Chapter 6
1287 Words
Damien's POV
I smelled him before I saw him.
That was the training — Alpha-born, pack-raised, you learn what a threat smells like before you learn to read. And the man who came through my room door at twelve-thirty on a Thursday while the lunch trays were still in the hall smelled like iron and old forest and a pack marker I recognized: Vorreth. One of the packs that bordered mine to the west.
Ally territory. Formally.
The kind of “ally” that sends a scout to your hospital room while you’re recovering from a wound they may have known was coming.
He was big. Not a fighter — his hands were wrong, desk-worked, soft in the knuckles — but he was carrying silver-threaded wire in his coat pocket and I could see the shape of it through the fabric. Not a weapon. A signal jammer. The kind that disrupted pack bonds at close range and made it harder for an Alpha’s people to locate them.
He was here to confirm I was isolated.
“Mr. Ashborne,” he said. Mild. Businesslike.
“Who sent you,” I said. Not a question.
He smiled. The kind of smile that is a message.
I was hooked up to three different monitors and I had been off the ward maybe six hours total in the past ten days. My wolf was half-muzzled by the suppressant drip. My left side still pulled if I moved wrong.
None of that mattered.
I had grown up being told that an Alpha’s real power wasn’t in the fight. It was in the voice. In the weight behind the eyes. In the thing that other wolves felt in their bones before a single word was said.
I sat up straight and I looked at him.
“Sit down,” I said.
He sat down. His own body did it before his brain decided to, and for just a second pure panic crossed his face — the panic of a wolf who has just been reminded what food chain they’re on.
“You’re going to tell me who sent you,” I said, “and you’re going to tell me why, and then you’re going to walk out of here without doing whatever you came here to do. And in return, I am not going to call every Alpha contact I have and tell them Vorreth is running intelligence ops against injured pack leaders in civilian hospitals.” I paused. “That would be very bad for your pack’s next three trade cycles.”
His jaw worked.
The door opened.
Nora came through it fast, a security badge in her hand and two of the hospital’s wolf security staff behind her. She took in the room — the man, me, the shape of the situation — in about one second.
“Sir,” she said to the man, level and cold. “This is a medical facility. You need to leave immediately.”
He looked at her. Then at me.
“Consider the message delivered,” he said quietly, to me.
“Consider my response understood,” I said.
He walked out. The security staff went with him.
Nora waited until the door was mostly closed. Then she turned to me, and for the first time in ten days she wasn’t being a doctor. She was being herself — jaw tight, eyes lit up, furious in the precise and focused way I remembered.
“What was that,” she said.
“A scouting visit.”
“From who?”
I looked at her.
“I don’t know yet,” I said, which was mostly true. I had a theory. I just needed Rhen to finish running down the Voss compact before I said it out loud. “But someone knows I’m here and knows I’m not able to move, and they want to see how exposed I am.”
She stared at me.
“In my hospital,” she said.
“In your hospital.”
“You brought this here.”
“I didn’t choose to get ambushed, Nora.”
“But you chose to come here.” Her voice was shaking slightly, but not with fear. With something else. “You were stabilized. They could have transferred you to Ashborne territory. You could have finished recovery there.”
I held her gaze.
“The Ashborne pack medics didn’t have the silver suppression protocol. Your facility did.” I paused. “That’s why I was brought here.”
“You should have been moved once you were stable.”
“Your head of surgical care countered that recommendation.”
A pause.
“Wren—”
“Told my pack liaison that moving me before full silver clearance was medically irresponsible and she would not sign off on an early transfer.” A beat. “She was right, medically. For what it’s worth.”
Nora’s expression cycled through about four things quickly.
“I’ll talk to her,” she said.
“You could just let me stay.”
“That is not—”
“Nora.” I kept my voice quiet. “That man who was just in this room — if he found me here, whoever sent him already knows about this facility. About where you work.” I stopped, and I let her hear what I wasn’t saying, and I watched her hear it. “I have people running down the threat. But right now, the safest place for my recovery is a location no one expected me to be in.” I held her eyes. “And the safest people to be near are people who are motivated to keep me alive.”
I watched her understand what I meant.
I watched her hate that I was right.
“You don’t get to use my clinic as a tactical position,” she said.
“I know that.”
“I have patients here. I have staff.”
“I know.”
“I have Iris here.”
Her voice dropped on the last word, just slightly. Enough.
I met her eyes.
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m asking you.”
Silence.
She looked at me for a long, long moment. Her arms were crossed. Her face had gone back to that smooth, professional surface that I had spent ten days learning to see past.
But she hadn’t walked out.
“Two more days,” she said. “I want Rhen here with whatever he’s found by Saturday.”
“Done.”
“And Damien.” She said my name like a decision. First time in ten days. “If anything touches this clinic — if you bring anything to my door — I will be the thing you can’t recover from.”
She walked out.
I sat back against the pillow and let out a slow breath.
My wolf was not quiet anymore. He was pacing — but differently than before. Not grief-mad. Not aimless.
Oriented.
He knew where she was. He had always known where she was, I understood that now. Every restless night for three years, every time he’d pressed against my ribs and pointed at nothing — he’d been pointing at her.
Six hundred miles away, building something brilliant and sharp and entirely without me, and still — still — the bond was there.
I had broken everything I was allowed to break.
Now I just had to figure out if there was anything left that was worth trying to mend.
My phone buzzed.
Rhen.
I picked up.
“I found it,” he said. “The prophecy. There are two versions.”
I closed my eyes.
“Tell me everything,” I said.
- Writer
