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He applied a clean strip of gauze, taping the edges with small, precise squares. His thumb smoothed the tape flat against her skin.

“Iris used to put me in the bath when I got hurt,” Sloane said. She didn’t know why she was talking. “Cold water. She’d fill the tub, tell me to get in, go back to whatever she was doing. I was eight the first time. Cut my elbow open falling off the porch railing.” She watched his hands on her leg, the gauze, the careful tape. “Nobody ever sat in front of me with a first-aid kit.”

His thumb moved against the side of her calf. A small stroke, barely there.

“You don’t have to do anything with it,” he said. “You just have to let me finish.”

She looked at him. He looked at her. The kitchen was quiet, late-afternoon light catching the side of his face, the line of his jaw.

She leaned forward. Slowly. He didn’t move. She pressed her mouth to his.

It was nothing like the other times. Not the fierce collision in the training yard, not the hungry taking by the equipment shed. This was soft. Her lips parted against his with a tenderness that frightened her, her hand rising to his neck, feeling his pulse under her fingertips. He kissed her back slowly, thoroughly, his hand still cradling her calf, the other rising to her jaw. His thumb brushed her cheekbone.

She pulled back enough to breathe. His forehead touched hers.

“Come to bed,” he said quietly, moving his hand to touch her cheek.

She kissed him again. He rose from his crouch without breaking the kiss, his hands finding her waist, lifting her off the chair. Her legs wrapped around him. Her back found the mattress. His weight settled over her, warm, his mouth trailing from her lips to her jaw to the curve beneath her ear. His hand slid under the hem of her tank top. His fingers spread against her ribs.

She could feel him through the bond. Not just his body, but the emotion running beneath it, unguarded. He was certain. She could feel it pouring through the connection, his belief that this was the moment, that the tenderness meant what he thought it meant.

Her chest constricted.

She kissed him harder. Tried to turn it into what it had been before, the armored version. He slowed her down. His hand cupped her face. He pulled back, looked at her, and ran his thumb along her lower lip.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m right here.”

The gentleness hit her like a fist.

She pushed him off. Gently, her palms flat against his chest.

“Sloane.”

“I can’t.”

She rolled off the bed, grabbed her boots, and she was at the door before he’d sat up.

“Sloane, wait.”

She didn’t wait. She pulled the door open, cleared the porch steps, and ran. Her leg screamed. She ignored it. She ran past the eastern gate, into the trees.

Behind her, through the bond, Chris’s confusion spiked into something raw. Then the shift, his human shape dissolving, the bond flaring bright as his instincts overtook his reason. He ran too, but not after her. Away. Putting distance between them because even now, even hurting, he wouldn’t chase her.

She ran until the compound was a distant cluster of rooftops through the canopy. Then she stopped, bent double, hands on her knees.

She sat down against a tree. Drew her knees up. Pressed her palms against her eyes.

She wasn’t crying. She refused to be crying.

Her face was wet.

***

Chris shifted back against the garden wall. His hands were scraped from the run. His chest burned. He pulled on the trousers he’d stashed behind the maintenance shed, because he’d been doing that for weeks now, leaving clothes at the edges of the compound for the nights when holding his human shape became too heavy.

Caitlynn was on the stone bench with Elianna on her lap, a blanket around both of them in the cooling air. She looked up when he came around the corner and said nothing for long enough that he knew she’d felt it through the pack bond, the whole thing, the bright flare followed by the collapse.

“She ran,” he said. He sat down beside her. “I didn’t chase her.”