[Skyler’s POV]
The first boy comes through the clinic doors sideways, held up by two trainers whose faces have drained to a shade of white that means this is not a drill. Blood sheets from a gash across his shoulder deep enough to show muscle.
Dr. Vasquez is already elbow-deep in a girl whose forearm looks like something tried to peel it open. The second stretcher coming through the door carries a boy no older than thirteen, curled on his side, sobbing for his mother.
"Set him down, table two." My voice comes out of someone who hasn't thought about it first, and I'm already cutting the first boy's shirt away, scissors through fabric while my eyes count wounds.
"Marcus lost it mid-shift." The trainer's hands are shaking against the stretcher bar. "No warning, no trigger—one second he was running the drill, then he turned on them."
I shove that aside because the boy on my table is gripping the edge hard enough to bend it, his eyes rolling with the effort not to let his wolf surface. "Hey, look at me, what's your name?"
"Jace," he manages through his teeth, and the tendons in his neck are standing out like cables. I thread the needle and hold his gaze.
"Jace, I'm going to stitch this and it's going to hurt, and you're going to breathe through it—not because you're brave, you already are, but because if you shift on my table I'll have to explain to Vasquez why his equipment is in pieces." I lean closer. "He gets very emotional about his equipment."
A strangled sound that might be a laugh, good enough. I start stitching, my hands steady in a way the rest of me has no right to be, working ragged claw marks together with the patience of six years spent doing this without a title or anyone's permission.
"Four more." I keep my voice low and steady, a metronome for him to follow. "Three… almost there."
"Is Mira okay?" His eyes dart to the girl Vasquez is working on, and the crack in his voice tells me everything.
"Vasquez has her, best hands in the territory." I tie off the last stitch and tape the gauze. "Don't move, don't shift, don't be a hero."
The thirteen-year-old has curled into a ball on the third table, shaking hard enough to rattle the metal frame. Forehead wounds bleed like murder scenes regardless of depth and this one's shallow—it's the shock that's eating him alive.
"Sweetheart, can you tell me your name?" I crouch to his eye level, my hands gentle on his arms, and something warm pulses through my palms—a hum I barely register through the pace of everything else.
"I want my mom…" His voice is small enough to split my ribs apart.
"I know, we're calling her right now." I clean the cut while talking—River's age when she scraped her knee, the sound effects I invented, how Ashton declared war on the playground on her behalf.
The boy's breathing slows and his fists unclench against the table. By the time I've taped the strips he's watching me the way River does when the world needs someone to prove it can go right.
I move between the tables for the next hour, rechecking Jace's stitches, adjusting Mira's splint while Vasquez handles the deeper work. I hold the thirteen-year-old's hand until his mother arrives and he dissolves into her so completely it's like watching a wall come down.
Then Leon is in the doorway. He doesn't announce himself—just stands with his arms crossed, reading the room the way a man reads something he already understands. The triage order I chose, the youngest positioned closest to the door so his mother could reach him first.
The crisis drains out by degrees—families arrive, bleeding stops, the last stretcher is carried away. The silence that replaces the chaos is the particular quiet that only exists after someone almost died and didn't.
I lean against the supply counter because my legs have tendered their resignation. Blood on my sleeves, my forearms, a smear across my collarbone I don't remember earning.
"You should have been doing this years ago." Leon's voice is low, unhurried—a man stating a fact that costs him something to say out loud.
"I know." No edge, no bitterness—just the truth, standing between us like it's been waiting for someone to pull up a chair.
"The medical program starts this fall, Shadowcrest funds it—tuition, books, clinical placements." He delivers it like a border report. "Not a favor."
"A pack investment." I finish the phrase and his mouth twitches—recognition, the echo of our conversation in his study weeks ago when investment was his way of giving me a future without making me owe him for it.
Underneath the professional distance runs a current we don't name. His mouth on mine, my pulling back, his apology that sounded like the worst thing he'd ever had to do.
We don't mention it. The not-mentioning has become its own fluent, exhausting language by now.
Then his expression shifts—the professional layer peeling away. "The wolf who lost control, Marcus—nineteen, three years of training, no instability flags."
His hands migrate to his pockets, and I've learned that particular movement means he's holding something back. "The way he snapped wasn't a temper break or a dominance surge."
"What was it then?" My fingers go still on the gauze I've been folding, and something in his tone makes the back of my neck prickle.
"Chemical. Might have been." He holds the word like it might detonate. "His pupils were blown wide and unresponsive when we restrained him—I've seen wolves lose control, Skyler, and this wasn't that."
My stomach tightens until I can feel my pulse through it, and my hand grips the counter edge behind me. "You think someone—"
"I think I need to look into it." He cuts the thread before I can pull—not unkindly, but precisely. "I'll handle it."
He leaves without theater. I watch his back disappear down the corridor, and the word chemical lodges in my chest between the memory of his kiss and everything I haven't told Dylan.
My hands. I turn them over, studying the palms that stitched Jace's shoulder and cleaned a terrified boy's wound—the warmth hasn't faded, and if anything it's sharper now, a low pulse beneath the skin that has nothing to do with adrenaline.
"Skyler?" Vasquez is frowning at his chart, pen tapping. "Jace’s healing markers are abnormal—tissue regeneration I'd expect at the twenty-four-hour mark, not at one hour."
"He's young." I keep my voice level, my hands still beneath the counter. "Young wolves heal fast."
"Not this fast." He flips the chart toward me and the numbers are there in his clean handwriting—regeneration nearly triple the expected rate. His frown deepens into something he can't explain. "I'll note it as unusual."
I flex my fingers where he can't see them. The warmth pulses once—deliberate, pointed—and something behind my ribs shifts in recognition.
It hadn't been adrenaline when my palms pressed against Jace’s broken skin. Something had moved through me toward the wound, something that knew where to go before I did.
I close my fist and say nothing, because the warmth doesn't feel like adrenaline. It feels like something answering.