Fix yourself..

ROAN

The room Sloane leads me to is small, bare, private in the way that suggests she chose it for exactly that reason and nothing else. No windows. One table. A door that shuts behind Marcus when she tells him, without looking at him, that this part doesn’t require an audience.

Then it’s just the two of us, closer than we’ve been in two years, and I don’t know where to put my hands.

“Sit,” she says, nodding at the table’s edge. “Shirt off. I need to see where it’s centered.”

I do as she says, because there isn’t a version of tonight where I don’t do exactly what she tells me to, and because some small, useless part of me is grateful for any excuse to be looked at by her again, even like this. Even clinical. Even cold.

Her hands, when they finally touch my chest, are steady in a way that undoes something in me I don’t have a name for.

She doesn’t smell the way I remember either. Underneath it, faint, she still carries something warm and familiar that used to mean home to every instinct I have. But over it, new, there’s something sharper, ash and cold iron, something that doesn’t belong to any wolf I’ve ever stood this close to.

My own wolf goes very still and very quiet under my skin, the way it does around something it can’t decide whether to fear or bow to.

She presses two fingers just beneath my sternum, eyes distant, focused on something I can’t see or feel the way she apparently can. Her jaw tightens almost imperceptibly.

“It’s spread further than it should have by now,” she says, mostly to herself. “This isn’t new damage. This has been building for a long time.”

“Two years.”

“I heard Marcus the first time.” She moves her hand slightly, presses again, and I have to work not to react to the accompanying flare of pain, or to the fact that her hand is the thing touching the place it hurts most. “Does it get worse at night?”

“Yes.”

“Worse when you’re stressed?”

“Yes.”

“Worse around anyone you’ve bonded to, even falsely?”

I hesitate at that one, long enough that she looks up at me directly for the first time since we entered the room.

“Yes,” I admit. “Worse around Selene.”

Something flickers behind her eyes at the name, gone too fast to read, buried under the same clinical calm she’s worn since she stepped out of that car.

“How does it feel,” I ask, before I can stop myself, “being the one with your hand on my chest instead of the other way around.”

She doesn’t answer that. Her fingers pause for half a second, and then continue their careful work like I never said anything at all.

“Does your vision blur during the worst episodes?”

“Sloane.”

“Answer the question.”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

She nods, filing it away with the same efficiency she’s given everything else tonight, and I have to fight the urge to reach up and stop her hand, just to make her look at me the way she used to, before I ever gave her a reason not to.

“Do you think about that night,” I ask instead, quieter. “The way I think about it.”

Nothing. Her hands keep moving, methodical and professional, like the question dissolved in the air before it reached her.

“Does Nora know what this is? Is that who taught you—”

“That’s not relevant to what I’m assessing right now.”

“Sloane.”

“I need you to stop talking unless I ask you something,” she says, flat and final, and I stop, because I didn’t have it in me to push against that tone.

She finishes whatever it is she’s doing, straightens, and steps back half a pace, putting distance between us that feels more deliberate than the room requires.

“Are you going to help me,” I ask, because it’s the only question left that actually matters, and because I need to hear the answer even if I already suspect it isn’t going to be simple.

“What do you have to offer in return.”

The question lands harder than I expect it to. I open my mouth, and nothing comes out. Every answer I reach for, territory, resources, warriors, the alliance itself — feels suddenly small and beside the point, standing here in front of her with my shirt still off and two years of things I never said sitting in my chest alongside the sickness that’s actually killing me. I don’t have an answer that isn’t either a lie or an admission I’m not ready to make out loud.

She watches me fail to find one, expression giving nothing away, patient in the particular way that feels more like a verdict than a question.

I take one step toward her. I don’t decide to. My body just moves, the way it always used to when she was close enough to reach and I forgot, for a second, that I wasn’t allowed to.

She doesn’t step back. She just watches me.

“I can hold a knife perfectly well now, Roan.” Her voice doesn’t rise.. “Stay exactly where you are, or I will open your throat before you finish that step.”

I stop.

“Sloane,” I start, “I need you to understand why I—”

“Save it.”

Two words. Dry enough to end whatever I was about to say before it fully existed.

She looks at me a moment longer, something moving behind her composure that I can’t read and don’t have the right to ask about, and then her gaze drops, briefly, to the state of me — hollowed out, thinner than I should be, barely able to stand upright an hour ago in front of her whole delegation.

“You need to fix yourself before I see you again,” she says. “Eat. Sleep. Whatever it takes. I’m not interested in negotiating an alliance with a man who looks like he’s already halfway into the ground.”

“Sloane—”

“I’ll decide about the alliance at the next meeting.” She’s already moving toward the door, already pulling the distance back into place like a coat she never took all the way off. “Get dressed.”

Then she’s gone, and I sit there in the small, bare room with my shirt still in my hands, the ache in my chest sitting exactly where her fingers left it.

For the first time since that night in the hall, I understand exactly how much I still have left to lose.

I don’t get much time to sit with that thought before Marcus pushes the door open again, face already wrong in a way that stops my next breath cold.

“Roan. You need to see this.”

He holds out his phone, hand not quite steady. A photo one of the scouts sent from the mill road, a wide, dark stain soaked into the gravel at the old crossing, and tracks leading away from it into the trees, too large and too oddly spaced to belong to any wolf either of us recognizes.

“No body,” Marcus says. “Just this. Whoever it was either walked away or was carried.”

“Ours or theirs?”

“We don’t know yet. Nobody’s reported missing on our side. I’ve already sent word to ask if Ashborn’s short anyone.”

I look at the image a moment longer, at the shape of those tracks, and something in me, older than the sickness, older than two years of grief, goes very quiet and very alert at once.

“Keep this between us for now,” I say. “Until we know more.”

Marcus nods, already pocketing the phone, and neither of us says out loud what we’re both thinking.

Something is circling closer than the hunters we know how to name.