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Chapter 3

The ridge house sat quiet in the early light. June stood at the kitchen counter with her hands around a coffee mug that had gone cold. Her boots sat by the door, the mud from yesterday’s climb dried in hard ridges across the tread. She hadn’t scraped them. She hadn’t done a lot of things.

Her canvas jacket hung on the peg beside the door, the clinic logo faded from too many washes. Next to it, a garden trowel leaned against the wall. The metal was clean. She hadn’t touched it in weeks.

The house was warm. The wood stove in the corner held last night’s fire, banked but still putting out heat. The single window above the sink showed gray sky and the tops of trees below the ridge line. Nothing moved. June rolled her shoulders. The ache spread across her upper back. Her legs held the memory of the climb from town, the switchback trail that took forty minutes on a good day and fifty when her lungs burned and her thighs shook. She’d made it in fifty-two yesterday. It wasn’t her best time.

She reached for the coffee pot on the stove and poured. The mug warmed against her palms. She didn’t drink.

The door opened without a knock. Luca came in with a paper bag from the bakery, the kind with grease spots at the bottom. He wore a black sweater and dark jeans, his hair damp at the temples from the climb. He set the bag on the counter between them and leaned his hip against the wood.

“Morning,” he said.

June nodded. The bag sat unopened. She knew what was in it without looking. Something with sugar, something she wouldn’t have picked up herself because going into town meant going past Heller’s Hardware, the bakery and the clinic where Marcus worked, and Marcus had questions she couldn’t answer.

Luca didn’t push. He’d been bringing things up the ridge for three days now. He had brought coffee yesterday, a book she hadn’t opened the day before that, and pastries today. The routine was its own language between them.

She lifted the mug and drank. The coffee was bitter. She’d made it too strong again.

“What’s it like down there today?” she asked.

Luca considered the question. His dark eyes held hers without hurry. He’d been twenty-three for two hundred years and it showed in his patience, in how long he waited before he spoke.

“Quiet,” he said. “The kind of quiet where people are talking, just not out loud.”

June set the mug down. The ceramic hit the counter with a solid sound. They both knew what that meant.

Four wolves were sick: Cole first, then Petra, then the young one whose name she hadn’t caught, and now the brown-haired man Del had walked to Marcus’s clinic two days ago. They all had fevers that wouldn’t break, rib pain, and blood that came dark and wrong under a microscope. And the town had noticed. The town always noticed.

“Anyone new?” she asked.

“Not that I’ve heard.” Luca reached for the paper bag and opened it. The smell of sugar and butter filled the kitchen. “Marcus is working. Cole’s stable. Petra’s worse.”

June’s jaw tightened. She’d been up here treating the ones who could make the climb. A woman with a fever of a hundred and two who’d dragged herself up the switchback trail with her mate half-carrying her. A man who’d shifted twice on the way up out of pure instinct, his wolf trying to fight whatever was in his blood, and each shift had left him weaker. She’d given them both fever-break tea that did nothing and compression wraps for the rib pain that did less. She’d taken blood samples with the kit she kept in the cabinet under the sink and stored them in the refrigerator next to the milk, and she hadn’t sent them to Marcus because sending them to Marcus meant admitting she was involved, and she wasn’t ready for that conversation.

Not yet.

Luca pushed the bag toward her. Inside were two cinnamon rolls, the kind with white icing that hardened when it cooled. She took one without thanking him. He took the other. They ate standing at the counter, three feet between them, the wind off the ridge pushing against the window glass.

“How many can you treat up here?” Luca asked.

“As many as make it up the trail.” June wiped icing from her thumb. “Not many will. It’s too steep when you’re sick.”

“You could go down.”

“I will. When I have something that works.”

Luca didn’t argue. He’d learned that about her in the months they’d been together. She gave instructions in a crisis and asked questions after. She deflected concern about herself with a flat “I’ll eat at home” and moved on. She wouldn’t be talked around. She asked the same question in different words until she got an answer, and right now the question hanging between them was why she was hiding on the ridge when the pack needed its medic, and she wasn’t answering it because she didn’t have an answer that made sense.

The truth was simpler. The truth was that her clinic had hosted the blood drive last April, that she’d rolled up her sleeve and signed the intake form herself under a sponsor she never questioned, and that when she looked at her own samples under the microscope she’d known, with the same certainty she used to diagnose a dog with parvo or a cat with renal failure, that whatever was wrong in that blood traced back to the paperwork she’d helped fill out. It hadn’t come from her hands. It had come from her clinic and her signature.

She hadn’t said that part out loud, not to Luca and not to anyone.

He finished his cinnamon roll and brushed the crumbs from his palms into the sink. His movements were unhurried. In two centuries he’d endured worse than sick wolves: plagues, wars, and men who lived long enough to master cruelty. He watched her now with the same stillness he’d carried through every crisis before this one; she loved him for it and hated it, too, because patience didn’t fix what was broken.

“I should go down today,” she said.

Luca nodded. “I’ll drive you.”