All Chapters of Bring Him to His Knees: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

ROANThe 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 instinc

SLOANE I leave the patrol crisis in Kieran’s hands, which tells you something about how much I trust him, and how little patience I have left over for anything that isn’t figuring out exactly what Roan’s sickness is worth to me. Corvin wanted me to stay and run the search myself. I told him Kieran could find three missing wolves without me standing over his shoulder, and that I had somewhere else I needed to be first. Nora’s house looks the same as it did two years ago, right down to the pine trees blocking it from the road, and some stubborn part of me still expects to feel like a frightened girl the moment I step inside instead of an Alpha who could level the place if she wanted to. She doesn’t seem surprised to see me. Nora is rarely surprised by anything, which used to comfort me and now, for reasons I can’t quite name, makes me uneasy in a way I don’t examine too closely. “You found something,” she says, not a question, already moving toward the kitchen table like she knew I’d

SLOANE We shift at the tree line, and the pain is instant, bone grinding into new shape until my mouth fills with the copper taste of my own blood from biting down on the scream I refuse to let out loud. Then it’s over, and I’m on four legs instead of two, and the world comes back sharper, wet green earth, cold biting through fur, Kieran’s heartbeat steady at my flank. “Which way”, I ask him, the words shaped from intent instead of sound. Kieran noses east, toward the ridge. Their trail starts here. We run. There’s nothing like it, my whole body a single moving thought, no council, no letters, no ache behind my ribs that isn’t purely physical. For one stretch of trees I let myself forget I’m anything but an animal built to move fast and low and hungry for ground. Then the trail dies. We slow into a small clearing and every hair on my body goes rigid at once. The grass lies flattened in a wide, deliberate circle. Under the pine and wet dirt there’s a smell that doesn’t bel

ROAN The drive back from Ashborn takes longer than it should. Roth doesn't speak the entire way, arms crossed, jaw set, radiating the particular offense of a man who was made to wait in a courtyard like a stranger on his own alliance business. The other elder, Ilsa, keeps glancing at me in the mirror like she's waiting for me to explain myself, and I don't have anything worth giving her. I watch the trees blur past instead, and I let myself feel, for the length of the drive, exactly how badly that conversation went. I want you safe.” I actually said it. Out loud, in that same bare room, two years of careful silence undone in under a minute because some reckless, exhausted part of me decided honesty was worth the cost of her fury. It was. I still think it was. That doesn't make the drive home any easier. "She threw us out," Roth says finally, once we're far enough from Ashborn's border that he apparently feels safe saying it. "An hour of waiting, and she threw us out like dogs." "

I take him to my office rather than the bare room I use for Roan, because some instinct I don't examine too closely refuses to let those two rooms mean the same thing. It's smaller. Warmer. A fire already dying down in the grate from earlier in the evening, before any of tonight happened. He takes it in slowly, the way he takes in everything — unhurried, assessing, like he's cataloging exits and weaknesses and the exact number of steps to my desk without ever appearing to look for any of it. "Sit," I say, "or don't. I don't particularly care which." "Generous." He sits anyway, folding himself into the chair across from my desk with an ease that makes the furniture look like it was built for him instead of for me. "You hit hard, for someone your size." "You'll want to remember that." "Believe me." Something flickers behind the gold of his eyes, there and gone too fast to name. "I already have." I sit across from him and make myself breathe evenly, because there's somethin