Chapter 5
1487 Words
By the time Arya reached the central corridor, the mess of her morning had worn off, but not disappeared. Her lips still tingled faintly. Her chest still ached.
She didn’t linger on it.
Feelings didn’t excuse tardiness.
The assignment board was posted just outside the logistics wing—digital, touch-responsive, rotating every thirty seconds between names and schedules. Enforcers and junior aides huddled around it like scavengers around meat, eyes flicking for their names, shoulders tense. Arya didn’t shove through the group. She waited. Quiet. Observing.
Eventually, her name scrolled into view.
ARYA RION — TRIAGE DETAIL, WEST WING — 0900–1600
Her stomach settled at the sight of it.
She liked the hospital wing. Morbid, maybe—but it was honest. Nothing to interpret. Nothing to guess. Just blood, stitches, survival.
She turned on her heel and headed down the corridor.
The west wing of Ridgepoint Hold felt like a different world. Quieter. No barking orders. No fists slamming into bone. Just the low whine of medical monitors and the scent of antiseptic in every breath.
The lighting was clinical—white, flat, and endless. The walls were gray with soundproofing foam. The floor gleamed with industrial wax. Every footstep echoed.
Arya checked in at the triage desk, where Nurse Halden barely looked up.
“Exam Room C. Post-op cleanup. You’re solo.”
“Copy,” she said.
She took the gloves off the wall hook and pulled them on with practiced ease.
Exam Room C was already cold.
The lights hummed. The gurney in the center of the room was soaked in drying blood, flecked with bits of gauze and cracked surgical tape. An empty IV bag dangled like deflated skin. The scent of wolf blood was different than human—it had that iron core, but stronger. Rawer. It made some people gag.
Not Arya.
There was something grounding about it. The blood was always honest. The body didn’t lie about damage. There were no politics here. Just pain and recovery.
She moved with quiet efficiency—stripping sheets, replacing bloodied towels, sterilizing tools left behind by the night staff. Her mind didn’t wander. Her hands knew what to do. She folded into the rhythm like a prayer.
Pack assignments rotated weekly—part tradition, part necessity. Every ranked wolf had to serve the Hold in one way or another. If you weren’t patrolling borders, you were loading supply runs. If not that, then running drills, sparring enforcers, organizing intel, running the daycare, tending to the kitchens, managing storage, replacing insulation in the crumbling northern wing, or—like today—sanitizing a post-op room covered in someone else’s blood.
No one got to coast.
Unless you were Alpha.
Or his Luna.
But even those roles had weight.
Alpha Keagan met with elders and foreign envoys. He negotiated terms with outside packs, tracked rogue movements, and signed off on enforcement raids. He gave final say on border kills and alliance renewals. Every minute of his schedule was watched, recorded, assessed. One wrong step could spark a rebellion. A Hunt without a Luna already had people murmuring.
The Luna, when chosen, would run internal order—pack welfare, supply delegation, dispute mediation, mate bonding permissions, resource tracking, and—if the blood bond flared strong—protection of the Alpha himself through shared sense and power distribution.
In Blackridge, the Luna didn’t sit quietly beside the throne.
She sharpened her claws and made sure the kingdom didn’t bleed.
Rion, as Beta, ran everything else. Day-to-day command. Enforcement logistics. Pack law enforcement. Inter-pack negotiations. Discipline boards. Rank arbitration. And—unofficially—ensuring Keagan didn’t collapse under the weight of expectation.
Which meant Arya—his daughter—was a tool forged for function, not comfort.
She got the tough assignments. The lonely ones. The blood-soaked ones.
And maybe that was fine.
Maybe she liked the silence better anyway.
She moved to the side cabinet and peeled a new set of surgical wraps from the sterilized stack. Her fingers moved without thought—unwrapping, folding, disposing. The worst days were when someone she knew came through here. When the blood had a face. A voice. That happened more often lately.
Rogues were pressing in at the borders.
