explanation for whatever *that* look was, and for whatever Sable was talking about." Something moved behind his eyes — want, and refusal of that want, close enough together that she could see both. "Some things," he said, "are better left for a night when nobody's bleeding on your table." He was gone before she could argue, Sable leaning on him at the door, the storm swallowing them into the dark toward the tree line at the edge of her property — a tree line, she now understood, that marked the beginning of somewhere she was never supposed to have seen. Wren stood alone in her clinic long after the taillights of nothing, because they hadn't come by car, faded from a road they hadn't used, staring at the blood-soaked towel on her exam table and the absolute certainty, useless and undeniable, that she would see Kade Ashgrove again.

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