The door clicked shut soft and final, sealing the medical bay off from the corridor’s residual chaos. Damian’s quiet plea lingered suspended in the sterile air, thick, unspoken, heavier than any battlefield command he’d ever issued.
The Wolf of concrete and blood and unyielding territory—king of every hard, brutal thing in his world—had begged me to survive.
The thought drained me more thoroughly than blood loss, more than the splitting pressure still coiled tight behind my eyes.
I did not rest.
Not truly.
I drifted in a thin, toxic haze of antiseptic and starched linen, my fractured mind looping endlessly over the night’s c*****e. The sharp shatter of bullet-riddled glass. The hot metallic copper flooding my throat. Leah’s scream, raw and frayed, splitting the room like torn fabric.
