Chapter 4
He asked me at the end of a twelve-hour shift, when my hands smelled like yarrow and my back ached in that specific way that meant I'd been hunched over a cot for too long.
"Come on a run with me."
I looked up from the supply log. Nicholas was leaning in the clinic doorway, still in his jacket, like he'd been waiting for a natural pause and had decided there wasn't going to be one.
"It's past midnight," I said.
"I know."
I looked at him for a moment. Then I set down the pen.
The Outlands at night were different from Silver Moon's manicured territory — wilder, less certain, the kind of dark that didn't apologize for itself. The moon was high and full, throwing silver across the grass in long, uneven patches. I could hear the distant sound of the rogue camp settling into sleep, the low murmur of a fire somewhere to the east.
Nicholas shifted without ceremony. No performance, no slow display of dominance the way pack Alphas usually managed their transformations in front of others. One moment he was standing beside me, and then he wasn't — and in his place was the largest wolf I'd seen outside of a formal challenge. Midnight black, almost invisible against the dark except where the moonlight caught the edges of his coat. He turned his head and looked at me with those same steady dark eyes.
Sera moved.
Not the flinch she'd developed over years of Trevor's aura. Not the wounded retreat into silence. She moved the way she used to move when I was young and the world hadn't finished with me yet — a full-body shift, like something shaking itself awake after a very long sleep.
I pressed two fingers to my wrist. Old habit. Grounding reflex.
I shifted.
It hurt less than I expected. My wolf form had been sluggish for months, the transformation slow and reluctant, like a door with a warped frame. Tonight it opened cleanly. I landed on four paws in the wet grass and felt the night air hit me differently — richer, layered, full of information my human senses couldn't hold.
Nicholas didn't move toward me. He waited.
That was the thing I kept noticing about him. He waited. Not with the pointed patience of someone performing restraint, but with the genuine stillness of a man who had decided that my pace was the only pace that mattered.
We ran.
I don't have better words for what happened in the next hour. The ground under my paws, the cold air, the way the moonlight moved through the grass as we crossed the open field north of the camp. Sera ran like she was remembering something. Like joy was a muscle she'd forgotten she had, and the memory of it was coming back in pieces — first the shape of it, then the feeling, then the full, aching reality of it.
At some point Nicholas pulled ahead, then circled back. Not herding. Just present. A warm, steady mass moving alongside me in the dark.
We stopped at the ridge above the eastern camp, where the tree line broke and you could see the whole stretch of Outlands laid out below, silver and quiet. I shifted back. So did he.
For a while neither of us said anything.
"Your wolf," he said finally. "She's been hurt."
It wasn't a question. I didn't treat it like one.
"Yes."
"She's still there, though." He said it simply, like a fact he'd confirmed and was reporting back to me. "She's still whole."
I looked out at the dark below us. Sera was quiet again, but it was a different quiet now — not the folded-inward absence of the last few years. Something warmer. Something that felt, cautiously, like rest.
"I'm not going anywhere," Nicholas said. "I want you to know that. Not asking for anything. Not on any timeline." A pause. "Just — I'm here."
I didn't answer right away. I was thinking about Trevor's voice in the dark of our bedroom, warm and easy, drifting through the walls while I lay on the floor alone. I was thinking about what it had cost me to believe that patience and endurance were the same thing.
"Okay," I said.
It was the most I could give him. He seemed to understand that it was also the most I'd given anyone in a very long time.
We walked back to camp in silence, and it was the comfortable kind.
---
Three days later, my brother called.
Daniel's voice came through the phone tight and careful, the way it got when he was trying not to alarm me before he had to.
"Maddie." A breath. "I've been clearing out your old office. The infirmary one." Another pause, longer. "There was a loose board under the cabinet. Behind the back wall."
I went still.
"I found your logs," he said. "The original ones. From before." His voice dropped. "And Emely's notes. Her actual notes, Maddie. Unedited. All of it."
The night air felt suddenly very cold.
"They prove everything," Daniel said quietly. "Every single thing."
I pressed two fingers to my wrist and stared at the clinic wall and didn't say anything for a long moment.
Ten years. The weight of ten years, sitting in a loose floorboard, waiting.
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