Chapter 7

POV: Wren

“Hold still, this will sting.”

Garrett didn’t hold still, because Garrett never held still for anything, and the gash along his forearm from last night’s patrol reopened half an inch the moment he flinched.

“Sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all.

“You will be, if this scars because you can’t sit through a cleaning.” I pressed the cloth harder than strictly necessary and watched him grit his teeth through it. “What happened out there?”

“Nothing got close enough to matter. Branch caught me wrong, chasing the trail.” He said it too fast, the way warriors always said things when they didn’t want to admit how close nothing had actually come to mattering. “Whatever howled last night, it knew the territory well enough to disappear before we got a fix on it.”

I didn’t ask more. The whole clinic had been busy since the howl, minor injuries from doubled patrols, warriors coming in tense and leaving tenser, and Dr. Halloway moving through all of it with a calm that felt less like reassurance the longer I watched her keep it up.

Nobody had mentioned Kade following me to the creek. I didn’t know if that was a mercy or just the pack having bigger things to worry about, and I decided not to examine which one I wanted it to be.

I finished with Garrett and moved through the rest of the morning on momentum alone, restocking, changing dressings, letting the work fill up the space in my head that kept wanting to come back to the way Kade had looked at me before that howl cut everything short. Work was easier than thinking. Work didn’t ask me to explain anything.

It was Tobias who noticed first, an hour later, when I was chopping willow bark faster than the task required and caught the blade wrong.

“Wren.”

“I’m fine.” I looked down at my palm, at the clean line the knife had opened across it, already welling red, and braced for the sting that always came a half second behind the cut.

The sting never really arrived. By the time I’d grabbed a cloth to press against it, the bleeding had already slowed to almost nothing, and by the time I actually looked, really looked, the line across my palm had closed to a thin pink seam that looked more like three days healed than three seconds.

I stared at my own hand as if it belonged to someone else.

“That looked worse than it was,” Tobias said, already reaching for the cloth. “Let me see.”

“It’s fine.” I pulled my hand back before he could get a good look, wrapped the cloth around it myself, tighter than the wound needed. “Barely broke skin.”

He gave me a look that said he didn’t entirely believe that, the same look he’d given me outside the clinic three days ago, but he let it go, because Tobias had never once needed an explanation twice and apparently wasn’t going to start demanding one now.

I kept the cloth on longer than necessary anyway, just in case.

The second thing happened an hour after that, in the storeroom, alone, and it should have unsettled me more than the cut did, except by then I’d already half convinced myself the cut was nothing, coincidence, adrenaline doing something strange to my perception of time.

I heard Dr. Halloway’s voice before I should have been able to. Not through the wall exactly, more like the sound arrived early, sharper and clearer than a closed door and thirty feet of hallway should have allowed, her voice and Marisol’s, low, tight, arguing about something I couldn’t quite catch the shape of before it faded back into ordinary muffled nothing.

I stood very still in the middle of the storeroom for a long moment, holding a jar of dried lavender I’d forgotten I was holding, listening to nothing at all.

I told myself it was exhaustion. Three sleepless nights, one rejection, one strange howl in the dark, and a body that had every right to start playing tricks on a mind this worn down.

I did not entirely believe myself, and some small, careful part of me that I didn’t examine too closely was already starting to keep a private tally.

By the time the clinic emptied for the evening, my leg ached ordinarily again, and my hand had healed into a scar so faint I had to hold it up to the lamp to convince myself it had ever been a wound at all. I told Dr. Halloway I’d lock up. She let me, distracted, still carrying whatever that argument with Marisol had left in her shoulders.

I washed the last of the basins alone, the clinic quiet in a way that usually settled me, and it was on my way past the small mirror by the door, the one we kept for patients checking stitches on their own faces, that I finally stopped.

My reflection looked back at me the way it always did. Tired. Ordinary. My mother’s jaw, my father’s dark hair, nothing that had ever earned a second glance from anyone in this pack except for the cane and the limp that came with it.

Then, for exactly half a second, my eyes weren’t brown.

Gold. Bright, molten, unmistakable, staring back at me out of my own face like something had finally decided it was done waiting quietly under the surface.

I blinked, and it was gone, my own tired brown eyes back where they belonged, and I stood there gripping the edge of the basin hard enough that my knuckles went white, staring at a reflection that looked completely ordinary and completely unfamiliar at the same time.