married to the wolf

What Cormac knew

Wren was moving before Rourke finished giving the order.

She'd spent two years stitching up border skirmish wounds in her clinic long before any of them knew her name was tied to a debt, and some instincts didn't care whose pack she'd married into. She grabbed her bag from the study — the one she'd started keeping by the door out of habit these past four days, as if some part of her had already known this house didn't run out of emergencies — and followed the night watch out into the dark at a run.

Cormac lay in the frost-stiff grass at the fence line, one hand still curled toward the wound in his side like he'd tried, uselessly, to hold himself together. Talia was already crouched over him, jaw tight, pressing a folded jacket hard against the bleeding. He was young — younger than Wren had pictured, maybe twenty, with a soft, unfinished look to his face that made the blood on him seem obscene.

"Silver," Talia said tightly, without looking up. "The blade that did this was silver-forged. That's not a wolf's claw wound. Someone used one of the old weapons on him."

Wren dropped to her knees beside him, hands already moving — pulse thready but present, breathing shallow but not yet failing. "Get me light. Now." She tore the jacket away and pressed her palms flat against the wound, feeling the wet heat of it soak through her sleeves in seconds. "Rourke, I need your hands here, steady, exactly where mine are — don't let up no matter what."

He didn't hesitate. He knelt across from her, pressing down where she guided him, his face inches from Cormac's, and for the first time since she'd met him, Wren saw something in Rourke Sinclair that wasn't command or grief or fury. Just a man doing exactly what he was told, because someone else finally knew more than he did in the moment that mattered.

"Cormac." Wren kept her voice low, steady, the same tone she used on frightened patients who didn't yet understand how close to the edge they were. "Cormac, can you hear me?"

His eyes fluttered. Found her face. Something like recognition moved through them — and something like terror close behind it.

"You," he rasped. "You're the — the doctor. The one they married him to."

"That's right. I need you to stay with me. Who did this to you?"

His hand found her wrist, grip weak but insistent, blood-slick fingers closing tight enough to leave a mark. "Didn't want — didn't want to hurt anyone. I swear. They said no one would get hurt. Just information. Just —" He coughed, and Wren felt Rourke's hands tense beneath her own, holding steady despite everything in him that must have wanted to shake the boy for answers instead of pressing wounds closed.

"Who told you that, Cormac?" Rourke's voice was gentler than Wren had ever heard it, gentler than she suspected he knew how to be with anyone but her. "Who gave you the coat? Who told you where to stand, what to listen for?"

"Don't know a name." His breath hitched, wet and uneven. "Never a name. Notes, under my door. Money, after. Told me my father's old debt would finally be — be settled, if I just listened, just told them what I heard in the house." His eyes swam, unfocused, then sharpened again with sudden, desperate clarity. "The ledger. They wanted to know if you'd found the ledger. Not the box — the ledger inside it. Said it was the only thing that mattered."

"What's in the ledger, Cormac?" Wren pressed harder against the wound, feeling him fading under her hands no matter how much pressure she gave. "What's important enough to kill you over?"

"Names," he whispered. "Not just — not just Callahans and Sinclairs. Other packs. Other families. Buyers." His grip on Wren's wrist went slack, then tightened once more, urgent, final. "They're not protecting a secret. They're protecting a client list. Twenty years of it. If that ledger surfaces, it doesn't just burn two families." His voice dropped to almost nothing. "It burns everyone who ever paid for silver."

His eyes rolled, lashes fluttering, and for one long, suspended second Wren thought she'd lost him entirely — until his breath caught, ragged but present, and his pulse under her fingers steadied into something thin but holding.

"He's stable," she said, though the words cost her more than she let show. "Barely. He needs surgery, real surgery, more than I can do in a field. Talia—"

"Litter's already coming," Talia said, voice rough. "Marguerite's clearing the healer's wing."

Rourke didn't move his hands from the wound even as the others arrived to lift Cormac between them, careful and grim, carrying him toward the house at a pace just short of running. He stayed crouched in the frost long after the boy was gone, staring at his own blood-soaked palms like they belonged to someone else.

"A client list," he said finally, quiet and hollow. "Twenty years of buyers. That's not a family secret anymore, Wren. That's every pack within three territories who's ever quietly armed themselves with silver they weren't supposed to have."

"Which means whoever's protecting it isn't just protecting your father's memory, or my father's debt." Wren helped him to his feet, her own hands trembling now that there was no wound left to steady them for. "They're protecting a network. People with resources. People who'd rather bury a boy at a fence line than risk a single name surfacing."

Rourke's eyes, when they met hers, had gone hard and clear in a way she hadn't seen since the night of the binding. "Then we're no longer looking for a thief," he said. "We're looking for whoever's willing to kill an entire generation of secrets to keep the last one buried. And they know now that we're close enough to be worth killing for."

Behind them, in the dark beyond the fence line, something moved through the trees and was gone before either of them turned to look.