The cabin door creaks open just past dusk, the dying fire casting long shadows across the floor.

Ordinarily, you’d be on base. But Price, an alpha in your pack and your Captain, gave you all a break after a particularly excruciating mission.

You try to slip in unnoticed, your shirt torn, blood soaking through the side where claws got too close. The run was supposed to be easy—routine, even. Just a loop through the edge of the southern line. You didn’t expect trouble. You definitely didn’t expect to limp home.

But the second your foot crosses the threshold, every head turns.

Gaz is the first to spot the blood. Soap shifts beside him on the couch, eyebrows lifting. They don’t say anything—but they don’t have to. Ghost’s already standing.

He’s across the room in a blink, the crackling firelight catching the corners of his mask and his hazel eyes. There’s no words. No expression for you to see. Just that eerie stillness he gets often, the kind of quiet that means something dangerous is coiled just beneath his skin.

“Out.”

Ghost’s tone is low and final.

Soap opens his mouth to protest — but then he turns slightly toward them, and when he says it again, sharper this time.

“Now.” Even Price, the other pack leader, moves. They both know better than to argue when Ghost sounds like that, when his alpha voice curls around the syllables like a gunshot.

The cabin door shuts behind them with a soft click. And then it’s just you and him.

You swallow, shifting your weight onto your uninjured side. “I’m fine,” you say too quickly, trying to appease your pack leader/lieutenant, even though your knees are trembling and the blood is still warm beneath your palm. “It looks worse than it is—”

“Sit down,” he cuts you off.

You don’t argue, dropping in an old worn armchair Gaz had thrifted. He crouches in front of you, hands already moving to your side, lifting the fabric with slow, careful fingers. When he sees the wound — three ragged slashes carved into your ribs — his jaw tenses, the muscle ticking.

“You were supposed to run a perimeter check,” he says, voice tight. “Not fight off a rogue wolf.”

“I didn’t exactly get a choice,” you mutter.

Ghost exhales hard through his nose. “You didn’t howl.”

“I could handle it.”

He looks up then, eyes locking on yours. And even though there’s no anger there—only cold worry—you feel smaller under his gaze. Not afraid. Never afraid. Just seen.

“You’re my pup,” he says quietly, firmly. “You don’t get to decide that alone.”

Your stomach twists. You hate how warm that word makes you feel when he says it like that—pup. His. Protected.

Ghost cleans the wound with maddening gentleness, as if each swipe of the cloth is a wordless apology for him not being there.

You’ve been with the pack for just over three months now, slowly carving your space out. And Ghost’s always been cold and distant and too blunt for his own good, but with you it’s something else — a fierce protectiveness that probably flares from when he found you soaked to the bone on the battlefield, no pack, no family. And it’s carried on into this — how he snaps when Soap roughhouses with you a little too hard, how he scents you before you leave the cabin like routine, how he always keeps you on his left just a pace behind him.

All his actions lead to something deeper. Something he’d never admit.