The Alpha's Doctor.

Chapter Twelve — The Run

Zara's POV

My father left on Sunday morning.

He came by the apartment at nine with his coat on and his travel bag over his shoulder and the expression of a man who had made a decision he was not entirely comfortable with but had made anyway. I had been awake since seven — the dream had seen to that, the same way it had seen to every morning since Friday, leaving me at 2AM with tangled sheets and a warm mark on my collarbone and no interest whatsoever in going back to sleep.

I had made tea. I had drunk it. I had stood at my window and watched the Sunday morning city and not thought about certain things with great concentration and moderate success.

He knocked even though he had a key. That was James Osei — he had boundaries and he kept them even when he was frightened.

I opened the door.

He looked at me the way he had been looking at me since Friday night. The doctor's assessment running underneath the father's relief, cataloguing things he had not yet decided what to do with. I was used to it. I had inherited the habit from him.

"I have a flight," he said.

"I know," I said. "Come in."

He came in. Did not sit down. Stood in my living room with his bag over his shoulder looking at me with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously.

"Come to London," he said. "A week. Two weeks. You have the time off and you should not be here alone and—"

"Dad," I said.

"Zara."

"I am fine," I said. "I promise you I am fine. I need to be here. I need my space and my routine and to be in my own place." I crossed the room and put my hand on his arm. "Go. I will call you every day."

He looked at me for a long moment. The kind of look that contained an entire conversation he had decided not to have yet.

"Every day," he said.

"Every day," I confirmed.

He pulled me into another hug — briefer than Friday night but no less complete. Then he stepped back. Straightened his coat. Picked up his bag.

"Something happened to you out there," he said quietly. Not an accusation. Just a fact he was leaving on the table between us. "When you are ready to tell me what it was I will be here."

I said nothing.

He nodded once. And left.

I stood at my window and watched him get into the cab below and watched the cab pull away and felt the particular quality of alone that was different from solitude — the kind that arrived after someone who loved you left and took their particular warmth with them.

I stood there for approximately four minutes.

Then I changed into my running clothes.

I was not a dedicated runner. I ran because it was efficient — a good cardiovascular workout that required no equipment and no scheduling and could be done at any hour when the alternative was lying in bed not sleeping. I ran three times a week on a good week. I had a route. Forty minutes. Consistent pace. Nothing remarkable.

I stepped outside into the Sunday morning air and started running.

For the first two minutes it was normal.

Then something shifted.

I did not notice it immediately — it crept up on me the way the change in a patient's vitals sometimes crept up before the monitors caught it. My pace increased without my deciding to increase it. My legs were doing something they had not been asked to do — eating up the pavement with a efficiency that felt different from trained effort. Easier. More natural. Like running was suddenly the thing my body had always been designed for and had simply been waiting for permission.

I ran past my usual turning point.

Kept going.

Past the park. Past the market that was just setting up its Sunday stalls. Down toward the riverside where I almost never went because it added fifteen minutes to the route and I was usually conserving energy by that point.

I was not conserving energy. I had energy I did not know what to do with — a restless, physical surplus that the running was addressing but not resolving. Like something in me needed more than forty minutes of pavement. More than a route. More than the ordinary metrics of ordinary exercise.

I ran for an hour and ten minutes.

When I finally stopped — at a bench by the river I had not visited in two years — I stood with my hands on my knees and waited for the breathlessness that should have followed an hour of running at that pace.

It was minimal. A few deep breaths. A slightly elevated heart rate that settled faster than it had any right to.

I straightened up.

Looked at the river.

Filed it under the growing list of things I was not examining right now and started walking home.

The walk back gave my mind exactly the kind of unoccupied space it had been trying to avoid all morning.

He filled it immediately.

Not dramatically — not the dream version of him, not the war room version. Just the question that had been sitting at the back of my mind since the helicopter. Whether the wound site was closing correctly. Whether anyone had checked the fragment near his spine. Whether the tissue around it was healing in alignment or whether there was pressure building that his extraordinary physiology might not register as pain until it became something more serious.

I was his doctor.

That was why I was thinking about it. Professional responsibility. A surgeon did not simply operate on a patient and walk away — there was follow up, there was monitoring, there was a standard of care that did not evaporate because the patient in question lived in a mountain and had asked her to leave and she had — eventually, after a scalpel was involved — been allowed to go.

I thought about his grey eyes finding her first across every room.

I thought about his mouth on the mark.

I walked faster.

I was thinking about him as a patient. That was all. I was his doctor and I had no way to contact him and no way to follow up on his care and that was a professional failing that sat badly with me and that was the entirety of what I was feeling about the situation.

I was aware I was lying to myself.

I was also aware that I was going to continue lying to myself because the alternative required examining things I was not ready to examine on a Sunday morning on a riverside walk after running faster than humanly possible for over an hour.

I went home.

Made food I mostly ate. Read four pages of my book. Sat on my sofa and looked at my apartment ceiling and thought about a man whose healing I could not monitor and whose wolf had bitten her collarbone and whose voice saying her name in a corridor still lived in her chest in a place she had not found a way to evict it from yet.

Felt bad for thinking about him as a woman.

Felt bad for thinking about him as a doctor who had left a patient without proper follow up.

Felt bad in two completely different directions simultaneously which was a new and unwelcome experience.

Night came.

I went to bed.

And the dream came with it — the same dream, the same dark warmth, the same grey eyes finding her before anything else — and I woke at 2AM with my hand pressed flat against the mark and the city dark outside my window and the knowledge that tomorrow was going to be exactly the same.

I turned over.

Closed my eyes.

And waited for morning.