[Dylan’s POV]
The clinic lights are off, which is how I know something's wrong. Skyler doesn't leave early.
She works until the fluorescents buzz loud enough to drown whatever's in her head, then works twenty more minutes for good measure.
I find her on a step stool in the supply closet at the end of the hall, rearranging bottles into alphabetical order—reorganizing medical supplies at 9PM is a clear cry for help.
I lean against the doorframe, arms crossed, going for casual-and-unbothered when neither word applies. "I leave for three days and you redecorate."
"Someone had to, the ibuprofen was behind the gauze." She doesn't turn around. "How was the border?"
"Boring and territorial—two wolves arguing about a creek nobody's used since 1987." I step inside. "What happened while I was gone?"
Her hands pause on a bottle of antiseptic—one breath, two—then resume. "Kailani reassigned me to the kitchen."
"Did she?" She places the bottle on the shelf with surgical precision before answering.
"Yeah. And the twins were sent to communal care, east wing. Enforcers came to the school. Ashton—he fought them, Dylan. He's six and he fought two grown wolves because they were dragging River out and nobody was stopping it."
Something cold floods down my spine and settles in my fists. I uncurl them deliberately, then curl them again because the alternative is putting one through the nearest shelf.
"Pulled him off by the arm, carried him out." Her voice flattens the way voices do when they're holding something too heavy to inflect. "River screamed the whole way. I could hear her from the kitchen."
I'm going to kill someone. I haven't decided who, but the list is forming—clear, ranked—and every name on it works for Kailani—
"I went to her and begged." Skyler's back is still turned, her hands moving over bottles she's already sorted. "She smiled the entire time, glad I'd finally remembered my place."
"Skyler—" I start, but she turns around and the look on her face stops me mid-step—exhausted, calm, held together by something I'm not allowed to test.
"Alpha Leon reversed it within the hour. Kids are back. So am I." She lifts her chin. "It's handled."
The anger doesn't leave. It reshapes—from a blade into something heavy and permanent that locks into my jaw. I breathe through it because she's watching, because the last thing she needs is my fury stacked on top of everything she's already carrying.
I pick up a box of supplies from the floor instead, glad to put my hands to use. "Where do these go—top shelf, bottom?"
"You don't have to…" she starts, but I'm already holding the box like a man with a mission.
"I need direction, because my medical knowledge peaks at 'put a bandage on it and hope for the best.'"
She smiles at me—warm, real, bright enough to rearrange the entire dim room around it—and something inside me goes quiet. I stare at her a beat too long, holding the box, the anger in my jaw dissolving into something I have no name for.
"Top shelf," she says, and I blink back to the task. "Ointments left, oral medications right."
We work without talking until the quiet loosens on its own. She passes me a brown bottle, our fingers brushing over the label. "High shelf, I can't reach."
I stretch to the top rack, place the bottle, and turn back to find her watching me with something unguarded in her expression. "What was that one for?"
"Joint supplement." She tucks hair behind her ear, and the clinical tone softens. "We had a wolf come in last month—eighty-three, completely convinced he was dying because his joints ached."
"Terminal," I say gravely. Her lips press together against a sound that wants out, shoulders dropping an inch.
"I spent twenty minutes explaining the concept of arthritis, he kept asking if it was a curse. Finally admitted he wasn't there about the pain—his wife died last spring, his house is too quiet, he wanted someone to sit with."
"What did you do?" I ask, and the softness that crosses her face when she answers nearly undoes me.
"Made him tea, let him stay until closing." She glances sideways. "He comes every Thursday now—brings cookies and complains about his neighbor's dog."
"You gave a man a standing appointment for loneliness—that is the most aggressively kind thing I've ever heard." I lean against the counter, watching her, and I stop pretending I'm not.
"It's good medicine," she says, facing me now—when did that happen? "People don't always come in for the problem they think they have."
"I know exactly what you mean." I cross my arms, grinning. "Two elders showed up last year—fence six inches past the property line, fighting about it for thirty years."
Her eyebrows climb so high they nearly leave her forehead entirely. "Thirty years over six inches?"
"Checked the survey, both wrong, both right—moved the fence, told each of them they won." I shrug. "Still hate each other, but happily."
She laughs—warm and unguarded—and I lose whatever I was about to say. The closet light catches the silver in her hair and she's gesturing with both hands, tracing shapes in the air, alive in a way that makes me forget we're standing between antiseptic and gauze.
I just watch her. The thought I've been circling for weeks stops circling and lands: this woman makes me want to be the version of myself that deserves her.
Not the Beta, not Leon's younger brother, not the charming second son. The version who's steady enough, brave enough, enough.
"Come on." My voice comes out rougher than planned, scraped raw by something I'm not naming yet. "I'll walk you back."
The hallway is dim—half the lights out for weeks—and the darkness makes the walk more intimate than it deserves. Our footsteps fall into rhythm, her shoulder close enough that two inches would close the gap.
We reach her door and she turns, face tilted up, the single working hallway light catching the curve of her jaw, and every reasonable thought I own evacuates.
I want to kiss her. The impulse is immediate and total—my hands curling at my sides, my whole body angled toward her. I've wanted this since the lake, since I pulled back and told her I wouldn't take anything she wasn't sure about.
I held myself together that day because she was Leon's—his wife, his bond, his in every way that mattered. But Leon's mind has let her go, and the space his claim used to fill keeps filling with something that has my name written through it like letters in rock.
But right now isn't sure enough. Right now is raw, and I don't press harder against raw things.
I lean in, my forehead against hers, eyes closing. She smells like antiseptic and something beneath it—warm and clean—that I've been carrying in my mind since the water dried on our skin.
She doesn't pull away. Her breath catches once, steadies, and for one beat we're just there—forehead to forehead in a dim corridor, my hands on the doorframe on either side of her because if I touch her I won't stop.
When I pull back slowly, her eyes open, and what's inside them nearly shatters every careful line I've drawn.
"Goodnight, Skyler." My voice barely holds its shape, and hers is no better when she answers.
"Goodnight, Dylan," my name in her mouth following me as I turn and walk away with a smile on my lips.
Twelve steps down the corridor before the sound of a door closing reaches me. Leon's room.
The back of my neck goes cold. I don't know how long he stood there, what he saw, what crossed his face while he watched his brother lean into a woman he can't stop gravitating toward for reasons his memory won't surrender.