Chapter 1
Death, contrary to expectations, brought no peace. It didn't come at all.
There was no light at the end of the tunnel, no rolling credits, no blissful emptiness. Instead of eternal oblivion, it felt like someone swung a defibrillator and slammed it straight into my soul. Full power. No anesthesia. No warning.
Consciousness snapped on in a jerk. A supernova inside my skull.
BAM.
A second ago I—Aleksandr Petrovich, a doctor—felt my body lying on the cold operating-room tile while my worn-out heart gave one last pathetic twitch. A clot, a massive infarction, the end. I accepted it.
And now I was inhaling.
The air was чужое. Not the sterile ozone of an OR, but a thick, hot haze soaked with dust and cheap alcohol. It flooded my lungs with the hunger of a drowning man surfacing. My ribcage answered with a crack—my ribs felt like they were trying to rip through the skin from the inside. The oxygen удар to the brain brought instant dizziness that bordered on retching.
Alive?
The thought was absurd, heretical to my materialist mind. Thirty years of practice, thousands of autopsies, shelves of medical literature screamed the opposite. You don't come back from an infarction like that. Hypoxia should have already turned the cerebral cortex into useless jelly. Final station, Sasha. The train doesn't go farther.
But facts are stubborn, and physiology doesn't tolerate conditionals.
My heart hammered against my ribs—not like an old man's failing pump, but like the piston of a boosted engine about to redline. It pushed through my veins not just blood, but some fiery cocktail, a mix of adrenaline, cortisol, and pure, concentrated rage.
"What the… hell…" I tried to speak, and failed. My tongue felt swollen, чужой slab of meat.
A crimson veil hung before my eyes. Not a metaphor—real мутная redness blotting out my vision. But worse was what was happening in my solar plexus. A nuclear reactor was lighting up there. This wasn't the anger of a human. This was Rage—ancient, distilled, predatory. It flooded my rational mind, trying to seize control of my motor functions. It didn't care about medical history. It wanted blood.
"Aleksandr, status?!" My inner voice—the doctor's voice—broke into a panicked shriek, trying to drown out the beast's growl. "Full assessment! Now!"
But my brain couldn't handle it. The sensory overload was so monstrous that my psyche yanked the emergency brake to avoid insanity. Hard dissociation.
I was kicked out of the body.
Reality blinked and changed angles. I hovered under the ceiling like a bodiless дух, watching the scene from above. The camera pulled back, turning me into a spectator in an anatomical theater of absurdity.
The picture was grotesque, worthy of a mad painter's brush. A wealthy but bleak hall in half-darkness, candlelight trembling as it snatches two figures out of shadow, locked in a смертельный clinch.
A massive man covered in black hair—a mountain of muscle—held a scrawny мальчишка of about twelve in the air. The child dangled in his огромные hands like a broken rag doll.
My взгляд, obeying professional deformation, began scanning injuries. The diagnosis arrived in a fraction of a second.
Cervical spine trauma. Catastrophic.
The boy's head was thrown back and twisted at an angle incompatible with life. The skin on his neck stretched white, and beneath it displaced vertebrae jutted in sharp corners.
With injuries like that, death is instant. The respiratory center is cut off, the diaphragm paralyzes, the heart stops. A corpse.
But this corpse was alive.
It contradicted every law of medicine, but I saw it. His eyes weren't glassy. They weren't filmed over with fading. They burned with a horrific, inhuman yellowish fire, drilling into the убийца's face. There was no victim's fear in that stare. There was the hunger of a predator that had finally cornered prey.
I shifted my gaze to the man—the giant.
And I knew his song was over.
From the boy's fists, tearing through thin pale skin, bone protrusions stuck out. Not knives, not steel—bone. Porous, yellowish, slick with серous fluid and слизь, but sharp as a razor. Three spikes on each hand.
The boy's right hand went under the giant's lower jaw. The trajectory was perfect: the bony blades pierced the floor of the mouth, tongue muscles, hard palate, and, by the angle, jammed into the base of the skull, nearly entering the brain from below.
