Chapter 4
"Leave it," he commanded, his voice gaining a sudden, unnatural rigidity. "It’s nothing."
"It isn't nothing. I smelled blood yesterday. Don't play the invincible Alpha with me, Mathias. In this dark, your rank doesn't mean spit."
She forced her hands around his left shoulder, sliding her fingers beneath the torn layers of his shearling jacket. Her fingertips met the rough wool of his under-sweater, damp and stiff. As she reached around toward his scapula, her fingers dipped into something thick, crusted, and tacky.
It smelled of old copper and cold iron.
"Mathias..." Her breath hitched. The laceration was massive, running from the base of his neck across the shoulder blade. The fabric had fused to the flesh, cemented by frozen fluids. But as she pressed lightly against the perimeter of the wound, checking for broken bone, her fingers encountered an unnatural angle—a sharp, protruding edge of rock or bone that felt violently displaced.
Yet when she touched it, he didn't scream. He didn't even flinch.
"Does that hurt?" she asked, her voice trembling.
"Pain is a distraction," he said flatly. His tone sounded detached, distant, as if he were observing a conversation happening thirty yards down a tunnel. "Stop poking at it. You’re letting the cold inside the coat."
"It needs to be bound. If it starts bleeding again when we move—"
"It won't bleed," he interrupted. A dry chuckle rattled in his throat. "Trust me, Elena. It’s thoroughly frozen shut."
"That isn't a good thing! That means the tissue is necrotic!"
"Then let it rot," he hissed, his hand suddenly shooting out through the pitch to catch her wrist.
His grip was terrifyingly strong—an immovable vise that closed around her delicate bones with enough pressure to make her cry out. Yet his fingers felt strangely devoid of texture, neither fully hot nor fully cold, but an abrasive numbness that seemed to suck the sensation right out of her skin.
"Sit down," he ordered, pulling her down against his chest until she collapsed back into the small hollow between his thighs. "Stop playing medic. You don't have bandages, you don't have needle and thread, and your wolf doesn't have the juice to trigger a healing surge. All you're doing is exhausting yourself."
Elena slumped against him, defeated. She leaned her ear against the left side of his chest, listening.
Inside the cavern, the water dropped: *Plink. Plink.*
Beneath her cheek, there was only the dense, immovable silence of his heavy wool coat. She strained her ears, desperate for the comforting, double-beat of his shifter heart, but the ringing in her own ears was so loud, a high-pitched siren of exhaustion that drowned out everything else.
*It’s just hypothermia,* she told herself frantically, pressing closer to him, trying to bury her nose into the warmth of his neck. *Severe bradycardia. His heart rate has dropped to ten beats a minute to survive the torpor. That’s what high-Alphas do. Their bodies hibernate.*
"Elena."
"What?" she muttered, her eyes fluttering closed against the endless dark.
"Tell me about the day your father died."
Her eyes snapped open. "Why would you ask that? You were there. Your father was the one who signed the decree that drove him into the borderlands."
"I was nineteen," Mathias said, his voice softer now, brushing against her hair like a ghost of wind. "I stood behind my father’s chair. I saw you kneeling on the flagstones. You didn't cry. Not even when they stripped your family’s sigils from your shoulders."
"I wasn't going to give you the satisfaction."
"I didn't want your tears," he murmured. "I wanted to know where a slip of an iron-ranked girl got that look in her eye. Like you were going to burn the packhouse to ash with your bare hands."
"I would have," she whispered, her fingers curling into his coat. "If I had the fire, I would have burned it all."
"I know."
A strange, quiet pause fell over them. For a brief second, the absolute darkness of the cave seemed to soften at the edges, shimmering with a faint, phantom indigo hue that she knew was only the dying cones of her retinas misfiring.
"I kept your sigil," Mathias whispered.
Elena froze. The words hung in the sub-zero air, fragile as spun sugar.
"What?"
"The bronze pin. The broken oak branch of your bloodline. My father threw it in the brazier. After the court cleared, I fished it out of the coals with the iron tongs. I still have it in my desk at the packhouse."
Elena felt an ache blossom behind her breastbone—not the sharp sting of cold, but a deep, tearing grief that knocked the wind out of her. "Why? Why would you keep that?"
"Because," he rasped, his chin resting atop her head, his heavy arm tightening around her waist, pinning her so close she could feel the rigid contour of his belt buckle biting into her hip, "even then... before the ridge... before this mountain fell on us... my beast knew yours."
A violent shiver ran through Elena, tearing a low moan from her throat.
The mate bond.
It was pulsing now, not with the triumphant golden thunder of a healthy pack union, but with a sorrowful, phantom frequency. It resonated through her marrow like a cello string pulled too tight, humming in the cold. It was an impossible, twisted fate: the executioner keeping the souvenir of the exile he was meant to love, locked away in a wooden drawer while her family starved on frozen lichen.
"You're a monster, Mathias," she wept, pressing her face into the curve of his throat.
"I am," he agreed, his lips brushing against the shell of her ear—a touch so light, so impossibly faint, it felt like nothing more than a falling snowflake. "A monster who won't let you die in the dark."
***
By Day Four, Elena had begun to hear the voices.
They weren't Mathias’s. They were her sister’s laughter, echoing down the long, black tunnels of the cave; they were the bark of the hunting hounds across the winter ridge; they were the sound of summer rain drumming against the tin roof of her childhood home.
"Elena."
A rough hand shook her shoulder. The movement was jerky, mechanical.
"Elena, wake up. Answer me."
She groaned, her tongue feeling like a dry sponge wedged in the back of her throat. "Leave me alone, Lily... let me sleep five more minutes..."
"I am not your sister!"
The slap was immediate, sharp, cracking against her cheekbone with the sound of a pistol shot.
Pain erupted across Elena’s face, bright red and blinding, dragging her kicking and screaming out of the warm, sunlit meadow of her hallucination and slamming her back down into the freezing, pitch-black tomb.
"You bastard!" she snarled, lashing out blindly with her clawed fingers. Her nails caught the side of his neck, raking across the skin.
She expected warm blood to well up under her fingernails. Instead, the texture was rubbery, tough, and cold—like slicing through half-thawed meat from a larder. No wetness coated her fingers.
"Good," Mathias’s voice came back, entirely devoid of pain, completely unaffected by the strike. "Get angry. The moment you start talking to ghosts, you're twenty minutes from cardiac arrest."
