Reject Me Once, Regret Me Forever

Chapter 7 — The Healer's Hands

**POV: Kael Thornheart**

The third ring stank of rogue wolf—the outermost band of Thornheart land, where the villages clung to the edge of nothing and the law thinned to a rumor.

I had come myself—not for the girl, though my wolf had not stopped circling her scent since the Beta's reports, but because the border packs were turning bold and a child had been taken. An Alpha who let rogues bleed his vassals was an Alpha who would not keep them long.

So I rode in with my patrol, and by the second day we had the pack cornered in the ravine.

The rogue wolf took my arm.

It was almost polite—a s***h of claws across the bicep as I drove it back, a reminder that even an Alpha bleeds. My wolf surged; I broke its spine and let it fall. The others scattered.

I barely felt the wound. That was the problem.

Because the moment we rode into the village, the scent hit me.

*Roses.*

Cold skin. Something wild underneath.

The same scent from the forest road, from the night a hooded girl had looked at me like she had already won and said my name like a wound.

My wolf went still. Then he went feral. *Her. Here. The mate.*

I dismounted hard, one hand on the arm the rogue wolf had opened. The villagers came out—elder, hunters, and a girl with a basket of bandages who moved through them like she belonged to the ground she walked on.

"Alpha," the elder said. "The healer—"

The healer.

She was already at my side before the word finished. Hood down, hair pinned back, hands steady. A village girl. A stranger. Someone I had never seen.

And yet my wolf rose to his feet like a hound who had caught a scent after weeks of nothing.

She reached for my arm. Her fingers were cool against the hot line of the wound. My wolf slammed against my ribs so hard I almost stepped back. The bond scar, quiet for days, flared under my chest—not with the warm claim of a mate answered, but with fire. A scalding, furious pain, the kind a cut thread leaves when it is dragged across the soul.

She had rejected this bond. And the bond remembered.

It did not pull me toward her the way a true mate's bond should. It burned. It accused. It screamed that she was the one and that she had thrown me away, and the only thing it gave me was the agony of knowing.

*Roses. Her. Here.*

I looked at her face—and found nothing I could name. The dusk in the forest had been thick; the hood had been low; I had been too blindsided to see her. This girl had plain features, calm eyes. But for one breath, as her eyes lifted to mine, I saw something flicker in them—a wariness, and under it a recognition she did not want me to see. A girl who did not know me should have looked at an Alpha with fear, or with nothing at all. She looked at me with something older than fear. As if she had met me before, and decided something about me long ago.

My wolf went still. *Her,* he said. *The one who ran.*

The scar burned harder, as if in agreement.

She bound the wound with a competence that undid me. The clean pull of the thread, the economy of her movements, the utter lack of fear in her eyes when they met mine and slid away. A village healer should have flinched under an Alpha's stare. She did not.

She was not afraid of me.

No one was not afraid of me.

And that—that calm, that lack of fear, the way her hands did not tremble on an Alpha's blood—it did something to me I did not have a name for. My wolf paced, restless, certain she was the one and furious that she stood here like a stranger. *Demand it,* he said. *Make her name herself.*

She tied the last knot and stepped back. The wound was bound, the bleeding stopped.

"Thank you," I said. It came out rougher than I meant.

She nodded, hood already coming up, already turning away. "Rest the arm, Alpha. It will heal."

She moved to leave.

And my hand caught her wrist.

I did not decide to. It happened—the bond scar flared white-hot, the wolf surged up my throat, and my fingers closed around the thin bone of her wrist before my mind caught up. Her skin was cool. The scent of roses rushed up from her like a held breath let go, and the scar answered with a fresh scald.

"Who are you?" The words tore out of me—not gentle, not Alpha-composed, but raw, the question the wolf had been howling since the forest road.

Her eyes widened. She did not pull away at first; she only looked at me, and for one impossible second I thought I saw the same war in them that was tearing me open.

Then she drew a slow breath.

"You're hurting me," she said.

The words were quiet. Not a cry. A statement. As if she were reminding me, and herself, of something.

I released her as if burned. My own hand was shaking.

I had grabbed a stranger. A village healer who had bound my wound without flinching, who owed me nothing, whose name I did not know—and I had seized her like a man possessed, demanding who she was as if I had any right.

"I—" I started, but the Alpha in me had no dignity left for this. "Forgive me. That was unconscionable."

She rubbed her wrist once, eyes flat now, all trace of that earlier flicker gone behind a wall I could not see through. "It's nothing, Alpha." She stepped back into the crowd and was gone.

---

I stood in the village square with my arm wrapped in a stranger's linen and my wolf howling at a scent I could not anchor to a face. Roses. Steady hands. A wrist too thin in my grip. A scar that burned only with pain, and no claim.

The Beta found me there. "The ring is clear of them, Alpha. Shall I—"

"Later," I said.

I closed my eyes. The scar under my ribs burned, patient and certain, the way it had burned in the study that first night.

A rose-scented healer in a border village. A girl who was not afraid of me. A pair of hands I could not stop thinking about, and a wrist I had grabbed without knowing why.

I did not know her name. But the wolf did. And the scar would not let me forget that she was the one who had rejected me.

I would find out who she was. I would not grab her like a fool again.

I told the Beta to make camp in the village. My arm needed seeing to, and the healer—whoever she was—would be far easier to find if I stayed where she worked. The third ring was clear of rogues; there was no reason to ride back tonight. I would not leave this village until I knew her name.