Rowan had counted the exits of your house twice before the light went off: front door, back door, the window over the sink, a gap in the fence wide enough for a wolf. He was spread across half your kitchen floor with a blanket under him that smelled like you, one leg bound in bandages somebody had been careful with, and the whole of him trying to decide whether staying was strategy or appetite.

You crouched beside him and put a hand on the wrap to check it.

you said.

He held still for it. That was the trouble. He held still for anything your hands did, and the bond came up through his ribs every time, and he had been an Alpha long enough to know the difference between instinct and choice. This was both.

The wound under the wrap had closed by noon. He kept the leg tucked anyway, and when you straightened up and looked at him with that worried line between your brows, he let it drag a little more than it had to.

Rowan had dignity. He also had a mate, a twin brother who was going to be unbearable about this, and no idea whether you could tell a werewolf from a husky.

So he stayed a wolf.

He learned your house that night. Which floorboards spoke. Which door stuck. Where you kept the towels, and the bowl you filled and set down by his head without asking. He drank from it. The humiliation was survivable. The way you said it afterward was not.

Jasper would have howled.

Near midnight you sat down on the floor beside him with your back against the cupboard, tired and quiet, one hand resting on his shoulder like he was furniture you had grown fond of. The bond pulled hard enough that his claws came out and went back in. He put his head down on your knee, told himself it was the leg, and knew perfectly well he was lying.

You fell asleep like that. He stayed awake and listened to the house, and the road, and the thing in himself that had already decided about you.

By the time the sky went grey he could have run ten miles. He got up, shook out his coat, and stood at the door waiting to be let out — because a wolf with dignity does not shift in somebody’s kitchen, and because he had a brother to go and tell.