Chapter 4 Small hours

The fourth time, he didn't bother with an excuse at all.

It was the small hours of the morning and the pack was still deep in sleep. The only sounds were the wind moving through the pines and the distant patrol of the night watch. Eric had been in bed for two hours and had not slept for a single minute of it. He had lain in the dark with his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling and waited for sleep to come.

It didn't.

He got up, pulled on a shirt and trousers, and walked across the pack grounds to the medical wing. The night air was sharp and cold, the frost on the ground catching the pale light from the lamps along the path. He kept his hands in his pockets and walked without hurrying, telling himself this was nothing more than a check. A practical matter. He was the Alpha King. It was his medical wing. There was nothing unusual about walking through his own pack grounds in the middle of the night.

The corridor was empty. He pushed open the door to her room and stood in the doorway. Danielle's chair next to her bed was vacant.

Nothing had changed. She lay exactly as she had the night before, pale and still, her breathing slow and even. The bruising along her jaw had begun its long process of fading, the edges of it softening from deep purple to something yellower and less violent. In the quiet of the room the only sound was the steady rhythm of the monitor beside her, marking each breath with indifferent precision.

He leaned against the doorframe and looked at her for a moment.

She looked younger in sleep than she had in the forest. He hadn't thought that was possible, given how young she had already looked when Danielle had carried her in. But something about the absence of tension in her face made her seem less like someone who had been surviving and more like someone who had been allowed, briefly, to stop. He wasn't sure that was a comforting thought.

He pushed off the doorframe, turned to leave, and made it two steps down the corridor before he stopped.

He stood there in the empty hallway and did nothing. He was an Alpha King. He had built his pack on clarity and control. He decided, and he acted, and that was the end of it. So why was he standing in an empty hallway in the middle of the night, unable to make himself walk away?

He turned around, walked back, and sat down in the chair beside her bed.

The room was quiet around him. He sat with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor for a while, and then at the window where the night pressed dark and cold against the glass, and then, reluctantly, at her. She hadn't moved. Her breathing was steady. The fluid line ran from her arm to the bag hanging beside the bed, doing its quiet work.

He looked at her hand resting on the blanket beside her. The knuckles were still raw, the nails still broken. Helena had cleaned and bandaged the worst of it, but the story was still there underneath. No amount of time would fully erase that. He thought about what those hands said about the life she had come from, about the years behind her that had produced someone who walked into wolf territory and asked to die rather than go back.

He sat there for a long time. Long enough for the pack grounds outside to go from deep silence to the first tentative sounds of early morning. The birds getting active, the early pack members getting to work, the distant creak of the kitchen building being unlocked. The night letting go of itself, the way it always did, indifferent to whatever had happened inside it.

He got up and left before anyone could see him go.

Danielle arrived at the medical wing just after six in the morning.

She walked to the girl's room and stood in the doorway. She noticed that the chair beside the bed was angled slightly differently than she had left it the night before. It would have meant nothing on its own, but she knew Eric had been here again. She looked at it for a moment, then gently pulled the door close behind her and walked to the small back room to make herself a coffee.

She stood with her back against the counter and drank it slowly. Outside the small window the pack members were waking up, the first figures moving between the buildings, the smell of breakfast drifting from the kitchen. Ordinary morning sounds. Everything as it should be.

She thought about the chair again.

She thought about the fact that this was the third night in a row she had seen him leave this corridor. She thought about the border patrol reports Steven had mentioned were sitting unread on Eric's desk, which was the kind of thing that simply did not happen. Eric ran his pack the way he ran everything else, with an attention to detail that left no room for distraction.

The girl in that bed had arrived with nothing. No name that anyone here knew, no history, no claim on anyone's time or attention. She had asked to die and instead she was breathing, warm and recovering, while the Alpha King of this territory lost sleep over a human girl he had every reason to send away.

She had seen a great many things in twenty years of knowing Eric. She had seen him grieve and fight and lead and close himself off so thoroughly that even the people closest to him sometimes forgot there was anything underneath the authority. She had never seen him sit beside anyone's bed in the middle of the night though.

She finished her coffee, rinsed the cup, and went to take her place in the girl's room. She settled into her chair and waited for the day to begin.