married to the wolf

Blood on the border

For one frozen second, no one moved.

Rourke was still on one knee, blood dark against the mud beneath him, but his eyes had gone sharp and lethal in a way that made every instinct in Wren's body scream at her to run. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the man standing over him — tall, lean, with a smile that belonged on something far older and far less human than the face it was wearing.

"Kade," Rourke said, and the single word carried more contempt than Wren had thought a voice could hold. "You brought a war party across my border to deliver a message. Say it and get off my land."

"I came to see if the rumors were true." Kade's gaze slid from Rourke to Wren, unhurried, cataloguing her the way a man might catalogue a weapon he was deciding whether to use. "Everett Callahan's daughter, bound to the Sinclair Alpha, less than an hour after I hear whispers that the old fool finally got himself buried. That's either the worst timing I've ever witnessed, or the two of you are considerably more clever than anyone gave you credit for."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Wren said, and heard, distantly, how thin her own voice sounded against the torchlit clearing.

"Of course you don't." Kade's smile widened. "Your father sold me enough silver-forged rifles to burn through half of Sinclair's enforcer ranks over six years, girl, and he took my money every single time with that same wide-eyed *I don't know what you're talking about* look on his face. It's a family talent, apparently."

Rourke rose. It cost him — Wren felt the effort of it ripple through the bond, sharp and expensive, blood loss dragging at every motion — but he stood anyway, putting himself, deliberately, between Wren and the man across the clearing.

"You're outnumbered, Kade," Rourke said. "Three of my enforcers to your one exposed position. Say what you actually came to say, or leave while you still can."

Kade didn't look outnumbered. He looked, if anything, faintly amused by the arithmetic, which told Wren everything she needed to know about how confident he was in whatever backup he had waiting just past the treeline. "I came to say this. Your little truce doesn't fix what's broken between our packs, Sinclair. It buys you six months. Six months from now, when the binding lapses and the debt reactivates, I'll be back for the rest of what Everett owed me — and this time I won't be interested in weapons. I'll be interested in her."

The threat landed in the clearing like a dropped stone. Wren felt Rourke's fury spike through the bond so hard it made her flinch — not performed anger, not tactical posturing, but something genuinely, dangerously real.

"She is bound to my pack," Rourke said, very quietly, "which makes any claim you think you have on her a claim against me. Come back in six months looking to collect, and I promise you, Kade, you will not walk away from that conversation."

"We'll see." Kade inclined his head, unbothered, already retreating into the dark tree line with the same unhurried calm he'd arrived with. "Enjoy your six months, Alpha. I hear mate-bonds make everything so much more... complicated, once real feelings get involved. Do give my regards to the rest of the Callahan ledger, whenever you find it. I imagine there's quite a lot in there neither of you is going to enjoy reading."

He was gone before Rourke could respond, swallowed into the dark with his war party falling silently in behind him, and the clearing went quiet except for the low crackle of torches and the ragged sound of Rourke's breathing.

"Sit down," Wren said, already moving toward him, doctor-instinct overriding every other instinct in her body. "Before you fall down, and I have to explain to your entire pack why their new Alpha's mate let him bleed out making threats at a torchlit clearing."

"I'm fine."

"You are not fine. You're gray, and I can feel exactly how much pain you're in, so don't bother lying to me — you're the one who told me the bond doesn't allow that particular luxury." She dropped her bag in the mud and got to work, cutting his shirt away from the wound with quick, practiced motions, ignoring the way his enforcers hovered at the edge of her vision, clearly uncertain whether to trust a human doctor with their Alpha's life.

The wound was worse than she'd expected — deep, ragged, clearly from claws rather than a blade, already knitting at the edges with the accelerated healing she'd read about in medical journals but never actually witnessed. Still, it needed cleaning, and needed it now, before infection set in faster than even werewolf physiology could outpace.

"You came out here against my order," Rourke said, watching her work through the pain with an intensity that made her hands, for one unsteady second, less than perfectly steady.

"I felt you get hurt. I told your elder I was coming and she let me go, because apparently the bond doesn't just transmit fear — it transmits enough that even she thought ignoring it would be a mistake." Wren pressed a clean cloth against the wound, firm and unapologetic about the way he hissed through his teeth. "You can be angry about it later, once you're not actively bleeding into the mud."

Something that might have been a laugh, low and pained, escaped him. "You're not what I expected, Dr. Callahan."

"You expected a liar and a coward, given what you know about my father."

"I expected," he said, "someone who'd run the first chance she got. Instead you ran toward a battlefield to patch up a man you met four hours ago, who accused your dead father of arming his enemies in the same breath he asked you to marry him." His pale eyes held hers, steady despite the pain visibly radiating through him. "I don't know what to make of that yet. I don't know what to make of you yet."

"Then we're even," Wren said quietly, finishing the wrap on his shoulder with hands that had finally steadied. "Because I don't know what to make of a bond that lets me feel a stranger's fear like it's my own, or a rival Alpha who seems to think my father left behind a lot more trouble than a single burned ledger page."

Rourke's expression shifted — something guarded settling back over his face, the warmth of a moment ago folding closed like a door. "Kade doesn't make idle threats. If he says there's more in that ledger, there's more in that ledger, and we need to find whatever's left of it before he does — because whatever your father was really doing with Ashgrove, I don't think six weeks of raids was the whole plan."

"What do you mean, the whole plan?"

"I mean," Rourke said, letting one of his enforcers help him to his feet, weight braced carefully off the wounded shoulder, "that Kade didn't come to this border tonight to deliver a threat about six months from now. He came to see if you existed. He came to confirm something he'd only heard rumors about — which means someone told him you'd be here, tonight, at exactly the hour the binding was happening." His gaze swept the tree line, sharp and assessing, before settling back on her with a weight that made her stomach drop. "Which means, Dr. Callahan, that someone inside my own pack has been talking to Ashgrove — and I intend to find out exactly who, before they get the chance to talk again."