Chapter 4: Cracks in the Golden Boy

"You heard what happened, right?"

Priya doesn't look up from the fighter's shoulder she's stitching two tables over. News moves faster than blood in this pack.

"Heard what," I say, though I already know.

"Dean. This morning, he dropped in front of half the pack." She ties off her stitch, glances sideways at me. "You were there, weren't you?"

"I was there."

"So it's true. He actually lost control in public."

I don't answer right away. My patient, a fighter named Reyes who took a bad hit during morning drills, hisses as I press a cloth to the gash along his ribs. I focus on that instead, on the clean line of the wound, the way the muscle underneath still twitches when I get too close to the nerve.

"Sit still," I tell him. "Almost done."

"Yes, ma'am." He obeys, and I appreciate him for it, for giving my hands something simple to do while my head is still back in that clearing, watching Dean's control slip in and out like a bad radio signal.

Priya doesn't let it go. "Some people are saying it's guilt. Others are saying something's actually wrong with him."

"I don't know what it is." That part, at least, is true. I've been turning it over all morning, the way his eyes flickered gold to brown and back, the sweat on his forehead in the cold air, the panic underneath his fury when Jaxton called him out on it in front of everyone.

I finish taping the gauze along Reyes's ribs and send him off with instructions to keep it dry, no sparring for two days. He thanks me on his way out, and for a moment the clinic goes quiet enough that I can hear my own thoughts again.

They keep circling back to the same place. Dean has never once, not in eight years, looked scared of anything. Not a fight he was losing. Not his father's temper. Not even the visiting elder who once warned him about the weight of leading a pack someday.

This morning he looked scared of himself.

"You're doing the thing," Priya says.

"What thing."

"Going quiet, staring at nothing, solving a puzzle in your head instead of talking to the person in front of you."

I almost smile. "I'm working."

"Sure you are." She wipes down her table, unconvinced, and doesn't push further. She knows me well enough not to.

I keep my hands busy the rest of the morning. Restocking bandages. Boiling instruments. Checking on two younger pack members still healing from a minor skirmish last week. It's easier to think while my hands have something to do. It's always been that way, since I was a kid watching my mother work this same clinic, learning that grief goes down easier with a task attached to it.

I don't let myself think about Jaxton. Or I try not to. He hasn't come by since the confrontation this morning, and some stubborn part of me is grateful for that. I don't know what to do with a bond I never asked for, stacked on top of a rejection I'm still bleeding from.

Through the clinic window, I catch sight of Dean crossing the yard, moving slower than usual, shoulders hunched like he's trying to fold himself smaller than he is. He doesn't look like the boy who laughed in my face last night. He looks like someone carrying something heavy enough to bow his spine.

I hate that some old, stubborn instinct in me still wants to go check on him.

I don't move. I stay right where I am, roll of gauze in my hands, and remind myself that whatever's wrong with Dean isn't mine to fix anymore. He made that decision for both of us last night, with a single cruel sentence he didn't have to think twice about.

But my eyes stay on him anyway, tracking the way he holds his arm close to his ribs, the same way Reyes did an hour ago before I patched him up. Old professional habit, I tell myself. Nothing more.

He doesn't make it far across the yard before his father intercepts him.

Silas Ashcroft doesn't raise his voice. He never does, not out here where people might hear him. But even from thirty yards, through glass, I can read the tension in the way he grips Dean's shoulder, the way Dean's whole body goes rigid under his father's hand.

"Now," I hear Silas say, barely, carried on the wind through the open window. "Not later. Now."

There's nothing proud in his voice. Nothing that sounds like a father comforting a son who humiliated himself in front of the pack this morning. It's sharper than that. Urgent in a way that raises the hair on my arms.

Dean's face, even from here, goes pale.

"Delaney." Priya's voice cuts through my focus. "You're staring again."

I blink, pulling myself back into the clinic, back to the gauze wrapped tight around my fingers. "Sorry. Got distracted."

"By what?"

I glance out the window just in time to see Dean following his father toward the main house, walking fast now, almost stumbling to keep pace, his earlier slump replaced by something closer to fear.

Whatever Silas Ashcroft wants from his son, it isn't a conversation about pride or leadership or the humiliation of losing control in front of witnesses. It's something else. Something urgent enough that Silas didn't even wait for Dean to catch his breath first.

I set the gauze down slowly, watching the two of them disappear through the main house door.

"Priya," I say. "Has Silas ever come get Dean like that before? In the middle of the day, in front of everyone?"

She thinks about it, brow furrowing. "Not that I've seen. He usually sends someone to fetch him. Doesn't come himself."

That detail sits wrong in my stomach, heavier than it should.

I think about the way Dean's control slipped this morning, gold to brown and back, like something inside him was fighting for the wheel and losing. I think about the fear on his face when Jaxton pressed him for an answer he never gave, the way his mouth opened like the truth was sitting right there behind his teeth before his own body betrayed him and cut the moment short.

He was about to tell us something. Something important enough that his father apparently already knows about it, urgent enough to walk out here himself instead of sending a messenger.

Whatever Silas Ashcroft is walking his son toward right now, behind those closed doors, I have the sinking, certain feeling it has everything to do with me.