Chapter 6: The Man Who Found Me
1889 Words
I knew someone was outside the door before it opened.
The room had been quiet for several minutes, the kind of quiet that only made me more aware of where I was. The bed beneath me was too soft, the blanket too warm, the air too clean. Everything smelled wrong. Not bad. Just unfamiliar. Antiseptic, fabric softener, a faint trace of medicine, and underneath it all the distant scent of wolves who were not mine.
Not that I had a pack anymore.
The thought hollowed me out all over again.
I kept my eyes fixed on the door, fingers twisted tightly in the blanket, heart beating too fast for someone who was supposed to be resting. I didn’t know what I expected when it finally opened. A guard, maybe. The healer again. Someone to tell me I had survived the forest only to be sent back out into it by morning.
Instead, Lucian Nightbane stepped inside.
My breath caught before I could stop it.
He looked even larger in human form than he had in the forest. Broad shoulders beneath a dark coat, black shirt beneath it, heavy boots, dark hair still faintly damp as if he had only recently come in from outside. His face was hard in a way that should have been cruel, but it was his eyes that fixed me in place.
Dark gold.
The same eyes that had stared at me through the trees.
The same eyes that had watched me collapse.
The same eyes I had seen in the last clear moment before everything went black.
I dropped my gaze almost immediately.
Not in surrender. I told myself that at once. Only caution. Only common sense. He was an alpha in his own territory, and I was alone in a bed I had not chosen, wearing clothes that did not belong to me, with barely enough strength to sit upright without pain. There was nothing to be gained from meeting his stare like a challenge.
The door shut softly behind him.
He didn’t speak right away. Neither did I. I could feel him looking at me, and the awareness of it was unbearable. It crawled over my skin, made me too conscious of the blanket clutched against my lap, the loose shirt brushing my wrists, the way my hair was probably still a tangled mess around my shoulders.
“You’re awake.”
His voice was low and even.
I nodded once.
My throat had gone dry. It took me a second to trust my own voice enough to use it. “Yes.”
Brilliant, Anastasia.
He took a few slow steps into the room. Not close enough to crowd me. Not far enough to ease the tension. He stopped near the foot of the bed, and I was painfully aware of how easily he filled the space without doing anything except stand there.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
The question should have sounded ordinary. It didn’t.
No one had asked me that gently in what felt like forever. Not with real concern. Not without judgment already waiting beneath it.
I looked down at the blanket again. “I’m fine.”
A lie. A weak one.
Silence stretched.
Then, “No, you’re not.”
The words were not unkind. They were only true.
Heat crept over my face, sharp with embarrassment. I hated being seen too clearly. Hated that he had found me unconscious, carried me here, and was now standing under bright room light looking at the damage I could not hide.
My fingers tightened further in the blanket. “I’ll recover.”
His gaze lingered on me long enough that my skin felt too tight. “Mara said the pain is still severe.”
Of course she had.
I swallowed. “It’s manageable.”
Another lie.
The pain under my ribs had not eased. It came and went in brutal waves, some sharp enough to steal my breath, others dull enough to sit like a weight inside my chest and remind me that something sacred had been torn apart there. Even now, just breathing too deeply made it flare.
But I could not bring myself to admit weakness to him.
Not more than I already had.
“I see,” he said.
Something in me bristled at the calmness of it, though I kept my head lowered. He didn’t sound mocking. He didn’t sound disbelieving either. If anything, he sounded like a man filing information away for later.
That was worse.
“Thank you,” I said finally, because silence had started to feel dangerous. “For bringing me here.”
The words tasted strange in my mouth.
He was quiet for a moment. “You don’t have to thank me.”
Maybe I didn’t.
But I also didn’t know what else to do with the fact that I was alive because of him.
“I would have died out there,” I said softly.
It was easier to say while looking at the blanket.
Another pause. Then, “Yes.”
No false comfort.
No denial.
No easy lie.
The honesty of it unsettled me more than anything else had so far.
I wet my lips and forced out the question that had been circling in my mind since I woke. “Why did you help me?”
I expected him to answer immediately.
He didn’t.
That made me glance up before I could stop myself.
He was already looking at me.
