Stand down..

ROAN

Marcus tells me to stay down. I don't listen.

It isn't defiance, exactly, or not only that. It's the same reckless pull that got me here in the first place, the same refusal to sit still while something that feels like it concerns her is happening thirty feet away from me. My legs don't fully agree with the decision. I make them cooperate anyway.

"Roan." Marcus catches my arm before I clear the doorway, voice low and urgent. "She told me to keep you still."

"She's not here to enforce it."

"You can barely stand."

"I've been managing that all night. I'll manage it a little longer."

He curses under his breath but doesn't try to physically stop me, which tells me more about how worried he actually is than any argument would have. We make it as far as the edge of the courtyard, and that's where I see him.

The wolf pacing near the far wall is easily twice the size of anything I've ever stood across from, fur the color of wet stone, eyes an unnatural, burning gold that fix on me the instant I step into view. He doesn't growl. He doesn't need to. Something about the sheer size of him does the threatening for him without any effort at all.

"Lycan," Marcus says under his breath, and I feel my whole body go cold and alert at once, some old instinct recognizing exactly how outmatched I currently am.

Sloane's standing between us, arms crossed, and the look on her face when she sees me is somewhere between fury and genuine alarm.

"I told Marcus to keep you inside."

"I don't take orders from anyone but myself these days, apparently, including my own good sense."

The Lycan shifts, folding down into a man taller than I am, broader through the shoulders, and I catch the exact moment his gaze slides over me, cataloging, unhurried, the way you assess something you've already decided isn't much of a threat.

"So this is the famous Roan." Something almost like amusement crosses his face. "Smaller than the stories, if you don't mind me saying."

"And you are…?."

"Someone who's been considerably more use to her tonight than you have, from what I've seen." His eyes flick toward Sloane, brief and intentional. "You ran yourself half to death over a feeling. I brought her actual information."

Something hot and ugly moves through my chest that has nothing to do with the sickness at all.

"Careful," I growl, low.

"Or what?" He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to. "You'll run at me too? I've seen healthier men move faster."

"Enough." Sloane's voice cuts through both of us, sharp enough that we both actually stop. "Both of you. This is my territory, and I am not standing in my own courtyard at four in the morning refereeing whatever this is."

"He started it," the Lycan says, entirely unbothered, and I want to hit him for the sheer audacity of sounding amused while he says it.

"I don't care who started it." She looks between the two of us, something tired and furious in her expression that makes me feel, briefly, like exactly the burden I've apparently become. "Roan. Go back inside and let Marcus actually do his job. You—" she turns to the Lycan, voice going flatter, colder "—will remember that you're a guest here, and guests who provoke my other guests don't stay guests for long."

"Noted," he says, though the smile doesn't fully leave his face.

I don't move right away. I can't seem to make myself stop looking at him, this stranger who apparently walked into her life while I was busy dying slowly on the other side of a border, who clearly knows things about the threat against her pack that I don't, who stands there healthy and whole and unbothered in a way I haven't been in two years.

"Who is he to you," I ask her, quieter, before I can stop myself.

"That's not your business anymore."

"Sloane."

"Go inside, Roan." Something flickers across her face, gone too fast to read clearly, though I'd swear, if I still had any right to read her at all, that it looked almost like exhaustion at having to manage both of us at once. "Please. Before this becomes a second fight I don't have the patience for tonight."

I look at the Lycan one more time. He's watching me with an expression that isn't quite mockery, isn't quite pity, perhaps it closer to simple, unhurried patience, like he already knows exactly how this is going to end and doesn't feel any particular need to rush it.

"This isn't over," I say, mostly to him, though some part of it is meant for her too.

"No," he agrees, entirely too pleased with himself. "I don't imagine it is."

Marcus gets an arm under mine before my legs decide the conversation is finished on their own terms, and he steers me back toward the room I was supposed to stay in, and I let him, because I don't have anything left in me tonight to win whatever that was.

Behind us, I hear Sloane's voice, low and controlled, already back to managing the stranger like she never lost a single ounce of composure at all.

I lie back down in that bare room with my chest aching worse than it has in months, and it takes me a long time to admit, even to myself, that the ache isn't only from the sickness anymore.