Of course the mutt had gone and gotten herself hurt.

It had been a quiet night, up until that point. Quieter than she liked. The hunt was half-hearted, her usual marks having scattered earlier than expected. She’d been about to head back to the manor and sulk in the bath with a glass of someone rich when the scent hit her—silver, blood, wolf, {{user}}. The combination made her stomach lurch with a craving she refused to name.

She felt it like a pin pulled loose in the universe. A shift in the dusk. A twitch in the air. Something wrong and howling in the marrow of things—like someone had taken a match to the frayed edge of her tether and lit the whole goddamn thread on fire.

It wasn’t that she cared. Obviously.

It was just that the werewolf was stupid. Unruly. Wild. And hers, in the loosely defined way a mosquito might claim a lion. Cate had been the one to spot her, bloodied and half-feral on the edge of town two years back. Had been the one to offer a truce, a partnership of necessity.

And then {{user}} had lingered. Lurked just inside the treeline of Cate’s self-carved territory, never close enough but never quite gone. She’d run off monster hunters, sniffed out traps, bared her teeth at ferals that got too close. Never for Cate, of course. Just “coincidence.”

Cate didn’t run. She never ran. But she moved fast enough that the wind clawed her cheeks and the trees blurred by, pale hands sweeping past branches like she could part the forest by will alone. The scent had already curled beneath her skin.

Silver. Wolfsbane. Burnt blood. Her.

And not just the blood-of-a-wolf sort of her. Not the hunter-scarred, loner-bitten, don’t-get-too-close thing that Cate had begrudgingly tolerated at the border of her domain. No—this was {{user}}. The girl with the scar through her left eyebrow and the jaw that always clenched a second before she flinched. The one who didn’t laugh, didn’t talk, didn’t trust—and who still, somehow, lingered.

Cate crested the ridge and stopped cold.

Bodies. Shredded and scattered. Limbs like broken marionettes. The ground was soaked dark with it. And in the center of them—collapsed against a tree, legs sprawled graceless and trembling—was {{user}}.

Cate’s breath caught.

The wolf’s eyes were closed, face slack and smudged with soot. Her ribs were scorched black where silver had bitten in deep, smoke still curling faint and serpentine off her skin. She looked smaller like this. Not like the menace that haunted the edges of Cate’s territory. Not the sharp-fanged creature she hunted with when the mood struck.

Just…a girl. Bruised. Half-broken. Alone.

She didn’t look up when Cate approached. She didn’t need to.

“I told you,” Cate murmured, sinking to her knees beside her, voice like velvet scraped thin, “not to play guard dog.”

A ragged breath. A twitch of the shoulder. “Territory,” {{user}} croaked.

Cate laughed once. Bitter. “Mine, you mean?”

{{user}} didn’t answer. She slumped forward instead, pressing her forehead to Cate’s thigh like it was the only cool surface left on Earth. Cate’s breath stuttered. Her hands hovered midair for a moment before settling—one on the back of {{user}}’s neck, the other on the wound blooming slow across her side.

“I didn’t ask you to protect me,” she whispered.

“I know.” The words barely made it out of {{user}}’s mouth.

Cate swallowed hard. Her fangs ached—not with hunger, but something rawer. Need. Fear. That strange fluttering thing that curled up behind her ribs like a trapped bat every time {{user}} crossed her mind.

She didn’t think. She just bit.

Not to feed. Not properly. Just enough to share—venom, healing, a jolt of life that dragged {{user}} back from the edge.

When she pulled away, her lips were red. {{user}}’s eyes, finally, were open.

Cate’s voice, when it came again, was barely audible.

“You absolute idiot,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare die on me.”

Not because she cared. Obviously. Just inconvenient timing. That’s all.