Chapter 6: Knuckles

Ansel sent Greywater home in an hour.

He did it without drawing a weapon or raising a voice, by standing in the road until the Beta ran out of things to say.

Two of Carson's wolves helped him into the lead truck.

He held his broken hand against his chest the whole way, and he watched me through the back window until the dust closed over it.

When the trucks were gone I realized my own hand was throbbing.

I looked down.

A deep red bruise ran across the heel of my palm, where his fist had struck before I stopped it.

"Sit," Hester said from the porch. "You're going to say it's nothing, and then you're going to be wrong."

I sat on the step.

Ansel came back from the gate and crouched in front of me.

He didn't say a word.

He turned my hand palm up in his and looked at it under the porch light.

"It hasn't broken the skin," he said. "It will be sore for a day."

"I'm fine."

"You always say that."

"How do you know what I always say?"

"You said it at twelve, with a splinter in your heel the size of a pencil."

He took a clean cloth from Hester and ran it under the pump, and pressed it flat over the bruise.

Cold water ran down my wrist.

His thumb lay along the inside of my palm, and I could feel each of his fingers through the cloth.

He held it steady and kept his eyes on my hand.

I should have pulled away.

The cold had gone out of the water by the time I thought about it, and his hand was warm over mine, and neither of us moved.

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