A few of the scars on her thighs came from fights with wild wolves who’d lost their minds and morals. Not all of them were enemies. Some were just... untethered. Lone wolves who had lost their packs and snapped under the weight of isolation. A few she’d fought had already started shifting halfway through a sentence—bones warping, voices cracking, humanity breaking apart under the full moon like dry bark.
She didn’t pity them.
But she didn’t hate them either.
She understood what it meant to fracture quietly. To carry something inside you so heavy it gnawed at your edges.
A knock at the door broke the silence.
Nurse Halden leaned in. “Clean enough. Room D’s prepped for wound stitch. You’re assisting.”
Arya nodded. Peeled her gloves off with a snap and followed.
Exam Room D was brighter than the last, but colder.
Arya followed Nurse Halden inside and immediately clocked the patient on the table: male, maybe early twenties, shirt cut open and soaked in blood at the side. Someone had packed the wound hastily with gauze. His breathing was quick, not panicked—but close. His eyes flitted to her as she entered.
“Rogue ambush,” Halden muttered, already snapping gloves on. “Northern watchpoint. Patrol team of four—this one’s the only one who walked back.”
Arya took the gloves from the wall and pulled them on tight.
The room smelled of antiseptic and copper. That scent always hit first. Then came the body language. Fear, pain, adrenaline—it clung to skin like sweat.
“I’m fine,” the man said. He looked like he meant it. But Arya saw the twitch in his fingers, the too-shallow breath.
“Not fine,” Halden replied calmly. “Three ribs cracked, two puncture wounds. You’re lucky your lung didn’t collapse.”
Arya approached without hesitation, pressing down gently on the man’s shoulder. “What’s your name?”
He hesitated. “Dane.”
“Dane,” she said evenly, “you’re going to stay still while I help seal that gash before you pass out and hit the floor face-first. Deal?”
His jaw worked for a second. Then he nodded.
She moved quickly—taking the pre-threaded sutures, sterilizing the wound again, cleaning the blood from the edges. Her hands were steady. Her expression, flat.
She wasn’t unkind.
But she wasn’t soft.
The pack needed healers who didn’t flinch.
“You said rogue ambush?” she asked as she worked.
“Yeah.” Dane winced as she started the first stitch. “Didn’t see them. Heard a howl, then two on us from behind. One of ’em had no eyes left. Like, they’d rotted out. Just... empty sockets.”
Arya didn’t pause. But her spine stiffened slightly.
No eyes?
“Did you kill them?”
“I didn’t kill s**t. Darius did. I was too busy bleeding.”
She tied off the next stitch and moved to the second. Halden worked in silence beside her, monitoring vitals. The air between them buzzed under the fluorescent lights.
Arya’s thoughts drifted.
No eyes. That wasn’t just a rogue. That was something else. A feral. A wolf gone so far off bond, off sanity, that even the moon couldn’t pull them back. Those kinds weren’t born. They were made—usually from exile, torture, or rage.
It didn’t bode well.
Fifteen minutes later, the last stitch held tight, and Dane was sedated, cleaned, and stable.
Arya stripped off her gloves and dropped them into the bin.
As she turned to wash her hands, she caught her reflection in the stainless-steel cabinet.
Blood on her arms. Eyes flat. Hair pulled tight. Her own face looked back at her like a stranger—half-girl, half-instrument.
She stood there, hands under freezing water, and thought:
This is what they’re shaping me into.
Not a mate. Not a daughter.
Not even a Luna.
Just... useful.
She dried her hands and left the room without speaking.
Back in the hallway, the rotation board lit up with the next round of assignments.
But Arya didn’t check it.
She walked toward the viewing deck at the end of the medical wing. The windows there looked down over the lower cliffs—nothing but treetops and mist below. For a moment, she stood there, watching the wind move through the pines like ghosts.
Her reflection hovered in the glass, translucent against the sky.
Behind her, this world was concrete, steel, rules, blood.
Ahead of her—fog, forest, and the Hunt.
And somewhere in the middle of it all: Keagan.
Still smiling like she mattered.
Still walking away like she didn’t.
- Writer
