Burned Luna's Revenge

Chapter 4:The Rogue

Alina's Pov

The man that rescued me wore a mask across the lower half of his face that turned him into nobody, but into a stranger who had just walked through fire for a woman the pack had already buried.

He cut the ropes fast. One clean motion. Then his arm hooked around my waist and we were moving.

"Guards!" The scream came from somewhere behind us. "Stop them, someone stop them."

The crowd split in front of us, people stumbling back, some grabbing and missing, one guard getting close enough that Ethan's elbow connected with his jaw and sent him sideways without breaking stride.

"Don't look back." His voice was low and tight at my ear.

The pain was arriving in full now. I pressed my face against Ethan's shoulder and held on.

We hit the tree line and he didn't slow down. Branches whipped past in the dark, the ground uneven under feet that couldn't feel properly, the shouts behind us getting further and then fainter and then gone entirely, swallowed by trees and distance and the sound of his breathing which was ragged and fast.

He ran for a long time.

I felt myself going somewhere. The pain was too big and my body had been through too much and there was simply nothing left to run on.

"I won't be able to survive this." My voice came out wrong.

"You will." He hitched me higher against his chest. "Stay with me. Ten more minutes."

"I don't think I have ten more minutes."

"Yes you do. Talk to me. What are three things you can hear right now?"

"That's a panic attack technique."

"It works for other things too. Talk."

"Wind." My eyes were getting heavy in a way I couldn't fight. "Your heartbeat. And I think, I think there's a river somewhere to the —"

I didn't finish the sentence.

The last thing I felt was Ethan's arms tightening around me as my head dropped against his chest. The last thing I heard was him saying my name, and then the world folded up and put itself away.

I woke up with a gasp, followed by a groan tearing out of my throat before I even knew I was awake, my whole body arching away from it instinctively.

"Easy." A hand pressed firmly against my shoulder, pushing me back down. "Easy, child. You're going to pull the dressings off."

I groaned again. Couldn't help it. My legs felt like they'd been held over a stove. My throat was raw. My eyes didn't want to open and when they finally did the light was wrong.

A face leaned into my line of sight. Old woman. Silver hair pulled back, she was pressing a cloth soaked in something cool against my left shin and she did it with the efficient hands of someone who had treated injuries before, many times, without being precious about it.

"There you are," she said it like a doctor confirming a diagnosis. "Thought you might sleep through till morning."

I tried to sit up.

"Where —" My voice came out wrecked, scraped hollow. I swallowed. I tried again. "Where am I?"

“You have a roof and four walls, which is more than you had two hours ago." She wrung out the cloth into a bowl and pressed it back against my leg. "Stop moving."

"Who are you?"

"Someone who owes a debt." She didn't look up from my leg. "Consider it in the process of being paid."

I stared at the ceiling. It had nothing like Silverpine architecture. And it didn't look like anywhere near Silverpine, judging by the complete absence of pack scent in the air around me.

"How far are we from the pack?"

"That is irrelevant right now." She moved to my right leg, peeled back a dressing to check underneath it, made a sound in her throat that could have meant anything. "You're lucky. Burns are bad but not deep. Your skin will heal but slowly. It wasn't ordinary flames."

I looked down at my legs properly for the first time. Bandaged from ankle to knee on both sides. My dress had been cut away at the hem.

I pushed up onto my elbows despite everything my body was saying about that decision. "Where is the person that saved me?"

"I'm here."

His voice came from the corner of the room.

I turned my head. Ethan was sitting in a wooden chair against the far wall, elbows on his knees, mask pulled down around his chin now. His face was tired in a way that went beyond sleep. His hands were wrapped in cloth. Both of them. Bandaged from palm to wrist.

His hands. He had grabbed me off that post with his bare hands while the fire was still going.

"You saved me? Your hands —" I started.

"I am completely fine. I am sure they're healed already, it should not have stayed this long. Probably because it wasn't just ordinary flames."

"Ethan, I am so grateful. Let me see your hands."

"Alina, I promise you my hands are the last thing either of us needs to be discussing right now." He stood up, crossed the room, crouched down in front of me so we were level. Up close the exhaustion was worse. "How's the pain?"

"Manageable." A lie. He knew it was a lie. "Who is she?"

"Her name is Sera. She was a pack healer about fifteen years ago before —" He stopped. "Before things changed. She knows what she's doing."

Sera snorted from somewhere behind him. "He means I was cast out. You can say it plainly, Young Vale. She's been through enough today to handle plain words."

Ethan's mouth pulled at the corner. "She was cast out. She's been in the outer territories since. She owes me a favor and she's paying it."

"The outer territories." I looked around the room again with new eyes. The rough stone walls. The dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, not the organized bundles of a pack infirmary, wilder than that, foraged and strung up by someone who had learned to source everything themselves.

"We're outside pack borders."

"Yes."

"All pack borders? Not just Silverpine?"

Ethan held my gaze. "Yes."

I let that settle. The weight of it pressing down slow and thorough.

"Ryker declared it," I said. Not a question. "Before you even got me out. He declared the banishment."

"Standard protocol when someone escapes execution. The order went out within minutes." His voice was careful.

The voice of someone delivering news they'd been rehearsing. "Any pack that grants you shelter is in violation of Silverpine law. Any wolf that helps you risks the same designation."

I looked at his bandaged hands. "Like you."

"I made my choice."

"Ethan….."

"I made my choice, Alina. Don't apologize for it."

Sera straightened up, picked up her bowl, and walked toward the back of the cabin as she removed herself from the conversation. A door opened and closed.

I looked at Ethan in the firelight. At the exhaustion and the bandaged hands and the mask still hanging around his chin. I couldn't believe he had walked through fire and ran through the forest for two hours.

"I will be going back," he said.

"What if they figure out it was you—"

"They won't. The mask bought us time." He paused. "But Alina, there's something I need to tell you. Something I should have told you a long time ago and I didn't, and I need you to hear it now before anything else happens."

The way he said it made my stomach drop.

"What?"

He looked at his hands. Then back at me.

"Ryker and Mira are having an affair. Almost everyone knows. But there's more to why Ryker did this than the affair." His voice dropped low.

My heart plummeted. I thought there wasn't any feeling lower than being sentenced to death then banished. But with this new information, I had hit the lowest of the lows.

"It goes back fifteen years. And when I tell you, everything you think you know about your pack is going to look completely different."

The firelight moved across his face.

"Tell me," I said.

He took a deep breath.

"My real name is Ethan Vale. Son of Robert Vale." He held my eyes.

"The Alpha your husband murdered to take Silverpine.”