Marked

Marked *Chapter 2*

## EMMA

---

The clinic had been closed for two hours.

Emma was still there because her apartment had a leak in the ceiling and a neighbor who played guitar badly at unpredictable hours, and because the paperwork wasn't going to file itself, and because — if she was being honest — she didn't have anywhere else to be.

She was updating patient records when the door exploded inward.

Not opened. *Exploded* — the lock giving way, the frame cracking, the whole thing slamming against the wall hard enough to dent the plaster.

Two men. One upright, one not.

The upright one was tall, dark-haired, moving with controlled urgency. He had the other man's arm over his shoulders and was half-dragging him through the ruined doorway. Blood everywhere — soaking through the injured man's shirt, smearing on the floor, dripping from wounds she couldn't see yet but could already tell were bad.

"I need help," the upright one said. "Now."

"The clinic is closed —"

"Does he look like he cares about your opening hours?"

She was moving before she finished deciding to. Training overriding everything else. She grabbed gloves from the dispenser, snapped them on, and helped him haul the injured man onto the examination table.

Up close, the damage was worse than she'd thought. Deep lacerations across the chest and shoulder. The kind of wounds that looked like claws. Like something with claws had torn into him.

"What happened?"

"Doesn't matter. Can you help him?"

"This needs a trauma surgeon. This needs an OR. I'm a GP, I don't have the equipment for —"

"Then figure it out." His voice was sharp. Impatient. "Save the inadequacy crisis for later. He doesn't have time for it."

Emma looked at the man on the table. Pale. Too pale. His breathing shallow, his pulse thready and weak.

He was dying.

"Fine," she said. "Keep pressure on that wound. Surgical kit, top shelf. And if he dies, I'm going to be very annoyed with you."

"Noted."

She got to work.

---

The world narrowed to the work.

Her hands, the wound, the next suture, the next clamp. She talked to herself under her breath, an old habit. *Okay, that's arterial, clamp it. Good. This tissue is —*

She paused. Blinked.

The tissue was knitting. Slowly, but visibly — the edges of the wound pulling together like time-lapse footage of healing. That wasn't possible. That wasn't how bodies worked.

His temperature was wrong too. She'd noticed it when she first touched him — hot, fever-hot, but his skin wasn't clammy. No signs of infection. Just heat radiating off him like a furnace.

And the blood. It smelled different. She couldn't have said how, exactly. Just — *wrong*. Or not wrong. *Other*.

She filed it away. Kept working. Whatever was happening, he was still bleeding, still dying. The impossible details could wait.

Then his bones started to move.

She felt it under her hands — a shifting, a *rearranging* — and stumbled back as his body began to change. Muscles rippling. Bones cracking, reforming. His face elongating, fur sprouting across skin, fingers curling into paws.

The man on her table was becoming a wolf.

Emma stood frozen. Her mind went blank — completely, utterly blank — and some distant part of her noted that this was probably shock, that she should be screaming or running or —

The wolf whimpered. Blood was still seeping from the wound in its side. Its eyes — pale grey, the same grey as before — found hers.

*It's still him*, she thought. *He's still dying.*

She stepped back to the table.

"Okay," she heard herself say. "Okay. f**k. Okay."

She kept working.

The dark-haired man helped when told. Held pressure. Passed instruments. Didn't speak except to answer direct questions. If he was surprised she hadn't run screaming, he didn't show it.

*How long ago.* Thirty minutes. *Has he lost consciousness.* Twice. *What the f**k is he.* Silence.

She didn't know how long it took. Long enough that her shoulders ached and her gloves had to be changed twice. Long enough that the wolf shifted back to a man somewhere in the middle — bones cracking again, fur receding — and she just kept suturing like this was normal, like any of this was normal.

But eventually — finally — the bleeding stopped. Vitals stabilizing.

Emma stepped back. Stripped off her gloves.

"He's stable. He needs a hospital. A real one, with imaging and —"

"No hospital."

"He almost *died* —"

"And now he's not dying. Thanks." The word was clipped. Acknowledgment and dismissal in one. "No hospital. Trust me — they couldn't help him anyway."

"What does that —"

The man on the table stirred. His eyes flickered open — pale grey, sharp despite the pain — and he was already trying to push himself upright.

"Don't." Emma put a hand on his chest. "You were dying twenty minutes ago. Lie down."

He ignored her, struggling to sit. "Declan. What did you do."

"Saved your life. You're welcome."

"Where —" The grey eyes moved, taking in the clinic, the equipment, Emma in her blood-soaked scrubs. "This is a human clinic."

"Your powers of observation remain unparalleled, Nash. Yes. Human clinic. Human doctor. Best I could do given that Hernandez is dead and you were bleeding out in my truck."

The words landed hard. Nash's expression flickered — grief, quickly buried.

"They got to him first?"

"Before anyone could react. Cal's been at the site. He's on his way here."

Nash closed his eyes. "You called him."

"Of course I called him. You almost died."

"He's going to —"

"He's going to be relieved you're alive."

"Declan —"

"He's already on his way."

Nash groaned. Actually groaned. The sound of a man who'd survived a near-fatal attack and somehow found this news worse.

"That bad?" Emma heard herself ask.

Declan's mouth twitched. "Let's just say our Alpha has strong feelings about people he cares about getting hurt. And Nash here is one of his favourites."

*Alpha*. There was that word again. What the hell was an Alpha?

"I'm no one's favorite," Nash muttered.

"You're everyone's favorite. It's incredibly annoying."

Emma looked between them. Wolves. They were wolves. The man on her table had turned into a wolf and back again, and now they were talking about an *Alpha* like that was a normal thing, and she was standing here covered in blood that smelled wrong, and —

The door opened.