But the left hand was worse. More efficient.
The strike landed прямо в лицо. The middle claw pierced the eyeball, turning it into vitreous mush, cracked through the thin ethmoid bone of the orbit, and sank deep into the frontal lobe.
Jesus Christ…
The thought hung in the vacuum of my astral projection.
I watched, spellbound, horrified, and with a twisted профессиональное admiration. Something dragged me forward—toward the boy. Toward the little monster with a broken neck who refused to die. And then I understood with perfect clarity: this wasn't just an image. This wasn't a hallucination of a dying brain.
This body was mine.
A flash.
Perception collapsed. I was slammed back into flesh like a piston forced into a cylinder under a hydraulic press.
CRUNCH.
The sound happened inside me. I didn't just hear it—I felt my own cervical vertebrae rubbing and sliding into place with a wet click. Torn ligaments fused at impossible speed, nerves threading through ruptures. It wasn't pain—it was зуд. Hot, electric, maddening зуд of furious, aggressive regeneration.
A nauseating bouquet of smells hit me, amplified a hundredfold: cheap whiskey fumes, the sour stink of old sweat, sharp gunpowder smoke, and dominating all of it—the sweet, heavy, metallic aroma of fresh blood.
I was staring straight into the man's face.
Thomas.
The name surfaced from чужая memory. The gardener. The killer.
His face was centimeters from mine. His mouth twisted in a silent scream, revealing rotten brown tooth-stumps. His one remaining eye stared at me with absolute, пределное disbelief. He couldn't believe he was already dead.
I felt life draining from his massive bulk. I saw the pupil widen, devouring the iris, the cornea clouding into matte glass.
Exitus letalis, my medical brain stated automatically, while my hands—child's hands with bloodied bone spikes—held the corpse.
I killed him. More precisely, It killed him. The зверь inside. But the border was gone now. We were one.
Panic washed over me like ice, knocking away the euphoria of rage. I tried to unclench my fingers, shove the dead, heavy lump of meat away, but the body obeyed badly. The muscles locked in a напряжение spasm.
The corpse began to tilt. Gravity took over. The giant's huge fingers, which a second ago had been crushing my throat, went limp and opened. The heavy body pulled me down with it.
"Uh…" I rasped, trying to free myself.
A wet, squelching sound. Revolting and eloquent.
The bony spikes slid out unwillingly. Bone scraping bone shuddered up my forearms to the elbow. A little fountain of dark blood splashed across my face, filling my eyes with warm sticky liquid.
Salty. Hot. Real.
Thomas's body hit the expensive carpet with a dull, wet thud.
"A-A-A-A-A!!!"
A scream cut through the cottony silence—sharp, ultrasonic. With my new sharpened senses it hit like a needle punched into my eardrum.
I jerked toward the sound, wincing at the phantom crunch in vertebrae that had only just fused. My neck still protested with a dull, aching heaviness. In the far corner, pressing her shoulder blades into silk wallpaper with monograms, a girl slid down the wall.
Rose.
Red hair that was usually tamed into a strict braid was now scattered like a mane, making her look like a mad witch. On her face, white as chalk, freckles looked like spatter from someone else's blood. She hugged her knees with whitening fingers, and her eyes were so wide the irises almost vanished behind the black of the pupils.
There wasn't fear in them. There was primal, chthonic horror. She was looking at me. Not at James, the master's son she'd known since infancy. She was looking at the monster that crawled out of his skin and tore a man apart with bare hands.
But there was another sound. Far worse than hysteria.
A dull, guttural howl that turned my guts into an icy knot. The sound of a wounded зверь that had lost its mate.
I forced my eyes right. By the fireplace, kneeling in a red pool that soaked fast into the thick pile of a Persian carpet, was a woman.
Elizabeth.
The mother of this body.
