“Who decides whether the magic in my body is working?” Clara asked.
“Edward will be able to monitor the graft,” Roesha said.
“That’s the medical answer. I’m asking who gets to decide whether I’m well enough for you to leave, or whether Dominic has to keep coming back here and putting his hands on you to keep me alive.”
Dominic turned sharply. “Clara.”
She looked at him until he dropped his eyes. “I woke up in my own kitchen to a man with a rifle telling me my husband belonged to somebody else. I’m allowed to ask how the arrangement works.”
Roesha felt the heat rise in her face. She drew a breath before answering. “Edward can bring in a surgeon from outside Covington to review the graft. Someone who answers to you.”
“You know someone?”
“Isaiah Bennett. We work together in Chicago.” She hesitated. “I trust his work. He’s also asked me to dinner. You should know that before you decide whether to ask for him.”
Clara studied her. “Give Edward the name. I want to speak to him myself. And I want a copy of every chart entry where someone used my marriage to justify a medical decision.”
“You’ll have it.”
“Good. Because if a pack lawyer ever says I agreed to any of this, I want to be able to show him exactly what I agreed to.”
Dominic waited until Clara’s eyes had closed before following Roesha into the corridor.
“Dinner?” he said.
“You heard me.”
“Do you want to go with him?”
The question would have sounded almost innocent if his knuckles hadn’t gone white against the rail. Roesha looked through the glass at Clara’s wedding ring, still on her hand.
“What do you plan to do with my answer?”
His grip loosened. “Nothing I have any right to do.”
“Then let me have an answer of my own before you make me defend it.”
He stepped aside. The hurt on his face followed her all the way down the corridor. She hated how much she wanted to turn around.
◆
By noon, the Hollow King had knocked three more times. Each knock came when Dominic and Roesha fell into the same rhythm. The ward beneath the hospital had held through all three.
Eric drew three tally marks on the whiteboard in the staff lounge. “I vote we stop giving him an audience.”
Hailey set an old survey map beside his laptop. “Show me where the old warden line crosses the county road.”
He pointed to the creek. “Here. Why?”
“Because my father wants me to stay inside his security perimeter, and Clara asked us to get her daughters to Elena.” Hailey traced the road with a blunt fingernail. “The eastern route gets us out of pack territory without crossing the ward. Can you ride with me?”
Eric looked down at the laptop. Roesha recognized the look. It was the same one he’d worn when she left home for her first hospital rotation and he pretended to need another ten minutes to fix her car radio.
“You can go,” she told him. “If I need you, I know how a phone works.”
“Debatable. You have fourteen hundred unread messages.”
“Thirteen hundred are from you.”
Hailey laughed, then took his hand. “I like that you look after her. But next time you want me to stay somewhere safe, ask me where I think I’ll do the most good.”
Eric squeezed her fingers. “Deal. And if your father calls, you’re driving. He’s much less likely to yell at me if I’m holding a child’s rabbit.”
They found Mia and Sophia in pediatrics. Mia had packed two juice boxes and a pair of hospital socks in a pillowcase. Sophia sat under the fort holding her rabbit by one ear.
“Is Daddy coming?” Mia asked.
“After he talks to your mom,” Hailey said. “Aunt Elena will be waiting for us.”
“Did we do something bad?”
Eric crouched so she could see his face. “The people who came into your house did something bad. You looked after your sister. That was brave. And you don’t have to be brave for the whole ride.”
Mia thought about this. Then she gave him the pillowcase and took Hailey’s hand.
An hour later, when Elena called to say the girls were eating toast at her kitchen table, Roesha brought the phone to Clara. Clara listened to Sophia describe the elaborate sleeping arrangements she had made for the rabbit. Only after she hung up did she let herself cry.
Roesha sat beside her until the tears stopped. “Edward’s taking over your follow-up. I’ll help him with the graft as long as he needs me.”
“Good.” Clara wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “I want a doctor I can be angry in front of without worrying whether I’ve hurt her feelings.”
“You should have one.”
Clara looked toward the door. “And I want ten minutes with my husband.”
Roesha left them the room.
◆
Dominic took the chair Roesha had vacated. At home, he would have sat on the edge of the bed and put an arm around Clara. He waited until she reached for his hand.
“Do you remember the washing machine in our first apartment?” she asked.
“The one that walked across the kitchen?”
“You kept fixing it. I knew we could afford another one by then, but I liked watching you come home and take care of something that belonged to both of us.” Her thumb rested over his wedding band. “I need you to understand why this hurts even if you didn’t ask for it.”
“I do.”
