Chapter 6: Ice Water

Except for silver.

My mother taught me that at her kitchen table when I was eight.

She had a bandage roll in one hand and a wolf's torn paw in the other.

Wolves heal everything in minutes.

Silver burns slowly, and it scars.

Eskil reached the shallows and stopped, with the lake running off his waist.

He didn't cover himself.

His eyes met mine across the dark, and I watched him decide not to hide.

"Go home, Maija," he said. "It's three in the morning."

"You're standing in a frozen lake," I said.

"I know where I'm standing."

"You're shaking."

He looked down at his hands.

"It's cold," he said.

"Wolves don't shake from cold."

I said it before I thought, and I saw him flinch.

I went down the dock steps and picked up the black wool coat he'd left folded on the boards.

Then I walked right into the shallows with my boots on.

The water went over my ankles and straight through to my skin.

I threw the coat around his shoulders and pulled it closed.

"Inside," I said. "The boathouse stove is lit. Leena banked it."

He let me lead him.

I had never led the Alpha of Ironwood anywhere, but he came with me.

The boathouse was a low log room at the foot of the bluff.

It had a cast-iron stove, a bench and a stack of old towels.

I dumped him on the bench and tossed a towel at his head.

"Dry off," I said.

He didn't move.

His hands were trembling too hard to hold it.

So I took the towel back, knelt in front of him on the cold floor, and dried his hair first, rubbing hard.

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