Her nightgown, once snow-white, now looked like a butcher's apron. The hem was wet, heavy, clinging to her legs. She noticed neither me—her son—nor Thomas's cooling corpse with a hole in his skull, nor the servant's screams. Her universe had collapsed to one point. To the man in her arms.
John Howlett.
My professional gaze moved faster than emotion. The diagnosis was immediate and hopeless. The man's chest had been turned into bloody mince by a point-blank shotgun blast. I saw white shards of shattered ribs mixed with tatters of an expensive vest, driven into the lung tissue, and the black rim of powder burn. Injuries absolutely incompatible with life. Massive blood loss, torn major vessels, fourth-degree traumatic shock.
Elizabeth shook him by the shoulders, smearing her thin aristocratic fingers in thick кровь that was already starting to clot.
"John… John, please…" Her voice broke and cracked into a high note, turning into an inhuman wail. "Get up… Don't you dare… Do you hear me?! Don't you dare!"
She pressed her powdered face into his ruined chest, not afraid to get dirty, and howled. That sound… I'd heard it in military hospitals, in morgues, when mothers identified sons by fragments. The sound of fate's spine snapping. It struck raw nerves harder than the pain in my own bones.
In this chaos, amid the acrid stink of burnt gunpowder and the sweet breath of death, her grief felt like the only real thing. Dense. Tangible. You could cut it with a knife.
And then reality tore open with a third voice—not grief, but black, boiling hatred.
"FATHER!!! NO!!!"
To the right, by the entrance, a teenager dropped to his knees.
Dog.
The gardener's son. The killer's son.
Stocky, thick-jawed like a bulldog, face twisted in бешенство. He stared at his father's corpse—Thomas—while gray-and-red brain slurry slowly seeped from the ruined eye socket.
Then, slowly, like a tank turret rotating, he raised his eyes to me.
There was no paralyzing horror in that look like Rose's. No despair like Elizabeth's. It was a promise. A sentence without appeal. He was memorizing me. Every line of my face, every stain of blood on my hands, every breath.
But I had nothing left.
My reserve generator died. The adrenaline storm ended as abruptly as it began, leaving scorched emptiness and leaden weight behind. Hypoglycemia, exhaustion, shock—the body presented its bill for miraculous resurrection.
The world swayed. The walls slid sideways like cheap stage scenery, the grieving mother blurred into a trembling watercolor stain, and the screams fused into a monotone hum.
The floor hit my knees. Hard. Then my shoulder.
I fell slowly, as if sinking into thick syrup. Sounds dulled, as if my ears were stuffed with cotton. The last thing my fading consciousness caught before darkness dropped the switch was my own hands on the patterned carpet.
The skin over the knuckles was in ribbons.
And from them jutted bloodied bony daggers.
My instrument. My curse. My new life.
---
The merciful blackout didn't last long.
Unforgivably, it didn't last long.
Something yanked me out of darkness roughly, without prelude. A sharp, тупой удар to my side—like a sledgehammer into a sack of wet cement. My body bounced, the world spun, and the flight ended with my back slamming onto the blood-soaked carpet.
With effort, fighting sticky lashes, I forced my eyes open. My left eye was swollen shut with a hematoma; my right was flooded with something thick, sticky, and hot. Through that crimson haze, Dog was coming at me.
Hell burned in his eyes. Pure, concentrated, distilled hatred. A killer's взгляд.
He dropped onto me, straddling me, pinning me with his knees, and began methodically turning my face into a cutlet.
"You… killed… him…" he rasped in time with the punches.
Punch. A fist slams into my cheekbone. The crunch of breaking bone vibrates through my skull. Punch. A fist drives my nose inward.
"I hate you! I'll kill you! Freak! What did you do to my father?!"
I tried to answer. To say something rational, adult—Your father just shot mine, it was self-defense. But the body failed me. My jaw wouldn't work, my tongue tangled. Only a wet, bubbling croak came out, mixed with bloody foam.
CRUNCH.
