Chapter 166
Kieran
I went still.
Her voice was even, her eyes were level, and the question sat in the room between us with all the weight of something she’d been carrying for a long time and had finally set down.
“I never―” I stopped. I pressed both hands flat on the table. “Serena, I never hurt you deliberately. I never wanted to prove anything to you. What happened between us—”
“I know,” she said. “I know that’s not what you’d say.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“I said I know.” She looked at me. “I’m not accusing you. I just realized something.” She picked up her bag from the sofa. “We’re keeping the past behind us. I’m just thinking out loud.”
“You caused yourself pain,” I said. “I never chea
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you. I never-”
“Okay,” she said.
Just that word. No heat in it. No door slammed. She said
it and walked to the bathroom and the door closed, and I
sat at the table and looked at the food I’d made and tried to find the argument I’d lost and couldn’t,
I got up, walked to the bathroom door and knocked.
“Can I come in?”
Silence. I stood outside it for a full breath.
“I’m really tired,” she said. “Goodnight.”
The door stayed shut.
I stood in the hallway with my knuckles still raised, she spent less than thirty minutes in there and when she
walked out, I went in.
I came out and the bedroom was dark. Serena was already in the bed, her back to my side, her breathing
slow.
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I lay down and looked at the ceiling.
Trevor’s words came back the same as they’d been coming back all week. She’s tired. She’s done. She stopped pushing because pushing didn’t work. I turned it over in the dark: is that what this is? Or is this just what it looks like when she’s finally here?
I couldn’t tell. I spent years reading her, knowing what each silence meant, what each pause meant, and now she was two feet away and I couldn’t read a single thing.
I closed my eyes.
I didn’t sleep.
The phone went off around sometime past midnight.
A sound, and then Serena’s voice in the dark before I’d fully surfaced.
“Andrew,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
My eyes opened.
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I lay still. Andrew. Andrew’s name in our bedroom. I lay
there and listened and my jaw pulled tight and my hands found the blanket without moving.
“How long has it been going on?” she said. A pause.
“Okay. Don’t move. I’m coming.”
She got out of the bed.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“My patient needs help.” She was already moving, her hands certain in the dark.
“It’s half past two.”
“I know what time it is.” She reached for her bag. “He’s in this building. He’s a high-value patient – the kind who refers other high-value patients. I’m not sending him a general on-call at this hour.” She pulled on her jacket. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back before long.”
She went to the door.
The elevator opened at the bottom floor and the smell came through before the doors were apart.
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Wolf.
–
But wrong. Not the clean musk of a man who’d shifted – this was the raw, uncontrolled surge of a wolf trying to break through a body that couldn’t contain it, the kind of smell that came when both halves of a person came apart from each other and started fighting for space.
Andrew was in the corner of the corridor with his back against the wall and his knees to his chest, breathing through his teeth. When Serena’s footsteps reached him his head came up. His eyes found her, and his shoulders dropped and his jaw unclenched and every line in his face loosened at once.
I stood behind her and watched that happen and my
stomach turned over.
“It seems your treatment is working a bit too well,” Andrew said. His voice came out scraped and rough. “My wolf is trying to come through and I can’t—”
“I know,” she said. She crouched in front of him, two fingers at his neck, one hand at his forehead. “Your system is responding faster than I expected. We need to
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reduce the dosage.” She straightened. “Can you stand?”
“If you help me.”
She put his arm over her shoulder and took his weight, and I stood in the corridor and watched them move toward his door and there was nothing useful I could do with my hands.
She got him inside. I followed. I stood in the doorway because she needed some privacy when attending to her patient.
Thirty minutes passed but she was yet to come out. It was not like she was performing a surgery. Why was she still there?
I walked in.
Andrew was on the bed with the blanket pulled to his waist. Serena sat beside him with a wet cloth in her hand, slowly drawing it along his arm, her head down over her work. Neither of them heard me.
My chest went tight. Then tighter. The tightness moved into my jaw, behind my eyes, and I stood in the doorway 2
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and stared and I couldn’t hear the room anymore except for the sound of that cloth moving across his skin.
“Serena.”
Her head came up. She looked at me with her brow pulled
in and her chin forward.
“Five more minutes,” she said.
“Serena.” My voice came out louder than I meant it to. Louder than the room needed. I heard it and couldn’t pull it back. “What is this?”
“This is a patient running forty-one degrees of fever whose wolf is breaking through,” she said, turning back to Andrew. “Five minutes. Then I’ll explain everything.”
A frown settled on her face, looking almost disgusted at my interruptions.
“Serena-”
Her hand stilled over him and th glare sent my way was undoubtedly mine. “Kieran.” She looked back at me, just onge, level and unhurried. “Five minutes.”
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I froze.
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