Aria’s POV
Sophie cried for forty-five minutes straight.
Not the quiet, dignified kind of crying. The full-body, mascara-everywhere, snot-involved kind that made Lina stare with her mouth open and Lilith pretend to be very interested in her shoelaces.
I laughed. It ca out softer than I intended. "You’ve been here for weeks. Your mother needs you. Your life needs you."
She finally pulled back. Just far enough to look at my face. Her eyes were still wet, mascara smudged in two perfect dark circles beneath them, which sohow she was still managing to make look stylish.
"If anything happens," she said, "you call . Imdiately. Not later. Not after you’ve handled it yourself. The second sothing goes wrong."
"Nothing is going to—"
"Aria Moon." She pointed one finger directly at my nose. "I swear to God, if you call three days after so crisis to say ’oh by the way I almost died again’, I will co back here and sit on you."
Lina perked up from her spot beside my leg. "You can’t sit on Mommy. She has a baby in her tummy."
"I’ll sit very gently," Sophie said, without breaking eye contact with .
I put my hands up. "I will call you."
"Imdiately."
"Imdiately."
She studied my face for another three seconds, apparently running so internal assessnt. Then she seed satisfied. She dropped her hand.
And then she turned to the girls.
Lina didn’t even wait. She launched herself at Sophie’s waist at full speed, and Sophie caught her with both arms and made a sound like she’d been physically wounded.
"My baby," Sophie said, with enormous drama. "My tiny little baby. I’m going to miss you so much. You have to video call every day."
"Every day?" Lina said, delighted.
"Every single day. You can show things. Rocks. Drawings. Whatever you ate for lunch."
Sophie finally released her. Stood up straight. Grabbed her bag from the floor with the energy of soone executing a military withdrawal before her emotions could catch up to her.
"Right," she said. Brisk. Professional. Her voice only slightly wrecked. "I’m going. I’m doing it. I’m leaving."
She made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. Then she actually left — walking fast, not looking back, which was the only way Sophie ever managed goodbyes.
The door clicked shut.
Lina stared at it for a mont. Then looked up at with wide, thoughtful eyes.
"Is she crying in the hallway?"
I listened.
Muffled noise from the other side of the door. Definitely crying. Definitely Sophie.
"Yes," I said.
Lina nodded seriously. "I thought so."
---
I was back at work by Thursday.
Kael had opinions about this. Strong ones, delivered in that particular way he had of stating things as fact when he was actually making a request.
"You should rest another week."
"I’ve been resting for nine days."
"The doctor said—"
"The doctor said no excessive physical activity. Sitting at a desk is not excessive physical activity."
He’d looked at for a long mont.
I’d looked back.
He’d let go.
The office felt the sa as it always had. Familiar. The particular sll of it, the light through the east windows in the morning, the coffee machine that took exactly three minutes longer than it should have. The quiet rhythm of people moving around with things to do.
Normal. Ordinary. Everything I’d been missing.
But Kael wasn’t normal. Not lately.
He was *there* — present, attentive, checking in, eating dinner with and the girls every night. But there was sothing else underneath it. Sothing I kept catching at the edges of him.
A weight.
He’d been carrying it since the eastern checkpoint. Since the badge. Since the conversation he’d told about, short sentences asured carefully in the dim hospital room.
He didn’t talk about it beyond what he’d already told . I didn’t push. I knew what it cost him just to say those two words. But I watched him and I thought about it, and every day that passed the weight seed to settle a little deeper.
The reports were on his desk.
He’d left them there when he was called away that morning — front line updates, injury tallies, patrol records. He hadn’t hidden them. He also hadn’t specifically said *look at these,* but he hadn’t said *don’t,* and they were right there.
I sat down in his chair.
Opened the top folder.
Fifteen minutes later, I closed it.
My hands were steady. My face was steady. But sothing was sitting in my chest that hadn’t been there before — heavy and sharp at the sa ti, the way broken glass feels.
Three more soldiers down in the past week. Injuries on the eastern and northern fronts both. The dical post at the eastern checkpoint was overwheld — thirty-seven personnel being treated, half of them for wounds that were taking too long to heal. Which ant, for wolves, sothing was wrong. Our healing was supposed to work faster than this.