Another punch, lower this time, accented, into my sternum. I felt a rib—seventh or eighth on the right—snap with a dry click, and a sharp splinter punched into my lung.
Traumatic pneumothorax, my inner diagnostician noted, flatly, like dictating an operative report. The lung will collapse. Respiratory failure will progress. Risk of emphysema. Death from asphyxia or pain shock within minutes.
Dog kept hammering me with the mechanical fury of a piston. I felt the cartilage of my nose fully collapse into bone grit. My mouth filled with tooth fragments and the thick, salty-iron taste of my own blood. I choked on it, swallowed it, gagged on it, trying to inhale.
But a strange thing… where was the pain?
The blinding, paralyzing pain that blacks out vision and stops the heart? It wasn't there. Only a dull, distant echo of discomfort, like this was happening to a mannequin. As if someone had pumped me full of morphine. Or as if this body… enjoyed damage.
The зверь inside me wasn't afraid. It didn't whine. It watched Dog through the bloody blur with cold curiosity. To it, this enraged подросток wasn't an enemy capable of killing. He was prey. Food that had decided to play with a predator while it rested.
Dog froze, his blood-smeared fist raised for another punch. Disgust twisted his face.
"Filth…" he growled, spitting saliva into my face. "Why are you baring your teeth, little bastard?! You think it's funny?! I'll kill you!"
Baring my teeth?
I wasn't smiling. I couldn't. I couldn't even close my lips—they were shredded, torn against teeth, exposing bloody gums and splintered incisors in a horrific involuntary grimace. It wasn't laughter. It was a skull's snarl while the skin is being peeled away.
How long can I keep taking this as a punching bag? drifted a lazy, detached thought. I should respond. Hit back.
I sent the impulse to my arms. Get up. Strike. Defend.
But my arms lay on the floor, heavy, useless ropes. The signal from my brain got lost on the way. The neural connection to muscle ran with a monstrous delay: all this organism's energy was being dumped inward—into cells frantically patching the hole in the punctured lung, fusing vessels, stopping internal bleeding.
Punch. The light began to dim, squeezing vision into a narrow tunnel. Punch. Consciousness was ready to surrender again.
And then the pressure vanished.
With a dull, heavy thud, something massive smashed into Dog's back. He grunted, air blasted from his lungs. His body jerked, flew over me, and crashed onto the parquet, sliding through a pool of blood.
A shadow filled my peripheral vision.
Rose.
She stood swaying, white as a ghost. Her thin hands shook so violently that the heavy oak chair—her desperate weapon—slipped from her weak fingers and hit the floor with a thud.
She dropped to her knees as if her tendons had been cut, and covered her face with her palms, trying to hide from reality.
"Stop…" Her voice was thin, breaking into a squeak. "Please, enough… I'm begging you… God, enough blood…"
Dog stirred nearby. He rose slowly, inexorably, like a crippled but still combat-capable tank. A guttural, vibrating growl crawled out of his throat. He turned his head toward Rose, and through the blood mask I saw a decision crystallize on his face. He didn't care who he killed anymore. The brakes were gone.
"You too…" he rasped, spitting thick saliva mixed with blood onto the carpet. "Little bitch… I'll kill you too. I'll tear all of you into pieces!"
I forced my head to turn. My neck vertebrae creaked but obeyed. Rose's взгляд met mine.
Her green eyes—full of tears and absolute terror—became a detonator.
FLASH.
A thermonuclear charge went off inside my skull. The mental barrier—the dam separating Aleksandr Petrovich's consciousness from the host's memories—collapsed under a tsunami. Chaotic scraps of images, sounds, touch, and smells that had only flickered at the edges snapped into razor clarity and slammed into place at sickening speed.
I remembered. I remembered everything.
