[Skyler’s POV]
The new suture kits arrive in boxes that smell like factory plastic and good intentions. I slice tape, count packets, line them on the shelf with the specific focus I’ve developed for organizing inanimate objects. It’s cheaper than therapy anyway.
The examination room door opens and Leon walks in holding his left arm against his torso, a towel pressed below the elbow, red already blooming through the white.
"Training," he says before I can ask. "Got careless with a sparring partner."
It looks like someone took a hunting knife to his bicep, so I sincerely hope his definition of careless has some flexibility. "Sit down, let me see."
He drops onto the exam table, peeling the towel back and a four-inch gash reveals along his outer arm. Deep enough to need attention, shallow enough that I can manage without the pack doctor, who is already retreating down the hallway with his phone pressed to his ear.
The door swings shut. Just us now, in this sterile room with its fluorescent hum and nowhere for either of us to look that isn't at each other.
I snap gloves on and reach for the antiseptic, arranging the tray between us. "Hold still, this is going to sting."
"I've had worse." He watches me clean the wound, breathing even, body calm while mine is running a full internal fire drill.
I focus on the gauze, the pressure of my thumb near the wound's edge.
"How are the kids adjusting to the new schedule?" Safe territory. The conversational equivalent of a demilitarized zone.
"River's convinced her art teacher is secretly a fairy." I dab along the cut, keeping my eyes on his skin because his face is too close and too dangerous. "Ashton loves it. Obviously, from the side it looks like he can barely tolerate her, but both River and I know."
Leon's mouth curves. "He landed a clean strike yesterday, caught the pad dead center."
Something in his voice peels open when he says it—no Alpha control, no diplomacy, just a man glowing over a boy's first real hit. The kind of pride that belongs at a kitchen table, not an exam room between two people pretending they're strangers.
I turn for the butterfly strips so he can't see whatever my face is doing. "He hasn't stopped talking about training since you started with him."
"He's got instincts I can't teach." Leon pauses while I press the first strip along the wound. "Dylan mentioned that you taught yourself medicine—that it wasn't formal training."
My fingers go still on the second strip.
Dylan told him, because apparently Dylan distributes my history like party favors.
"Not exactly a career choice." I smooth the strip down, pressing carefully along the edge. "More of a survival requirement."
"Tell me." Two words, quiet, with no demand behind them. An open door I could walk through or shut.
We are alone in a room the size of a generous closet, and Leon is watching me with the patience of a man who will sit in this silence as long as it takes.
"River had a fever when she was three. A hundred and four, climbing." I hear myself say it as if someone else is steering. "I carried her to the pack doctor at two in the morning and he looked at me like I'd tracked mud on his floor."
Leon doesn't move. Doesn't shift, doesn't interrupt, doesn't offer the sympathetic head-tilt people use when they want credit for caring without absorbing anything.
"He told me my pups weren't a priority. That I should come back during business hours." My hands keep working—third strip, fourth—because if they stop, the rest of me might follow. "She was burning up in my arms, shaking, and he… closed the door."
The room narrows to my own voice and the rhythm of tape against skin. "I stole a medical textbook from the pack library. Bought fever reducers with money I'd been hiding in a sock for months."
I smooth the last strip into place, my fingers steadier than the rest of me.
"Sat up two nights reading dosage charts and bargaining with a Goddess I wasn't sure existed—take anything, take everything, just not this child."
I stand there with my gloved hands hovering over his arm, not looking up, because the story has carved something open I usually keep sealed. Leon is quiet—not the uncomfortable kind, the deliberate kind, giving the story the space it earned.
"She broke the fever on the third morning." I pull the gloves off, one finger at a time. "And I kept the textbook."
"You shouldn't have had to do that alone." His voice is low, stripped of everything except the words.
"I know." I ball the gloves and toss them in the bin, slow and precise. "But alone was all there was."
“Where is the father?” He asks suddenly, and the world tilts on its axis.
Leon looks at me with an innocent curiosity and empathy, as if he really wants to hear an answer and I’m not here, burning up inside from this simple question.
It’s anything but simple. And he doesn’t know that.
“Not in the picture,” I answer cooly, and it’s enough for him to step down.
Something shifts in the air. His hand lifts from his knee, rising toward my face with the unhurried certainty of muscle memory—the exact gesture from days ago, fingers reaching to tuck the strand of hair that's slipped across my cheek.
This time, he catches himself in time. His fingers hover just an inch from my skin, close enough that heat ghosts across my temple—the distance between what he wants and what he'll allow himself.
Then his hand drops. The inch collapses, and the place where his touch almost was throbs behind my chest, a pressure building against something I can't hold shut much longer.
"Thank you for the arm." His voice has reassembled itself into something composed, but the seams show.
"Keep it dry for two days." Clinical, professional, as if my hands are not trembling. "If the redness spreads, come back."
He nods once and leaves. The door clicks shut, and the room becomes just a room—small, bright, the ghost of cedar soap hanging in the air with no right to linger.
I stand at the exam table and let myself do the thing I never do.
Just for a moment, just to see how the shape of it fits.
Leon coming home at the end of a day, pushing through our front door, dropping his jacket on the chair I'd yell at him for. Sitting across from me at dinner asking about my shift, listening the way he just listened—full weight, no rush.
Reading to River in the voice she'd fall asleep to. Walking in from the yard with Ashton, both of them grass-stained and grinning, crossing the kitchen to kiss me hello like it's the most ordinary thing in the world.
My breath catches somewhere behind my ribs. My chest closes around a warmth I haven't earned and have no right to hold.
I crush it. Fold it down, press it flat, shove it where I keep every beautiful thing I've wanted and learned to live without. Because wanting things is how you learn the exact weight of losing them.
But the image doesn't go quietly. It stays, lodged under my skin, pulsing with stubborn heat long after I've told it to stop.