Chapter 18: The Pack Comes Across

Dara's POV

I set his shoulder on Hester's kitchen table with a dish towel between his teeth.

I have done it a hundred times at the clinic, to loggers and to drunks.

I had never done it to a man whose pain I could feel in my own shoulder.

"Breathe out," I said.

He breathed out, and I pushed.

The joint went home with a wet clunk. His whole body arched and went slack.

"That's the worst of it," I said, and my voice shook. "Four broken ribs, a bite through the side that I've stitched, and no running for a month."

"I held the bridge," Tobias said around the towel.

"You held it, and you can stop talking."

I taped his ribs and washed the blood from his neck and hair.

I did not let my hands stop moving, because if they stopped I would start to cry.

Hester put a blanket over him and left a pot of broth on the stove.

At eight, Tobias's father came to the door.

He stood in the kitchen and looked at his son on the cot by the stove, and his face did something I had not seen it do.

"I kept the wolves home," he said to nobody.

"You did," Tobias said, without opening his eyes.

"I was wrong."

"Yes."

His father turned to me.

"No leash," he said. "Forty wolves at the creek, under your say. They stand there or they go home. That is all."

I looked at Hester. She nodded once.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Chose Her, So I Refused to Become His Luna from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.