The smell of old paper, leather bindings, and pipe tobacco. Warm, dry, надежные hands tossing me up toward the ceiling. Father. John Howlett. The kindest, gentlest man in this hard, cursed world. Always sick, always coughing, but ready for anything for me. He read me stories by the fireplace when fever wouldn't let me sleep. He was my shield. And now he was dead—just cooling meat with a blown-open chest a few meters away.
Grave-cold. The cloying stench of laudanum and bitter mixtures. A bedroom door always closed. Mother. Elizabeth. She never hugged me. Her gaze always slid through me, focusing on the ghost of my older brother, John Jr., who died long before I was born. To her I was a mistake. A living reproach. And now I was a monster that killed her lover. Lover? Yes—Thomas was her… God, what filth. What a vulgar Victorian hell.
The copper of red hair, the smell of sun-warmed wildflowers, ringing laughter. Rose. My only friend. The only living creature in this tomb called an estate who didn't give a damn about my status, wealth, and endless illnesses. We ran to the pond. We hid in the dusty attic. She was my anchor. My conscience. My light.
A punch to the gut. A dead frog in my bed. A spiteful взгляд from under thick brows. Dog. The gardener's son. My personal demon, my tormentor. Always stronger, nastier, tougher. He hated me simply because I existed. Because I slept on silk while he slept on straw.
The picture assembled with terrifying clarity. Neural connections closed.
A name. My name rose from the subconscious like a black float in a storm.
James. James Howlett.
The thought hit like a shock, punching through pain, shock, and chaos.
James Howlett. Canada. Late nineteenth century. Bone claws. Regeneration. A beast inside.
This wasn't the delirium of a dying brain.
"Holy…" I gargled, spitting a molar fragment onto the carpet. "Cosmic-scale irony…"
I hadn't just landed in the past. I'd landed in the body of one of the most famous fictional characters from my world.
I was Wolverine.
I was Logan.
A mutant. Weapon X. An X-Man. An immortal killer with an adamantium skeleton in the future.
My whole life—thirty years of practice, a dissertation, thousands of surgeries, everything I knew about saving lives—was now locked inside the body of one of the most efficient killers on the planet. And right now that lethal weapon lay in a pool of its own blood, unable to move a finger, while a деревенский teenager was about to kill my only friend.
Dog stood.
He stepped toward Rose, stepping over me like trash. He grabbed her by the thick red mane and yanked her toward him with sharp, sadistic delight.
"Ah! Let go!" She clawed at his arm, trying to pry open iron fingers, but it was hopeless.
Dog dragged her to the exit, hauling her like a sack of potatoes. He snarled, jerking her head so hard it looked like her scalp might tear from her skull.
"No! Please! James!" she screamed.
The beast inside me roared.
Rage, muted for a second under the weight of memory, ignited again. This wasn't the anger of a cornered animal. It was the fury of a защитник. An instinct older than humanity.
Get up, James! I screamed at myself, mentally kicking the paralyzed body. Get up. Status. Mobilize everything, or he kills her.
And I got up.
In one smooth, inhuman motion, ignoring gravity and inertia.
The red veil in my vision burst and ran off, replaced by crystalline, terrifying clarity. The world snapped into ultra-high resolution. I saw every fiber of the Persian carpet, every speck of dust in the light, every bead of sweat on Dog's reddening neck.
But the main event was inside.
A low, vibrating moan of pleasure spilled from my chest on its own.
The body sang. A symphony of flesh and blood. I could feel millions of cells dividing at insane speed. Broken ribs rebuilding and snapping into place with a dry wooden thud, freeing compressed lungs. Platelets sealing vessels. Hematomas dissolving.
My mouth was full of bone grit. I spat a thick clot of blood mixed with tooth fragments onto the carpet, ran my tongue across my gums—and froze.
Where bloody sockets and broken roots had been a second ago, new sharp perfect teeth were already erupting and hardening.
Polyphyodontia, like sharks, I thought with professional awe, drawing a deep greedy breath, filling restored lungs with oxygen. Full regeneration of hard tissue in seconds. No scarring. Metabolism accelerated to cosmic speeds. This is… a miracle.