“I don’t think you do yet.” She pulled her hand back. “I need you to find somewhere else to stay after I’m discharged. I’ll tell you when I’m ready to talk about the marriage. We can start making a schedule for the girls today.”
Dominic opened his mouth. The instinct to promise that he could fix it rose as fast as his wolf. He let it pass.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll bring their things to Elena. You can tell me which ones.”
Clara swallowed. “Mia will say she doesn’t want the night-light. Pack it anyway.”
He wrote it down.
◆
Isaiah arrived the next afternoon with a canvas overnight bag and the reading glasses he was forever losing in operating rooms. Roesha had warned him about the ward over the phone. He stopped outside Clara’s room anyway, staring at the emerald trace on the borrowed monitor.
“Your description of ‘some unusual post-op telemetry’ left a little room for interpretation.”
“I needed you to get on the plane.”
“Next time lead with ‘the mountain has a pulse.’ I’d have packed better shoes.”
Clara made them laugh from the bed. “If either of you charges me for the shoes, I’m getting another surgeon.”
She’d already arranged for Isaiah to examine her with Edward present and for Roesha to wait outside. Dominic was in the hall too. He had brought Clara’s hairbrush and a bag of clothes. Neither of them reached for the spare chair.
“Is he good?” Dominic asked.
“If I were on that bed, I’d want him looking at the graft.”
Dominic nodded. He had heard the steadiness in her voice. That was what hurt him. She had years of knowing Isaiah that no amount of feeling her heartbeat could give him.
When Isaiah came out, he handed Roesha a coffee. She took a sip without looking at the lid. He knew how she took it. Dominic could have asked her a hundred questions in the time they’d spent together and could remember only the ones that had to do with keeping somebody alive.
Isaiah turned to him. “Clara asked me to tell you she wants to explain the plan herself.”
Dominic went in. The brush was still in his hand.
◆
Clara sat up without his help. “Edward and Dr. Bennett think the graft can eventually carry blood on its own. Until then I’m keeping the monitor, and I’m keeping my appointments. I want you to tell the girls with me that you’re going to be staying somewhere else.”
Dominic pulled the chair close. “What do you want us to say?”
“The truth they’re old enough to hear. We’re having a hard time, we’re living apart, and they can ask us questions.”
They called Elena together. Mia asked if she had to pick which house she would live in. Sophia asked whether the rabbit could go to both. Dominic answered the second question first because he could get it out without crying. Clara answered the first. When they hung up, Dominic put the brush on the table beside her.
“He knew how she takes her coffee,” he said, and wished at once that he hadn’t.
Clara looked at him for a long time. “I know how you take yours. I knew before the girls were born. I knew when your mother was sick and you stopped taking sugar because you’d forget to eat if the coffee was sweet enough.”
He couldn’t look at her.
“Whatever you feel watching him with her,” Clara said, “remember I had to watch you look at her like that in a room where I couldn’t sit up.”
He put both feet flat on the floor. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have put that on you.”
“You shouldn’t have.” Her voice softened a little. “You can still take Mia her night-light. She’ll want you to plug it in yourself.”
He picked up his keys. This time he knew what he was going there to do.
◆
Roesha found Dominic that evening in the stairwell, sitting beneath a sign that said KEEP CLEAR. He moved his boots when he saw her.
“You ever do what a sign tells you?” she asked.
“Only if the sign outranks me.”
“Right now that’s most signs.”
A laugh escaped him. She sat two steps above him, leaving room for somebody to pass. On the other side of the wall, a nurse was trying to get a vending machine to give back her dollar.
“Isaiah says Clara’s heart rate barely moved during the test,” Dominic said. “He’s doing something good for my family, and when I saw him with you, I wanted him gone.”
Roesha let her hands rest open on her knees. “I wanted Clara to let go of your hand in the ambulance. For about half a second. Then I saw the way she was looking at you, and I wanted her to hold on as hard as she could.”
He turned enough to look at her. “You never said that.”
“I was ashamed of it.”
“Me too.” He looked down at the stair between them. “What if I get to the other end of this and you’ve chosen him?”
Roesha’s wolf stirred at the hurt in his voice. For a second she could imagine putting her hand on his neck and feeling everything go quiet. She folded her fingers together instead.
“Then you’ll know I had a choice,” she said. “I need you to want that for me even if it costs you.”
He was quiet long enough for the nurse to win her fight with the vending machine.
“I do,” he said. His voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again. “I want that for you.”
He left first. Roesha waited until the door closed before she let herself cry.
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
CHAPTER 17 — The Regional Summit
The summit convened in an old schoolhouse on the territorial border. Tomas offered Roesha the seat beside him, where a camera could see her and the public gallery could not reach her. She chose a chair next to the aisle. She wanted anyone walking into that room to be able to see her face.
