I don't remember choosing a direction.

One moment I was standing in the ravine with three dead wolves at my feet, silver fur still bristling along my spine, steam rising off the blood in the snow. The next, I was running again—but not away this time. Toward something.

My wolf had her nose up before I understood why. A scent had cut through the wind, faint but insistent, and every muscle in my body was already answering it before my human brain caught up. Cedar. Iron. Something underneath both of them that hummed against my teeth like a live wire.

*Go,* she said inside our shared skull. Not urgent. Certain. *Go.*

I ran a mile through frozen pines with fur still receding in patches down my shoulders, half-shifted, blood freezing along my ribs. The scent grew sharper. Cedar deepening into something clean. Iron thickening into what I recognized, finally, as fresh blood.

I came over a rise and stopped.

Below me, a massive pine had come down across a small clearing, its trunk thick as a car. Bodies lay around it in the snow—four, five, hard to count, all torn open in ways that spoke of a fight I would not have wanted to watch. And beneath the fallen tree, pinned at the chest, was a wolf.

Not a wolf. A Lycan.

He was midnight-black and enormous, larger even than I had been in the ravine, and his form was flickering—fur receding in patches to skin, then surging back, then receding again, the way a body shifts when it's dying and can't hold shape. His flank rose and fell in shallow, uneven pulls. Silver had been driven into his chest. I could see the fragments glinting through torn fur, three shards at least, one of them frighteningly close to the sternum.

My wolf did not hesitate. She shoved me back into my own skin so hard I hit the snow on my knees, naked and shaking, the last of the silver-white fur melting off my arms in the cold air.

I crawled to him.

My hands were useless at first—wolfsbane tremor, shock, cold. I clenched them into fists and forced them open. Clenched. Opened. The old drill for restoring fine motor control after nerve trauma. I had taught it to Ironveil warriors after frostbite. I taught it to myself now.

The suture kit was still knotted into the strip of gown I'd tied around my thigh. I pulled it free with my teeth. Rolled it open in the snow. Scalpel, forceps, curved needle, silk thread, a single vial of clotting powder I'd stolen weeks ago and never gotten to use.

I heated the scalpel blade against a rock and the friction of my own palms until the metal warmed enough to sear tissue.

"I'm sorry," I whispered to the unconscious Lycan beneath the tree. My voice was raw from the roar. "This is going to hurt."

I worked.

First fragment came out easy—shallow, near the collarbone. I cauterized as I went, the smell of scorched fur bitter in my nose. Second fragment was deeper, wedged against a rib. I braced my knee against his shoulder and pulled slow, steady, the way I'd been taught, and the silver came loose with a wet click. Blood welled up dark. I pressed clotting powder into the wound with the flat of my thumb.

The third piece was the one that would kill him.

It sat a finger's width from the wall of his heart, angled inward, and every shallow breath he took drove it closer. I could feel my hands trying to shake. I made them still. I made them still the way I had made my face still on Viktor Crane's dirt floor. I made them still the way I had made myself still for five years in a pack house that had never once been mine.

The forceps closed. The silver slid free.

I got the clotting powder on before the bleed could open properly, stitched the entry with three quick sutures, and sat back on my heels in the snow, gasping.

His form stopped flickering. The fur held. His breathing evened.

And then, without warning, his eyes opened.

They were gold. Not amber, not hazel—gold, the color of old coins, and they focused on my face with a clarity that had no business belonging to a man who had been dying thirty seconds earlier.

He looked at me. All of me. The blood crusted along my hairline. The bruises around my wrists where the zip ties had cut. The bare feet torn open on frozen ground. The silver-white shimmer still fading from the crown of my head. The cold, hollow place on my neck where a mark used to live.

I waited for him to ask what I was. Waited for him to ask why I was naked in the snow with a scalpel in my hand. Waited for him to ask, at minimum, my name.

He didn't.

His voice, when it came, was low and rough and steady as a struck bell.

"Who," he said, "did this to you?"

I stared at him.

Something inside my chest—something I thought had died on a pack house floor five years ago, something Sterling had spoken cold and something Connor had injected quiet—shifted, very slightly, in its grave.

I didn't answer him.

I couldn't.

His eyes stayed on mine until they slid shut again, and his breathing dropped into the deep, slow rhythm of a body finally allowed to heal.