I wanted to laugh out loud. The situation was monstrous—corpses, stench, a maniac dragging a girl—but my body was flooding my brain with endorphins and dopamine, smothering pain so completely that I felt good. Not just alive.
Immortal.
I looked up at Rose. She thrashed in Dog's hands like a bird in a snare. Her eyes flicked to me.
I tried to smile. Gentle. Reassuring, like a good doctor.
"Don't worry," I whispered through broken, rapidly healing lips. "Everything will be fine, Rose."
It backfired. A new spike of panic flashed in her eyes, bordering on madness. And I understood why: a blood-soaked boy with a crazy smile amid two corpses isn't comfort.
It's a nightmare.
She screamed harder, fought harder. Dog, without looking back, had already hauled her to the massive oak doors.
I dropped my gaze to my fists. Empty. Smooth pale skin, knuckles already sealed under a thin pink пленка.
Hey, tenant, I addressed the predatory thing pulsing in me. Enough sleep. Where are my claws? Come out. Time to show this rabid mutt who the alpha is.
And it answered.
Not with a voice—with sensation. Heat. Liquid fire like molten lead poured down my forearms and pooled in my hands. I felt ligaments tighten, muscles part to let foreign bodies through. It hurt—sharp tearing pain—but the pain was intoxicating, like pure спирт.
SNIKT.
The sound was wet, crunchy, and endlessly hungry. Skin split, and six bony blades burst out, spraying серous fluid. Thirty centimeters of death on each hand. Dense, yellowish, razor-edged.
"Alright," I breathed, feeling my pupils widen to drink every scrap of light. "Let's go."
I launched.
It wasn't a human run. It was a catapult release, a spring snapped from maximum tension. The parquet squealed under my feet; the heavy carpet bunched like an accordion. The five meters between us vanished in a heartbeat.
Dog heard me. His reflexes were excellent—he started to turn, loosening his grip on Rose's hair—but his mind lagged behind. He expected a crippled boy and got a projectile.
"RRAH!"
I slammed into him like a cannonball. We both flew into the wall, smashing an antique side table and turning an expensive Chinese vase into dust.
Impact.
My right hand, driven by a killer's instinct, punched into his flesh. I aimed for the carotid to end it in one move, but he was unnaturally fast—twitched off-line, and my claws sank into his shoulder.
I felt tissue сопротивление. The bony blades punched through the dense deltoid, scraped the head of the humerus with a grind, and buried deep.
Dog howled. But there was no victim's fear in it. It was the roar of a wounded bear.
He was strong. Wrongly, pathologically strong for a teenager. His free hand clamped my wrist, and I felt a vise grip that could crush bone.
"You!" he bellowed, his face inches from mine.
I saw his eyes up close.
Yellow. The iris flooded with gold, and the pupils… narrowed into vertical slits. There was nothing human in them. The same primal darkness that lived in me swam there.
Mutant, I understood instantly. Latent X-gene. Acute stress triggered activation. Hypertrophied strength, speed, aggression, звериные instincts.
He headbutted me.
CRACK.
The sound of cartilage breaking was deafening. My nose turned back into bloody mush. Hot liquid sprayed, soaking both our shirts. The kinetic force would have killed a normal human, driving facial bones into the brain. I was only thrown back a step, stunned for a fraction.
Dog used it—kicked me in the gut with a boot, breaking free. My claws slid out of his shoulder with a wet pop, tearing meat. Blood gushed, soaking his sleeve.
"Die! Die, freak!" he screamed, charging with fists.
We tangled into a knot. Not a duel—dirty, brutal street slaughter. He pounded me with sledgehammer fists, cracking ribs, crushing cheekbones, knocking my clavicle out of its socket. I answered with short ripping claw strikes, aiming for tendons and major vessels.
A deep gash across his chest. A torn wound on his thigh down to white bone. A cheek split from ear toward mouth.