Thorne’s emergency motion named Roesha and Dominic as the sole cause of the breach. It called for an armed occupation of the hospital and compulsory dampening of both wardens.
Roesha watched Dominic read the motion. His hand tightened once on the bench. Then he set the paper down and waited for her to speak.
“The bond was recognized at my grandfather’s door,” Roesha told the panel. “Its first public surge occurred while I was treating Clara Santino. The Hollow King woke after the tribunal fired a suppressor into an active surgical field. Those are three separate events. Your motion treats them as one.”
“Do you dispute that your bond opened the vault?” Thorne asked.
“No. I dispute that putting a weapon on it makes it safer.”
Hailey submitted the recordings Eric had recovered from the hospital’s telemetry cache. The first trace showed a steady ward. The second showed the Null-Guardians’ discharge. The third showed the pulse rising from beneath the hospital. Tomas put his name on the chain of custody.
Vance stood. “I acted to protect this pack under Article Nine.”
Clara’s face appeared on the screen at the front of the room. Elena sat just beyond the camera, close enough to help if Clara tired.
“I watched your officers point guns toward my children,” Clara said. “Show me the part of Article Nine that told them to do that.”
Vance’s lawyer touched his sleeve. He sat.
Clara went on. “Doctor Carter asked my permission to use her power in the hospital. Your officers tried to move me while I was bleeding. I’m putting both of those facts on the record, along with my refusal to be placed in anyone’s custody.”
One of the magistrates asked whether she wanted the panel to rule on her marriage.
“No,” Clara said. “I want to make my own decisions about it.”
The lead magistrate asked for the testimony to pause while the recording was checked. In the lull, Thorne leaned across her table.
“Doctor Carter, you directed the discharge into the ground. You had no survey of what lay underneath that hospital. If we accept your account, we still have to accept that you took a risk you couldn't measure.”
Roesha had practiced a dozen answers to that question. Under the schoolhouse lights, all of them sounded like ways to duck it.
“Yes,” she said. “I believed Clara would die if I let your field hit the graft. I took a risk with the ground because every other route I could see led through her body.”
“Would you make the same decision today?”
“Today I know what’s under the floor. I’d evacuate before we got that far. And I’d ask the person with the suppressor to put it down while there was still time.”
The magistrate turned to Dominic. “The pack’s preliminary report says you held your position because you were unable to withdraw.”
Dominic looked at the report. Roesha could see the place where he’d folded the corner.
“I could have stepped away,” he said. “I would have left my wife on the table without the current Doctor Carter was using to keep her alive. I stayed because I agreed to help.”
“Your continued suspension may depend on whether this panel finds you acted under compulsion.”
“I heard you.” He took his hands off the report. “If you’re going to decide whether I should still be Beta, start with what I chose.”
On the screen, Clara shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she asked the clerk to read back the last sentence. She wanted it entered in full.
The panel recessed. In the corridor, Thorne caught Roesha alone beside a drinking fountain.
“You expect me to leave a mountain in the hands of two people who have known each other for three days?”
“I expect you to let the people who live on it have a say.” Roesha handed her a single sheet. “Edward’s plan for a passive ward monitor. Nobody feeds energy into the seal. If the reading drifts, we can evacuate before either of us goes near the vault.”
Thorne read it twice. “And if one of you wants to leave?”
“The vault held while we were in separate rooms. It held while I drove here ahead of Dominic and he stayed at the hospital with Edward. The bond keeps the circuit closed. Our bodies don’t need to be chained to the floor.”
“You’re certain?”
“I’m certain enough to ask for supervised tests. You can name a technical observer. Tomas names another. Clara has final say over who sees her medical readings.”
Thorne folded the sheet. “You expect me to admit on the record that my intervention made this worse.”
“Yes,” Roesha said. “I would expect the same of a surgeon.”
When the panel reconvened, Thorne withdrew the demand for dampening and agreed to submit the hospital incident for independent review. The magistrates lifted the travel restriction and terminated the custody order. They barred Vance from enforcement duties while his conduct was investigated. Dominic’s suspension would stand until the pack reviewed its succession and oversight rules.
Tomas waited until they were outside to ask if Dominic wanted him to fight for immediate reinstatement.
“File the review,” Dominic said. “I’ll answer for my decisions. Right now I’m due at Elena’s. Sophia’s teaching me to make a rabbit out of a washcloth.”
Roesha watched him go. She had spent the entire drive imagining what it would feel like to win. It felt like having enough room to let him leave.