THE HEALER'S HIDDEN FANGS

Runa Ashworth's POV. The blood on my hands wasn't mine, but it still felt like a confession. I pressed the cloth harder against Old Merrin's shoulder, counting my breaths the way Nadia taught me years ago. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Don't let a wolf smell your heartbeat spike, because a spiking heartbeat means a lie, and in Blackthorn territory, lies get you killed slower than knives do, but they still get you killed. "You're not gentle enough," Merrin grunted, though his eyes stayed soft with trust. He was seventy winters old and still thought I was some quiet healer's apprentice with clumsy hands. Good. That's exactly what I needed him to think. That's what I needed everyone in this territory to think. "I'm gentle enough to keep you alive," I said. "Hold still or I'll let this scar wrong." He laughed, a wet, rattling sound, and I finished stitching the gash a rogue wolf had opened across his shoulder during last night's border patrol. My hands didn't shake. They never shake anymore. Five years of practicing stillness will do that to you. It turn your body into a wall so thick that even you forget what's hiding behind it. Behind mine was a girl named Runa Ashworth, and she had been dead since the night her whole pack burned to the ground. The girl stitching Merrin's shoulder was someone else. Someone smaller, quieter. Someone whose hair I had cut short and dulled with ash-root paste so it wouldn't catch the light the way it used to when I was young and careless and still had a family. I kept the name Runa, because losing the surname was easier than losing everything at once. Ashworth, I buried deep enough that some mornings even I had to remind myself it still belonged to me. "Done," I said, tying off the last stitch. "Don't lift anything heavier than a teacup for three days." "You sound like my mother." "Your mother had better sense than you. Listen to her for once." He chuckled and left the infirmary with the careful, favoring walk of a man who might actually listen. Only when the door shut behind him did my shoulders finally drop. The infirmary smelled of yarrow and rubbing alcohol, with the particular mustiness of the herb satchel I wore at my hip every hour of every day. Ash-root. Crushed juniper. A pinch of wolfsbane diluted so thin it wouldn't harm a soul. Just enough to blur my real scent into something forgettable. Something safe. Because my real scent was not safe. There wasn't a wolf over the age of twenty in Blackthorn who wouldn't recognize the Ashworth bloodline the moment it hit their nose. Not after what happened five years ago. I had been eighteen. My mother had been humming while she braided my hair for the harvest festival. My father had been arguing with my older brother about patrol schedules, the same argument they had every week, neither of them truly meaning any of it. Normal. Boring. Alive. Then the scent of smoke arrived before the screaming did, and nothing after that was ever normal again. I don't let myself finish that memory during daylight hours. I've trained it the way I trained my hands into stillness, into a locked door I keep shut until the moon forces it open. I keep the truth of what happened folded up small and sharp, like a blade tucked into a boot. Ready. Hidden. Five years of hiding. Five years of healing other wolves' wounds while nursing my own like a secret garden nobody is allowed to see. And five years of collecting proof, that the m******e of my family was not the tragic accident Blackthorn's official history claims it to be. It was an order. Someone gave that order. And I intend to find out exactly who, and make them answer for every single loss. I was three names away from finishing my list of suspects when the infirmary door opened. The whole room seemed to change temperature. I felt him before I saw him. That's the only way I know how to describe it a pull low in my chest, like a hook sinking through skin, tugging toward the door before my head even turn. My pulse did something it hadn't done in five careful years. It forgot how to behave. Alpha Cassian Vane stood in the doorway, and every instinct I had sharpened over half a decade screamed at me to run. He wasn't looking for me. That was the first small mercy. He was speaking to Nadia about bandages for the patrol team, his attention fixed on the supply shelf, not on me. I had three, maybe four seconds before his eyes would naturally sweep the room and land on the apprentice frozen beside the basin. I used every one of those seconds to grab my satchel and press it hard against my collarbone, right over my pulse point, flooding the air around me with juniper and ash-root. Masking. Hiding. Surviving. The way I had survived every day since the fire. It didn't work. His head turned. Not slowly. Sharply. Like something had yanked him, the exact same hook I felt in my own chest. His amber eyes found mine across the room, and I watched confusion cross his face first, then something else entirely. Something that looked almost like recognition, even though we had never spoken more than ten words to each other in the two years I had lived under his roof. He took one step toward me. I forced my spine straight and my expression flat, the way I did with every wolf in this territory. Unremarkable. Forgettable. A healer's apprentice. Nothing more. "You," he said. And his voice had gone low, rough, almost confused by its own reaction. "What's your name again?" "Runa," I said. My own name, half true, sitting like a stone in my mouth. He didn't move any closer, but his nostrils flared, slightly. Just enough for me to notice. He was trying to place my scent underneath the herbs. And the longer he stood there, the tighter that hook in my chest pulled, until I understood with a horror so complete it nearly buckled my knees where I stood. This wasn't attraction. This wasn't some strange coincidence. This was a mate bond, snapping into place between me and the son of the man I had spent five long years planning to destroy.