[Skyler’s POV]
I'm sterilizing the equipment when the door opens without a knock and Leon fills the frame the way he fills every space he enters—completely. Like the room was built around him and forgot to mention it.
"Kitchen accident," he says, holding up his left hand. A slice runs across his palm, deep enough to need closing, blood soaking through the towel. "Knife slipped."
He delivers the explanation with the conviction of a man reading someone else's grocery list. I don't believe him, and he doesn't seem to believe himself.
An Alpha who can command an army but can't sell a kitchen mishap? Yeah, right.
But for what reasons he’d be doing something like that on purpose?
"Dr. Fielding's out on a house call." I gesture toward the examination chair and keep my voice clinical. "So I guess you're stuck with me, Alpha Leon."
He sits and the chair creaks under him and the room shrinks by half as I pull the rolling tray closer. I unwrap the towel and the cut is straight, deliberate-looking—the kind of wound you get from gripping a blade, not from it slipping.
The blood wells fresh when the pressure lifts, and I press sterile gauze against his palm while I prep the solution. His skin is warm under my fingers the way a house is warm when someone's left the furnace running and gone.
I am not thinking about his skin. I am counting seconds of pressure. That’s all.
"This needs stitches, I'll numb it first." My voice comes out detached, clinical—a minor miracle considering the proximity.
"Don't bother, just stitch it." He holds my gaze with something that isn't bravery, his free hand resting still on his knee.
"That's a terrible idea, and it'll hurt. Badly so." I look up and his face is closer than I calculated—close enough to see the shadows under his eyes, the tension in his jaw that has nothing to do with his hand.
"Good." Something moves behind his expression, rearranges, settles into place. "I could use something that makes sense right now."
I fill the syringe with lidocaine anyway, because I'm not a barbarian and he doesn't get to override medical decisions with cryptic statements. The needle slides in and he doesn't flinch—not even the involuntary twitch most wolves give.
My hands know this work the way they know breathing—the needle pulling thread through flesh in steady arcs. But this is his hand, his breathing four inches from my ear, and the devastation of stitching together a man I've spent six years trying to forget.
"You're good at this," he says low, almost observational.
"Twelve sutures a week, minimum." I tie off the second stitch and reach for the scissors. "Your wolves are either very brave or very clumsy."
"Both." The corner of his mouth moves—not quite a smile, a disturbance in the region where smiles happen. "River showed me something yesterday."
My hand pauses on the third stitch. River and her drawings—little detonations wrapped in crayon, every one aimed squarely at my chest.
"A wolf howling at a moon that has a face." He watches my hands while he talks, the attention so focused it's almost clinical in return. "She said the moon was smiling because the wolf finally came home."
"She's been reading too many bedtime stories." My voice holds, barely. "I told Dylan to stop with the fantasy novels—she takes everything literally."
"Dylan reads to them?" The question sounds casual, but the stillness after it is not—a pause where his breathing trips over something sharp.
"Sometimes, when he's around for bedtime. He even does the voices." I tie off another suture, careful and even. "River loses her mind over the dragon one."
The silence has its own weather system and I push the needle through because this wound isn't going to close itself and neither is this conversation.
"I've been reading a field medicine manual," I offer, because neutral ground exists and I will find it. "Morrison's Trauma Protocols—the chapter on wound irrigation is surprisingly gripping."
He tilts his head, and a half-smile pulls at his mouth. "You're reading surgical textbooks for fun?"
"I'm reading them because no one else here knows the difference between a mattress suture and a simple interrupted. Except real doctors, of course." I snip the thread. "Also yes, for fun. I'm a delight at parties."
He laughs quietly and startled, like he didn't expect to find anything funny at four in the afternoon. My chest does something inadvisable, warmth spreading from my sternum outward.
"Last one." I slide the needle through and I know he watches my face instead of my hands now. I can practically feel it.
The weight of his attention on my skin the way you feel sun through a window—indirect and inescapable.
I tie the final knot and smooth the dressing against his palm. The job is done, the medical justification for touching him officially expired, and my hand stays on his arm. I can feel his pulse beating steady under my thumb and can’t move away.
The room has gone so quiet I can hear the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, Leon doesn't pull away too and neither of us moves.
His free hand rises slowly—deliberately, giving me time to stop him—and his fingers trace a line from my chin to my ear, featherlight, like carefully mapping territory he knows isn't his.
My breath catches between my lungs and my throat. He tilts my face toward him and I can see it. The pull, the confusion, something ravenous he can't name and can't cage. His gaze drops to my mouth and my body pitches toward him like gravity has changed its terms.
When he leans in and I can feel his breath on my lips, I step back.
Not because I don't want it—every nerve I possess is screaming to close the gap. But because I still remember how Dylan kissed me two days ago, warm and unhurried. He chose me without a cosmic leash, and I don't know what kind of woman lets one brother trace her jaw while the other's kiss still lives on her skin.
"Keep the stitches dry for forty-eight hours." My voice sounds like someone else's—steady, professional, pulled from a drawer I didn't know I had. "No training with that hand for a week."
Leon stares at me—not hurt or angry, something worse. Something quiet and total, as if my stepping back confirmed what he already suspected about the distance between what he feels and what he's allowed to reach for.
Fury I could fight.
This understanding is a blade I can't parry, and it guts me where I stand.
"Thank you, Skyler." He says my name the way he always does—like it belongs somewhere in his chest he can't locate.
The door clicks shut behind him and the room swells back to its normal size. I'm alone with a needle on the tray and my hands trembling hard enough to rattle the forceps against metal. I press my palms to the counter and his fingers burn along my jaw in phantom.
Two days ago Dylan's mouth was on mine, and I chose nothing—just retreated, which isn't choosing at all. The taste of a decision I didn't make settles into my throat, and the clinic is so quiet I can hear my heartbeat counting down to something I'm running out of time to name.