"You're bleeding."

"It's nothing."

He moved. Not toward me the way a captor moves toward a prisoner. He crossed the distance in two steps and his hand was on my shoulder before I could decide whether to let him.

His fingers found the tear in the fabric. Pulled it back. The wound was shallow — a scrape, not a cut — but it was bleeding steadily, and his hand on the skin around it was careful in a way that had nothing to do with field medicine.

"It tore on the exit." I kept my voice flat. "Stone edge. I need to widen that section."

"You need to stop running solo missions through a siege line."

"When you stop besieging my territory, I'll stop running through yours."

His hand was still on my shoulder. His thumb rested at the edge of the wound, not pressing, just there. The contact point burned in a way that had nothing to do with the scrape.

Two seconds. Three. His wolf was right behind his eyes — I could see it, the way the pupils went dark and the stillness became something other than professional. A man holding himself back from something with both hands, and the hands were slipping.

He let go. Stepped back.

"The north ridge patrol rotates at 0300," he said. "You have a twelve-minute window between the third and fourth sweep."

I stared at him.

Twelve minutes. The same gap Torren had mapped from the watchtower. The gap we'd filed under "terrain difficulty." Twelve minutes that had been the only opening in his entire siege perimeter — the only weakness in an operation run by a commander who didn't leave weaknesses.

"That gap isn't terrain," I said.

He didn't answer.

"You built it."

Nothing. His face was the finished surface again — flat, professional, closed. But the answer was in the silence. In the way he didn't deny it.

He'd left me a door. From day one. A twelve-minute window in a perimeter that should have been seamless, positioned on the one ridge that faced the route to the nearest supply point. He'd designed his own siege with a hole in it, and he'd put the hole where I'd find it.

"Why?" I asked.

He turned and walked into the trees. The darkness took him in three steps.

I stood there for ten seconds. Longer than I should have. The blood on my shoulder was already clotting, and the medicine in my pack was worth more than any answer he could have given me.

I shifted. Ran. Hit the north ridge gap at 0247 — thirteen minutes before the rotation. Went through the tunnel. Emerged inside my walls at 0310 with a pack full of antibiotics and a truth I hadn't asked for.

Isla had the antibiotics in Gerda within the hour. IV access with the last sterile line she'd been saving for an emergency that was apparently tonight. She didn't ask where the medicine came from. She looked at the oilcloth wrapping, at the Miller's Crossing stamp on the package, and she understood what I'd done to get it. She just didn't know all of it.

Torren was in the command room. He'd moved to the chair by the door, which meant he'd been watching the tunnel entrance.

"Clean run?"

"Clean enough."

"No contact?"

I looked at him. Held the look for a beat longer than a simple "no" required. Then I said it anyway.

"No contact."

He nodded. Filed it. Moved on to the morning patrol schedule.

I went to check on Lily. She was asleep in the inner room, curled around the wooden wolf, breathing slow and steady. Not shifted tonight. Small mercy.

I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her breathe. The medicine was delivered. Gerda would live. One fire out of a dozen put out. Tomorrow there would be another.

But I was sitting in the dark with blood drying on my shoulder from a wound he'd touched, carrying the knowledge that the one weakness in his siege wasn't a weakness at all. It was a choice. Made for me. On purpose. From the beginning.

I didn't know what to do with that. So I watched my daughter sleep and added it to the list of things I wasn't thinking about.

The list was getting very long.