He was stronger. Bigger. Heavier. But he had one fatal flaw.
He hooked my jaw, dislocating the temporomandibular joint. The lower half of my face shifted sideways. I snapped my head—CLICK—and the jaw seated itself. A huge purple bruise under my eye yellowed and vanished in seconds.
I slashed his forearm—his blood kept flowing. The wound yawned open. The edges didn't pull together.
He saw it too.
I caught the exact moment when the triumph of brute force in his eyes turned into sticky, животный fear. He hit me, broke me, turned me into a cutlet—yet I stood again and again. Spat blood, bared my teeth at death, and kept coming. A terminator of flesh and blood that couldn't be stopped.
"What… what are you?" Dog rasped, backing toward the shattered window.
He held his torn shoulder with his good hand. Blood streamed between his fingers in dark струйки. His face was death-white—hypovolemic shock was starting. His legs trembled. He weakened by the second.
I didn't.
"I'm death," I hissed, stepping toward him, my voice low and metallic.
I raised my hand slowly. Claws cut the air with a wet whisper.
"And I'm going to take your head off. Clean."
Dog's nerves broke. Survival overpowered rage.
Howling with powerless fury and panic, he grabbed a heavy bronze candlestick and hurled it at me. I didn't even dodge. The metal struck my chest and bounced away, harmless.
"Curse you! All of you, damn you!" he screamed, voice cracking. "I'll come back! I'll kill every one of you!"
He turned and dove through the broken window into the garden darkness. A thick bloody smear stayed on the sill. The sound of bushes snapping and the uneven pounding of heavy boots faded into the night.
Silence returned to the room. Heavy, ringing, вязкая silence, broken only by Elizabeth's whimpering over her husband's corpse. She never lifted her head.
The claws slid back into my forearms.
Snikт.
Pain left, replaced by the familiar prickling of wounds sealing.
I let out a slow deep breath, feeling adrenaline retreat. Lead fatigue took its place. My nervous system slammed the brakes. My knees wobbled, but I stayed up, bracing a hand against the wall.
Rose.
She sat on the floor, pressed into the corner as if trying to merge with the wallpaper. Curled into a tight ball, arms locked around her knees so hard her knuckles whitened. Her dress was torn at the shoulder, baring pale skin; her red hair was a tangled mat. She stared glassily at one point—where Thomas's body lay in a pool of blood.
Post-traumatic shock. Stupor.
I went to her. Slow, smooth, no sudden moves. I knelt beside her, ignoring the crunch of shattered glass underfoot.
I smelled like slaughter. Iron, sweat, зверь. I was soaked in чужая and my own blood. But there was no choice. Right now she needed living warmth.
"Rose…" I called softly. My voice was still raw, but I forced as much gentleness into it as I could.
She flinched like she'd been shocked. Slowly, in jerks, she lifted her eyes to me. There was so much pain and emptiness in them that even I—a surgeon who'd seen everything—struggled to breathe.
I carefully reached out with a hand that had no claws now and wrapped my arms around her. Pulled her to me, blocking her from the sight of bodies.
At first she went rigid. Her muscles were steel cables. She held her breath, expecting a удар.
Then the dam burst.
She clutched my blood-soaked, torn shirt with both hands, buried her wet nose in my shoulder, and screamed. Not fear—a child's grief as her safe, understandable world collapsed in an instant, burying childhood under rubble. She sobbed loudly, shaking in violent spasms.
I stroked her tangled red hair, feeling my own hands still trembling—aftershock from the fight.
"Easy… easy…" I whispered into her crown, rocking her like a child. "I'm here. I'm right here. I won't let anyone hurt you. Never. Do you hear me? No one will touch you again."
Over her head, I looked at the ruined drawing room. At the father's corpse I'd managed to love in seconds of memory. At the gardener's corpse. At the black hole of the window he escaped through—my blood enemy.
A second life had begun.
And it began exactly the way Wolverine's life should—knee-deep in blood.