Chapter 1: Wren
The knock came at 3:07am.
Three hard raps. Then a fourth, frantic, like whoever stood on the other side had run out of patience and into panic.
I swung my legs off the cot in the back room of my clinic, grabbed the scalpel from the nightstand, and slid it into my sleeve. I'd lived alone at the edge of Dunmere territory for five years. Nobody knocked at 3am with good news.
"We're closed," I called.
"Wren Hollis." A man's voice, rough and wrecked. "Please."
My stomach dropped through the floor.
I knew that voice.
Tobias Reyes-Marsh, Beta of the Ironfang pack. He used to steal pastries from my mother's kitchen and blame the dog.
I crossed the clinic in the dark, flipped the lock, and opened the door.
Rain poured off the porch roof in sheets.
Six wolves in human skin stood in the downpour, soaked to the bone, and none of them looked at me. They were all looking at the thing they carried between them on a stretcher made from a torn tent canvas.
Not a thing. A man.
Kieran Voss.
Five years. I'd imagined this moment in a hundred ways, and in most of them I was wearing something better and holding a drink I could throw in his face.
None of them involved him gray-skinned and barely breathing, with black veins crawling up his neck like ink spreading through water.
"No," I said. "Absolutely not. Take him to the city hospital."
"We tried," Tobe said. His voice cracked. "Two healers. Both said they don't know what it is, and they said he won't survive the drive." He finally met my eyes. His were red-rimmed. "You're the only one who might."
"Two seasoned healers couldn’t save him, so you came to the one who hates him?"
"Wren." The woman at the head of the stretcher stepped forward, and my breath caught.
Isla Voss. Kieran's little sister, who had been a gangly seventeen the last time I saw her, and who was now tall and fierce and soaked through, with a face that was every bit her brother's.
She wasn't crying, but she looked like she'd forgotten how. "Please. I'm not asking as his sister. I'm asking as someone who's been begging the moon for an hour."
Behind her, a broad man with a scarred jaw gave me a flat look. Brandt. The pack's enforcer. He had been in the crowd five years ago, the day Kieran stood in the center of the Ironfang gathering hall and said the words that ended my life as I knew it.
I reject you, Wren Hollis, as my mate and my Luna.
Brandt had smiled when Kieran said it. I remembered that. I remembered everything about that day. The silence, the stares, the way my knees stayed locked because I refused to let them buckle in front of all those people.
Kieran hadn't looked at me while he said it. He'd looked at a point over my shoulder, like I was already gone.
Now he lay in the rain with his head tilted toward me, and his breath rattled.
"Give me one reason," I said, "why I shouldn't close this door."
Maybe I sounded cruel to a pack whose Alpha was dying on my porch.
But I couldn’t have cared less.
Their Alpha had torn our bond apart in front of the whole pack, and he hadn't had the spine to meet my eyes while he did it.
Nobody answered. The rain answered, and the long, awful wheeze of a dying man.
I should have shut the door.
I want to be honest about that, because I'm going to tell you this story the way it happened, not the way it makes me look good.
I was a healer. I'd taken an oath. But I'd also spent five years building a life with my own two hands after a man took the old one apart in front of everyone I knew, and no oath was supposed to cover that.
Kieran opened his eyes.
They were the same. That was the worst part. Dark gray, the color of the sky before a storm.
On the stretcher, his lips moved. No sound, but I knew the shape of it. I'd have known it anywhere.
Wren.
The bond tugged in my chest, hard and insistent, and I hated it for how easily it answered him. That wasn't what decided me though.
I closed my eyes and counted to three.
What decided me was my oath.
I'd sworn it at nineteen, in my mother's clinic, with my hand over my heart and two hundred generations of Hollis healers watching from the portraits on the wall.
I will not turn away the dying. I will not choose who deserves to live.
Every word of it dug into me deeper than any bond could, because the bond was something done to me. The oath was something I had chosen.
I would not let the name Hollis be the one that left a dying man on the porch because he'd broken my heart once.
He was just a wounded man, and I was a healer.
When I opened my eyes, six wolves were still watching me like I was the last lifeboat on a sinking ship.
"Fine."
The relief that went through them was almost violent. Isla let out a sound that was half sob, half laugh. Tobe sagged against the porch post.
I stepped back and pushed the door wide. "Bring him in. Back room, the long table, and be careful of his head. Not all of you, I'm not running a parade. Tobe, Isla, and you two with the stretcher. The rest of you wait on the porch."
Brandt's jaw tightened. "We're not leaving our Alpha alone with—"
"With the person who's about to save his life?" I turned and gave him my most pleasant smile. "You're welcome to take him to a hospital that can't help him. Be my guest."
He stayed on the porch.
They laid Kieran on my exam table and the wood groaned under his weight. Up close, it was worse. Sweat beaded his forehead, his lips had a bluish tinge, and the black lines had reached his jaw.
When I pressed two fingers to his throat, his pulse fluttered under them like a trapped bird.
And the bond pulled. Every nerve in my hand knew exactly who it was touching, and exactly how long it had been.
I yanked my hand back like I'd been burned.
"Is it bad?" Isla asked.
"It's bad." I snapped on my gloves and gave them a sharp look. "No one lies to me. Not even once. How long has he been like this?"
"Since yesterday morning." Tobe swallowed. "He collapsed in the middle of a council meeting. Wren, there's something else."
My hands paused over the vial. "What?"
Tobe hesitated. "When the first healer arrived, Kieran was still awake. Barely. He wouldn't let her treat him. He said one thing, over and over, until he lost consciousness." Tobe's eyes held mine. "He kept saying 'Get Wren.'"
The needle rattled against the glass.
Five years ago, this dying man had told an entire pack I was nothing to him. He'd made me walk out of the only home I'd ever known with every eye on my back.
And now, dying, he was asking for me by name.
I looked down at the face I'd spent half a decade hating, and the thread in my chest hummed like a plucked string.
Fuck you, Kieran.
