“Nico.
Open this— open this door right now, or I will have someone here in 2 minutes who can open it for you.” I knew that voice, clipped and controlled, except there was an edge under it I hadn’t heard from her before, sharp enough to cut straight through the fog still sitting behind my eyes.
Everything ached, deep rather than sharp, hips and thighs worn through, a rawness low down I didn’t want to think about yet, honestly.
The sheets under me had gone stiff in patches they shouldn’t have, and the room smelled of sex, sweat and the thick sweetness of slick underneath all of it, fresh, all the evidence with nowhere left to hide.
Damjan didn’t move from where he sat against the headboard, sheet pooled at his hips, hands flat on his knees and his shoulders dead square.
I yanked the sheet higher and pressed my palm flat over the mark on my neck—pointless, since she’d probably smelled it from the corridor before she ever knocked.
Somewhere outside the shutter, boots crunched gravel and someone laughed at something I couldn’t hear.
Training was starting up, that’s ordinary, and also unbothered, the whole compound either oblivious or pretending to be, while 5 metres away Damjan Kessler had spent the night tearing my throat open with his teeth.
The lock clicked from her side—must’ve had an override for the safe rooms, ’cause the door swung in before either of us said come in, and Dr.
Vos stepped through already talking, already mid-sentence about overnight temperature logs, and then she stopped.
She stopped 2 steps inside the door and didn’t finish the sentence.
Her eyes found my neck before they found anything else in the room, and the clipboard in her hand came down slow and careful onto the side table, like she didn’t trust her own grip anymore.
Thin light was leaking through the shutter slats by then, finding the wreckage of the sheets, finding the old marks on Damjan’s ribs, 4 parallel lines gone white with age that I still hadn’t asked him about.
“Sit forward,” she said, voice gone back to flat and professional.
She checked my temperature first, the back of her hand against my forehead out of habit, then the actual thermometer under my tongue while she counted out 30 seconds under her breath, the reading coming back 37.1, already dropping toward normal, which she noted on the clipboard without comment.
Then her fingers were under my jaw, turning my head gently toward the light, putting off the part that mattered for as long as she reasonably could.
“Heat broke completely?” she asked.
“Yeah, hours ago.” “How many hours?” I looked at Damjan, and he looked at the wall instead of at me.
“Dunno,” I said.
“Lost count somewhere after the 3rd time, if I’m honest.” She made a small noise in her throat that wasn’t a word, and finally, finally tilted my head the rest of the way and looked at the mark properly.
I felt her go very still while she took it in: skin broken clean through in a half-moon, bruising spreading dark purple-yellow around the edges, dried blood crusted along my collarbone where it’d run down sometime in the night, and a heat still coming off the skin around it that had nothing to do with fever.
She pressed a sterile pad against it, lightly, to test whether it’d still bleed if provoked, and it didn’t.
“This needs cleaning properly and a dressing for a few days, but it’s already closing.” Her voice for that line was pure clinic, flat and procedural, and 2 minutes later it wouldn’t be.
“Who held still for this?” she said, not really a question.
“Damjan.” He didn’t answer right away, and when he did, his voice had gone thinner than I’d heard it even during the worst of the heat.
“I did this, he did not ask me to stop.” “That’s not what I asked.” “It is the only part that matters.” He still hadn’t reached for his clothes, even though they were right there on the floor.
He just sat there bare-chested in front of her, taking whatever was coming without trying to soften how it looked, and that scared me more than any of his usual control would’ve.
I shoved myself up the headboard and found my own voice even though it came out like sandpaper.
“He’s not— he’s not taking this on his own, I told him to and I said please, out loud, you can ask half the corridor if you don’t believe me.” Dr.
Vos straightened up, lips moving without sound, very fast, the same tic she got every time she was running numbers in her head she didn’t like the answer to.
“The heat resolved in one night,” she said.
“I— I told you to expect up to 3 days, maybe longer, given how late you presented.” “It just stopped after he bit me, it was dead, all at once, the whole thing gone in under a minute.” “That isn’t…
normal.” She set the clipboard down properly this time.
“A completed bond can shorten a heat, but it doesn’t usually end one outright, not in one stroke anyway, I need to know what time the bite happened, to the hour, if you can manage it.” “Sometime after 4,” Damjan said.
“Maybe closer to…
5.” She nodded slowly, writing something down, the pen pressing harder into the page than it needed to.
“Why’s that bad?” I said, because her going quiet scared me more than anything she could’ve said out loud.
“It isn’t bad on its own.” She looked at Damjan, not me.
“But a completed bond formed without a sanctioned claim has to be reported to the pack alpha within 24 hours, and that’s not my rule, Damjan, you know that better than I do.” “I will— I will tell him myself.” His jaw barely moved when he said it.
“Not you and not in a report.” “I’m not asking your permission.” Dr.
Vos didn’t raise her voice, the flatness of it hit worse than shouting would have.
“I can give you an hour to find him yourself before anything goes in writing, that’s— that’s the only courtesy I’ve got room to give either of you.” “What’s it actually mean, though,” I said, “him knowing, like, what does he do with it?” “Depends…” She picked the clipboard back up, mostly so she’d have something to hold.
“If it’d been sanctioned beforehand, this would just be paperwork, a formality, but if unsanctioned, he has to decide whether to formalize it after the fact or refer it upward, and you don’t want it referred upward, because that stops being a pack decision the second it leaves this building.” “And what happens to me?
Training-wise, contract-wise, any of it?” She didn’t answer that one right away, which told me everything the words would’ve.
“Nothing changes today,” she said finally.
“Today you train if I clear you to, and I’ll decide that in a minute.
What happens after Henrik’s involvement depends on Henrik.” I already knew part of the answer before she said anything else, ’cause I could smell it myself now the worst of the heat-fog had burned off, sweet and warm and unmistakable even with the window shut, and there was no version of training in 2 hours where 40 wolves on that pitch didn’t already know exactly what’d happened in this room.
I made myself sit up properly, ignoring what that cost me, ’cause whatever was about to land on him was about to land on both of us too, and I wasn’t gonna stay wrapped in a sheet while he took it standing.
Then Damjan finally moved, reaching down for his trousers off the floor and pulling them on, standing fast, every second he stayed still another second Henrik might hear it from someone else first.
He didn’t look at me while he dressed, and I don’t think he could’ve managed it even if he’d tried.
Through the bond, his heartbeat kicked hard enough that I felt it land in my own chest a half-second behind mine, way too fast, and way too sudden.
Underneath it his pulse kept climbing instead of settling, and Dr.
Vos looked at her watch.
“24 hours,” she said.
“That— that clock started the second I walked through that door.”