(Elena)
I’m halfway down the east corridor when I sll it.
Blood. His blood specifically, which I know now — which I’ve known since the night I cleaned his wrists and the scent of him got into my hands and didn’t leave. Smoke and pine and sothing wild and underneath all of it, right now, iron.
A lot of iron.
My feet move faster before my brain catches up. I round the corner and he’s there, walking toward — *walking*, still upright, which is the first thing I clock — but his left arm is held slightly away from his body in the specific careful way of soone managing pain they don’t want to show, and his jacket sleeve is wrong, the color wrong, soaked through in a spreading dark patch that—
"Rhydian."
He looks up.
His face is composed. Too composed, the kind of composed that costs sothing, and his eyes are very gold and very focused in the way they get when he’s running on adrenaline that’s starting to ebb.
"I’ve got it," he says. First thing out of his mouth. He reaches into his pocket with his right hand and holds up the vial and his voice is completely, absurdly steady. "One vial. Senna can work with one."
I stare at him.
"You’re bleeding," I say.
"I know."
"How badly."
"It’s—" He glances at his arm like he’s checking sothing he already knows the answer to. "It’s not nothing."
That’s when I reach him. I don’t ask — I take his arm, both hands, and he lets , doesn’t pull back or make it difficult, just watches my face while I push the sleeve up as gently as I can manage.
The cut is deep. Long, running the outside of his forearm from just below the elbow, clean-edged, knife work — soone who knew what they were doing made this. My stomach tightens in a way that is not dically appropriate but I don’t have ti for it so I just note it and set it aside.
"There were two of them," he says. "Inside Marcus’s room. Shadowpine, not Pack. They ca through a side door I didn’t know about."
"He has a servant’s entrance." I should have told him that. I didn’t think — I didn’t — "Rhydian, I should have—"
"It’s fine."
"It’s not fine, look at your—"
"Elena." He says my na and sothing in the way he says it stops . Quiet. Certain. His right hand finds my wrist where I’m holding his arm and he doesn’t move my hands away, just rests his over mine. "I’m still here. I got out. I got the vial." A pause. "I’m fine."
He’s not fine. But I understand what he ans.
The corridor is empty but it won’t be for long. I don’t want Marcus to know what’s been found — not yet, not until Senna has confird it and we know what we’re working with.
"Co with ," I say.
---
I take him to the room that used to be the Alpha’s private study — not the bedroom, not anywhere Marcus has reason to look first. It’s small, fireplace, a desk, a locked door that only I have the key to. I lock it behind us.
He sits where I point. The chair by the fire, upright, not leaning — stubbornly not leaning, even now, even with his arm doing what it’s doing. I get the healer’s kit from the cabinet, the one I keep here separate from the main stores, and I pull a chair up facing him and put the kit between us and start.
He watches my hands the whole ti.
I clean it first. He hisses once, controls it, goes silent. The cut is deep but clean — it missed everything that matters, which is either luck or whoever held the knife had instruction to wound rather than kill. I’m not sure which of those is more unsettling.
"He knew I’d co," Rhydian says. Not upset about it. Just — filing it. Processing it in the way he processes things, quietly and in real ti, the way soone does when they’ve had to be their own counsel for four years.
"Yes," I say.
"He’s got contingencies everywhere." He’s looking at the fire now. "He’s been building this for a long ti."
"His whole life, probably." I press a clean cloth against the wound and hold it. "Hold that."
He puts his right hand over it, over mine briefly before I move away, and the contact is brief and warm and neither of us ntions it.
I look at the wound. The bleeding is slowing but not enough, and there’s a heat in the surrounding skin that I don’t like, a tension in the tissue that ans his body is already fighting sothing. The knife might have been treated. Might not. I don’t know and I can’t know and the uncertainty sits in my chest like a hot coal.
There is another option.
I’ve used my Alpha gift three tis in my life. My father told to use it sparingly — *it costs you,* he said, *every ti, it takes sothing out of the well, and wells aren’t bottomless.* I used it once for a warrior with a chest wound who wouldn’t have made it through the night. Once for a child who fell from the lookout tower. Once for Viktor, actually, two years into our marriage when he caught a fever that ran too high for too long, and he thanked with the particular flatness of a man who didn’t fully understand what it ant for to give that.
I look at Rhydian’s arm. At the heat in the tissue. At the way he’s holding himself carefully in the chair like he’s not going to tell how much it hurts.
I lift his arm.
He looks at . "What are you—"
I lower my head and press my lips to the cut.
He goes absolutely rigid.
I can taste him imdiately — iron and salt and underneath it sothing that is purely him, that wild living quality that sohow survived four years of cold and alone and ca out the other side of it still intact. I run my tongue along the length of the wound, slow, and his hand cos up and grips the arm of the chair hard enough that the wood creaks.
"Elena—" His voice is wrecked.
I lift my head. Look at him.
His eyes are very dark. His jaw is working.
"You taste like courage," I say. I don’t plan it. It just cos out, because it’s true, because that’s exactly what it tastes like — not blood, not pain, but the particular quality of a person who walked into a dangerous room alone for soone else’s Pack, soone else’s wolves, and ca out the other side still holding the thing he went in for.
He stares at .
Sothing moves through his face that he doesn’t try to cover. He’s getting worse at covering things and I don’t think he’s noticed yet and I’m not going to tell him.
"That’s—" He stops.
"Hold still."
I close my lips over the wound again and this ti I let it co — the warmth that starts in my sternum, the thing that feels like pulling a thread from the center of yourself, the slow costly unspooling of sothing that takes weeks to rebuild. It moves through my mouth and into the cut in a way I’ve never been able to describe accurately, like heat but more specific than heat, like intention made physical.
He makes a sound.
Not pain. The opposite of pain — low and startled, the sound of a body receiving sothing it didn’t know it needed, and his free hand finds my hair without him deciding to do it, fingers resting against the back of my head, not pressing, just — there.
The tissue knits.
I feel it happening under my lips, the inflammation dropping, the edges of the wound finding each other. It’s never a clean process, never painless, but it’s fast. Faster than natural healing. Fast enough.
I lift my head.
His arm is pink and new where the cut was, the skin closed, the heat gone. A faint line remains — scar tissue forming, it’ll fade over weeks. But the wound is closed. The threat of whatever was on that knife is gone.
I sit back.
My head swims slightly. The cost of it, settling in. I press two fingers to my temple without thinking.
"Hey." His voice is different. He leans forward — not far, just enough. "What just happened. Are you—"
"I’m fine. It takes sothing out of . It passes."
"That was your—" He’s looking at his arm. At the closed skin. "You did that."
"Yes."
"You could’ve just bandaged it."
"The knife might have been treated. I wasn’t taking the risk."
He looks at . Looks for a long ti with those gold eyes that miss less and less these days. He’s learning to see, this boy. He arrived here wild and shut-down and biting, and sowhere in the past weeks he’s been slowly, carefully opening like sothing that forgot how to.
It’s the most dangerous thing I’ve watched happen.
Dangerous because I can’t look away from it.
He reaches up with his right hand.
His fingers find my face — my jaw, cupping it with a carefulness that doesn’t belong to soone who’s spent four years fighting off rogues in mountain territory, with a gentleness that belongs to soone who paid attention to every lesson even when he was pretending not to.
His thumb brushes my cheekbone.
I hold very still.
"Stay with tonight," he says.
Quietly. Just that. No performance in it, no angle, no brat hiding behind words — just Rhydian, twenty years old and freshly healed and looking at like I’m the most solid thing in his world, which might be true, which is exactly the part that makes my chest do what it does.
"Stay with tonight."
Reviews
All reviews (0)