Chapter 246: She Finally Asked for Him

ASH’S POV

Dove had sent for him. Ash had heard the runner say it twice and still made the boy repeat her name before he followed him to the clinic.

Now he was following her out of that courtyard, with Edrik turning back toward him from the corner. Dove kept walking beside Thorne. She had seen Ash start after them and chosen not to wait.

She had wanted roads. A gate that was still open. Names of men who had actually seen the barriers. He had given her everything he knew, and she had left holding her husbands’ hands.

He wanted her to call him back.

A clinic worker approached with a tray of cups and stopped well outside his reach. "Sir. The patients need this path."

Ash moved. The worker hurried past, eyes down.

Beyond the gate, Thorne paused beneath an awning while Dove adjusted her bag. Edrik waited until they moved on, then crossed toward Ash without bothering to smile. Ash kept walking until they stood close enough to hear each other over the engines at the clinic.

"She asked for directions, not a shadow."

"Get out of my way."

The bear looked past him toward the security post. "Your job’s over there. Or did you forget it when she said your name?"

Ash’s muscles tightened beneath his shirt. He could still feel Edrik fighting him in the practice yard, refusing to stay down until Ash made him. The victory had changed nothing. The bear spoke to him now with exactly the same contempt.

"She shouldn’t be on the street."

"She decided to come here. You heard her."

"I heard a woman trying to get her family out."

"And somehow decided the family included you."

Ash caught Edrik’s shirt. The bear struck his arm aside and drove a fist toward his jaw. Ash turned with the blow, caught the next wrist, and forced it down between them. Brick scraped Edrik’s shoulder as Ash pushed him against the workshop wall.

He could feel how much force the bear was using. More than most men could have survived. Not enough.

"Stop," Ash said.

Edrik looked him in the eye. "You first."

Ash held him there, breathing through his nose, aware of people retreating from the pavement. One woman pulled a boy inside a doorway. He did not want Dove coming back to this. He wanted Edrik to yield once, to lower his eyes instead of standing there certain Dove would call him home. The bear’s stare did not shift. Ash could feel the pulse in the wrist he held, steadying even while his own hammered.

Then the bear spoke again.

"You remember her trying to tell you what happened at the Warren?"

Ash’s grip changed before he could stop it.

"She was scared, and you made it worse," Edrik said. "I wasn’t there. I still get to live with what you left in her head."

The words landed harder than the fist.

Ash remembered Dove’s face. The anger she had used to hold herself together. His own certainty, ugly and easy, that she must have caused whatever had happened to her.

He wanted to tear the memory apart until there was a version he could bear.

Instead, he let go.

Edrik straightened his shirt without taking his eyes off him. Ash could have said he had apologized. He could have listed the miles, the work, the waiting outside her door. None of it would change that face.

An alarm sounded from the next block.

Both men turned. Edrik was already running before the second call, heading toward Dove’s street without wasting another threat on Ash.

Ash followed as far as the junction. Guards were dragging a barrier across the office road. A cart had overturned beside the clinic turn, and people were trying to get around it with bags and children.

He caught the cart’s metal edge and lifted. A worker scrambling beneath the broken handle stopped and stared.

"Move your feet," Ash snapped.

The man stumbled clear. Ash threw the empty cart onto the pavement, opening the road before a second family reached it. The impact bent a wheel flat. Nobody complained about the damage.

His superior called from behind the new barricade. "Inside. Now."

Ash looked down the clinic road. Thorne was moving a handcart with another man. Dove stood near the gate talking to Iris, her hand cutting through the air as she made a point. Edrik reached her, and she touched his arm without stopping her sentence.

There she was. Alive, furious, busy. Still refusing to be where someone else put her.

Something in his chest hurt badly enough that he pressed a hand against it.

She was not a member of his Warren anymore. She had never been his mate. He had run out of useful names for the thing that made him watch her hands and remember the sound of her laughing in another man’s room.

"Come inside," the officer shouted again. "We’re closing."

"The clinic’s still moving people."

"They were told to leave."

"A man on a stretcher doesn’t get faster because you told him."

The officer came closer, two guards behind him. "This is about the fox."

Ash faced him fully. The officer stopped.

"She’s out here."

"Then bring her in."

"She said no."

The words tore out of him. Saying them did not make him like them. It made him remember Dove stepping away every time he reached, the look on her face when he tried to turn concern into a reason she owed him something.

He would not drag her through another doorway.

The officer reached for his arm. Ash caught the hand before it touched him, held it just long enough to make the man’s knees bend, then released it.

"Close your gate. I’m staying."

The guards backed away with their officer. Ash turned toward the clinic approach and rolled his shoulders, loosening the strain through his neck. The first barricade section scraped shut behind him.

Dove looked up from the courtyard. Her eyes found him. She did not smile, but this time she did not turn away immediately either.

Then three armed men stepped from the office road and pointed toward her gate.

Ash moved into their path.

"Try another street," he said.