But they’d been hit with wolfsbane compounds.
I put the folder down.
Sat there for a mont.
Thought about it.
Then I stood up and got my jacket.
---
The dical post was in the eastern checkpoint complex.
The drive took twenty minutes. I didn’t tell anyone I was going.
I probably should have told soone I was going.
I thought about this approximately halfway there and decided I’d deal with the consequences later.
The checkpoint guards knew my face now. They’d started knowing it sowhere around week three of Kael’s very obvious staking of territory, and now they just waved through with the particular expression people wear when they’re trying to look professional while internally noting sothing for later.
The dical post itself slled like antiseptic and wolfsbane antidote and the particular sharp undercut of wounds that weren’t healing properly. I’d grown up around it — working in spaces where people got hurt and kept going was just Tuesday, in the world I ca from.
I pushed through the front door.
The receptionist looked up. Started to say sothing professional and procedural.
"I’m not here officially," I said. "I just want to see them."
She opened her mouth.
I waited.
She looked at my face. At whatever she found there.
Then she nodded, slowly, and pointed down the hall.
---
There were forty-three people in the ward.
So were awake. So were not. The ones who were awake tracked as I walked in — that particular alert quality that never fully switches off in warriors, even when they’re lying flat with tubes in their arms.
And then, one by one, they started to sit up straighter.
"Luna."
One voice first. Then another. Then the ones who couldn’t sit up turned their heads. Small movents, careful, the kind that hurt and they made anyway.
My throat tightened.
I wasn’t a Luna. Not officially. Not in any way that had been said out loud or made formal. But I’d started hearing it these last few weeks, whispered first and then more openly, and every ti I heard it sothing happened in my chest that I didn’t know what to do with.
I made myself smile. "Don’t move on my account. Please."
"Luna, you shouldn’t be here." A broad-shouldered warrior near the door — his right arm in heavy bandaging, his face the grey-tinged color of soone fighting the wolfsbane out of his system. "It’s not safe."
"I’ve been in less safe places." I crossed to him. Pulled up the chair beside his bed and sat down. "How long have you been here?"
He blinked. Like he hadn’t expected a question. "Six days."
"The arm?"
"Getting better." He said it the way warriors always said it. *Getting better* aning *I’m still standing, sort of.*
"Does it hurt?"
A pause. Like he wasn’t sure whether he was allowed to answer that honestly.
"Yeah," he said finally. "It does."
I looked at the bandaging. At the dull, throbbing pain I could see in the set of his jaw even when he was trying not to show it. At the faces of all the people in this room who had been lying here for days, fighting poisons out of their systems, healing slower than they should, because soone with access and patience and a grudge had known exactly how to hurt them.
My hands were in my lap.
My chest was doing sothing strange.
I reached out. My fingers hovered over his bandaged arm for a mont. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t a healer — I’d never been a healer. I was an Oga with a dormant wolf and a pregnancy and a list of problems approximately as long as the territory was wide.
But sothing kept pulling forward.
I pressed my hand lightly against the bandage.
The warrior went still.
I didn’t know what I was expecting. Maybe nothing. Maybe exactly nothing, and I would have to get up and go ho and sit with the feeling of uselessness for another week.
And then—
The color in his face changed.
Just slightly. Just at the edges. That grey-tinged exhaustion shifting, the tightness around his eyes easing by a degree that shouldn’t have been possible in a span of ten seconds.
He looked down at his arm.
So did I.
Beneath my palm, through the bandage, I could feel sothing. Warmth. A warmth that was starting in my chest, in my hands, spreading outward—quiet and steady and completely outside of anything I knew how to explain.
The warrior’s breathing changed.
"Luna," he said. His voice ca out strange. Uncertain. The voice of soone watching sothing that their brain kept trying to reject.
I didn’t move my hand.
Because right there, in the space between one breath and the next, the deep red bleeding through the outer layer of his bandage had stopped spreading.
And then, slowly, impossibly—
It started to fade.
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