Elias woke with his arm already braced for pain.

He had dreamed in fragments last night. The feeling as the massive teeth plunged into his shoulder, the sound of his own bones grinding in his ear, the hot splash of his own blood on his face.

Even now, as he drifted between sleeping and reality, he could smell the stench of the wolf’s breath. It was exactly how he knew death smelled...

Like blood and rotten flesh.

Waking up meant that he was going to have to deal with the reality of sepsis, of infection, swelling, maybe the start of necrosis. He braced for all of it as his eyes cracked open.

Instead, there was nothing.

He flexed his hand, expecting the nerves to be completely severed and his fingers to not work.

But his fingers obeyed his commands the first time.

There was no numbness, no pins and needles, no slow delay.

His grip was strong, clean, potentially better than it was before. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

That wasn’t right.

He sat up fast enough that the blanket slid from his shoulders and puddled around his hips. The movement should’ve hurt—should’ve pulled at the scars caused by Zubair’s fire, lit nerves like wires under flame.

Instead, it felt like any other morning.

It was better than any other morning.

His chest was tight. His breathing came too quick. Adrenaline reaction, he diagnosed automatically. The body does strange things under stress. It masks. It lies.

Patients that are minutes away from death get a second win, a moment of clarity, before they pass away.

He tugged at the wrap across his arm. The bandage came loose in strips stiff with blood. He expected ruin underneath. He expected something that would need grafts and weeks of debridement and months of rehab if there was such a thing as rehab anymore.

There was skin.

Whole. Unbroken. Not even pink with healing. Smooth, pale, like it had never been torn at all.

He touched it once with shaking fingers. Warm. Alive. He pressed harder, digging a thumb into the place where the wolf’s teeth had closed. He pressed until his nails blanched white. Nothing.

No tenderness. No bruise. No scar.

"This is—" His throat locked. He swallowed hard, forcing the words out. "—this is not possible."

He wrapped the bandage back with clumsy hands, covering the truth before anyone else could see. He pulled his sleeve down and flexed again under the fabric. Still nothing. Still whole.

A sound rose in him, low, curling through his bones. Not the remembered thrum of under-ice weight. Not the scrape of teeth.

A hiss. Soft. Amused.

You heal now.

The words weren’t words. Not in any language he’d learned. They came like exhaled air through a crack, like lungs that weren’t his pressing sound into his skull. The words were combined with pictures and emotions that were gone almost before he could identify them.

He froze.

Hallucination, he diagnosed instantly. Trauma response. Auditory disturbance tied to stress. The brain supplies stimulus when the body can’t reconcile memory with sensation. He’d read about it, seen it in soldiers who lost limbs but still felt them itch. Phantom pain, phantom voice.

Not phantom. The hiss slid across his teeth, almost a laugh. Real. Ours.

His hands shook harder. He laced his fingers together and squeezed until his knuckles cracked. "You’re not real," he whispered under his breath. "You’re a symptom."

Symptom of strength. The laugh grew louder, low and serpentine. We are in you. We are you.

"No." His voice went harsh. "I’m Elias Korkmaz. Thirty-four. Military medic, combat surgeon, bioweapons expert. PTSD indicators, sleep deprivation, stress-induced hallucinations. That’s all this is."

The hiss laughed again, like it was licking the edge of his denial.

He shoved his notebook open with stiff fingers and started writing. Words grounded him. Diagnoses steadied him.

Acute stress disorder.

Disassociation.

Hallucination: auditory.

Delusional ideation.

He wrote until the page blurred. His hand cramped. He stopped only when he realized the ink had trailed down into a scrawled line that looked more like teeth than letters.

He slammed the book shut.

Across the room, Lachlan shifted in his sleep and muttered something incoherent. Alexei stirred, one eye opening lazily before closing again. Zubair never moved. Only Sera was awake—leaning against the wall, her arms folded in front of her as she gazed at him... sharp and unblinking.

Her eyes tracked him like she already knew. He pulled his sleeve lower, throat tight.

He flexed his hand again, harder this time. Perfect strength. Too perfect.

Get used to it, the hiss purred. We will do it again.

His stomach turned. His rational mind scrambled for footing. Perhaps he’d been misdiagnosed before. Perhaps the bite had missed the artery. Perhaps clotting had been more efficient than he calculated. Perhaps—

Perhaps you stop pretending.

The laugh rolled through his chest until his heart stuttered. He pressed a palm hard over the place, willing it quiet.

He wanted to tell someone. He wanted to ask. But what would he say? That he’d been bitten almost to the bone, and now he was whole? That something whispered in his head like infection given voice?

They’d look at him the way he’d looked at soldiers who swore shadows followed them out of the desert. With pity. With distance. With the calculation of risk.

He couldn’t risk that.

He rewrapped his arm tighter, even though there was nothing left to bind. He told himself the pressure was necessary. He told himself this was science.

Then he opened his notebook again and forced his hand to write the truth he couldn’t say aloud:

Arm: completely healed.

No scar formation.

Impossible.

He hesitated. The pencil hovered. He pressed harder and wrote the word anyway.

Laughing.

The hiss purred, pleased, like it had been waiting for acknowledgment all along.

Elias snapped the notebook shut so fast the edge caught his palm. A red line welled across the skin. Blood. Normal, human blood. He stared at it like it was a gift.

It hurt. He clung to that hurt.

But when he wiped the blood away with his thumb, the skin underneath had already closed.

He sat very still, hands folded tight in his lap, as if stillness alone might keep the others from noticing. But Sera hadn’t looked away once, and Alexei’s half-smile in his sleep told Elias he hadn’t been as quiet as he thought.