There was something unreadable in his face. Not softness. Not pity. Definitely not indifference. Whatever it was, it made my pulse stumble hard enough to hurt.
“You were hurt,” he said at last.
I waited.
That couldn’t be all of it. No alpha risked pack complications over a wounded omega from rival territory just because she happened to collapse in the wrong forest. But if there was more, he gave no sign of it.
I lowered my eyes again.
Part of me was relieved.
Another part was not.
“Will you send me away?” I asked.
The question slipped out before I could stop it.
Humiliation followed immediately.
I should not have asked that. It sounded too close to pleading, and I would rather have bitten through my own tongue than beg for anything under another alpha’s roof.
But the question was out now, thin and quiet in the room between us.
Lucian did not answer right away.
When he finally spoke, his voice was lower than before. “Not tonight.”
Something in my chest tightened.
Not from pain this time. Or not only pain.
That answer meant very little and too much at once. It was not a promise. It was not safety. It was only a delay. But after everything that had happened, even one night of certainty felt dangerously close to relief.
I hated that too.
“I don’t want to cause trouble for your pack,” I said carefully.
It was the safest way I could put it. Safer than asking whether they considered me a threat. Safer than asking if the Nightbane wolves already knew exactly what had happened to me. Safer than asking if they pitied me.
His expression did not change. “You’re not causing trouble.”
“I’m from Evercrest.”
“I know.”
The words were simple, but something about them made my stomach knot. Of course he knew. My scent alone would have told him that. Still, hearing it aloud made the distance between us sharper. Him on his land, strong and certain. Me in his bed, borrowed clothes on my skin, Evercrest still clinging to me like a stain.
“I can leave when I’m able,” I said quietly.
It took effort to keep my voice steady. “I won’t stay longer than necessary.”
This time his silence felt heavier.
When he answered, there was something firm in his tone I couldn’t argue with even if I’d had the strength.
“You’ll stay until you can stand without looking like you’ll fall through the floor.”
Heat burned through my face again. I looked away at once.
The truth of it stung more because he said it so plainly. I was weak. Any attempt to deny it now would only humiliate me further.
I heard him move then—only a step, maybe two—and every nerve in my body went alert. Not panic exactly. Not yet. But sharp awareness, immediate and impossible to ignore. The scent of him touched the air more strongly now, dark and clean and male enough to make my already unsteady body feel strangely uncertain.
I went still.
So did he.
For one breathless second, the room seemed to narrow around us.
Then he said, more quietly, “No one here will hurt you.”
The words hit me like a bruise.
My throat tightened so fast it hurt.
Because I had heard promises before.
Because safety had once worn familiar faces.
Because I no longer knew what to do with kindness, especially from someone who looked like this—like danger given human form and taught how to speak softly.
I nodded because speaking felt impossible.
When I finally managed it, my voice was barely above a whisper. “I understand.”
But I didn’t. Not really.
I understood fear.
I understood pain.
I understood what it felt like to be discarded.
I did not understand why Lucian Nightbane had carried me out of the forest instead of leaving me there to die.
He seemed to study me for another long moment. Then he stepped back, and I did not realize how tightly my body had been wound until the distance eased some of the pressure in my lungs.
“Mara will come back soon,” he said. “If the pain gets worse, tell her.”
I nodded again.
He turned toward the door.
I should have let him go.
Instead, before I could stop myself, I asked, “Did I… cause problems when you brought me in?”
He paused with one hand near the door.
When he looked back at me, there was the faintest shadow of something in his eyes. Amusement, maybe. Or surprise.
“No,” he said.
A beat passed.
Then, “You tried.”
Mortification flooded me all at once.
I remembered the knife. The desperate swing. The pathetic, useless effort of trying to fight off a wolf who could have snapped me in half if he wanted. I looked down so quickly my neck hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
The room was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer.
Then I heard him say, very evenly, “Don’t be.”
I looked up too late. He had already opened the door.
A second later he was gone.
The room felt different after he left. Not safer, exactly. Just emptier in a way that unsettled me more than it should have. I stared at the closed door for a long time, my heart still too loud in my chest, and tried not to think about the fact that the only person in this place who had given me any promise at all was a man I had every reason to fear.
And somehow, against all sense, had not feared enough.
- Writer
