THE HEALER'S HIDDEN FANGS

CHAPTER 4

RUNA'S POV.

Garrick found me two days later, and he didn't bother pretending it was an accident.

I was crossing the training yard with a satchel of field bandages for the sparring wolves, keeping to the edges the way I always did, when he fell into step beside me like we were old friends catching up.

We weren't.

In two years, Garrick had spoken to me exactly four times, and every one of those times had been short, clipped, purely functional.

"Healer," he said, using the title instead of my name.

It felt deliberate and cold.

"You've been here…what, two years now?"

"About that."

"Funny thing. I was reviewing the pack registry last week. Standard business, nothing unusual."

His tone stayed light, conversational, but his eyes tracked me with the focus of a predator who had already decided I was prey worth chasing.

"Couldn't find much before you arrived. No home pack listed. No sponsor. You basically appeared at our gates one day, and Nadia vouched for you, and that was that."

My pulse spiked.

I hated it.

I hated that five years of discipline could still be undone by a few careful sentences from a suspicious wolf.

"I came from a small pack," I said, the same story I had rehearsed a hundred times in the dark. "It was destroyed by rogues. I didn't have anywhere else to go, and Nadia found me half-starved near the border. There wasn't exactly a registry left to transfer."

"Which pack?"

"Does it matter? It doesn't exist anymore."

"Everything matters to me when it concerns the Alpha." Garrick stopped walking, forcing me to stop too, and for the first time he dropped the pretense of friendliness entirely.

"I've known Cassian since we were pups. I've watched him carry this pack through his father's death, through three border wars, through more grief than any wolf his age should have to carry alone. He doesn't get to have many soft places left in him. And now he's telling me he's bonded to a healer with no past, no pack, and no explanation that adds up."

"I'm not hiding anything sinister," I lied, my voice miraculously steady even as my chest tightened like a fist was slowly closing around it.

"Maybe not." Garrick's eyes narrowed to slits. "But I intend to find out for certain. Nothing personal, healer. Just protecting my Alpha the way I always have."

He walked away before I could even attempt a response, and I stood frozen in the middle of the training yard until one of the younger warriors nearly knocked into me, apologizing quickly before jogging off toward the sparring ring without a second glance.

I made it back to the infirmary on legs that didn't feel entirely mine anymore.

Nadia took one look at my face and pulled me into the back room, locking the door firmly behind us. "What happened?"

"Garrick knows something's off. He's not going to stop digging." I pressed my palms hard against my eyes, trying to think through the panic clawing up my throat. "If he finds out who I really am before I'm ready…"

"Before you're ready for what, exactly?"

Nadia's voice had an edge I rarely heard from her.

"Runa, you have to decide. Are you here to destroy this pack, or are you here because some part of you doesn't want to anymore? Because you can't do both. Not with a mate bond sitting between you and the Alpha, and not with his beta circling closer every single day."

I didn't have an answer for her. That terrified me more than Garrick did.

That night, I couldn't sleep again, so I did what I always did when the walls of my small room felt too close, I slipped out to the training yard after moonrise, when most of the pack was long asleep, and ran the drills my father taught me before I ever became a healer's apprentice.

Strike.

Block.

Pivot.

Strike.

My body remembered every motion even when my mind was a storm of Elias Vane's handwriting and Cassian's amber eyes and Garrick's suspicious, unblinking stare.

I didn't hear him approach until it was already too late to hide what I was doing.

"That's not a healer's footwork."

I spun, heart slamming against my ribs, to find Cassian standing at the edge of the training yard, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read in the dark.

I had been mid-strike, my stance low and coiled, nothing like the soft, unassuming posture I wore during daylight hours for the benefit of everyone watching.

"I couldn't sleep," I said carefully, straightening my back. "Sometimes movement helps clear my head."

"That's not movement”.

He stepped closer.

“That's training."

He stepped closer, and I watched him take in the precision of my stance, the calluses on my knuckles I usually kept hidden inside healer's gloves, the way I had instinctively angled my body to keep him in clear sight instead of turning my back to him.

"Where did a healer's apprentice learn to fight like that?"

I had no ready lie for this one. I had been careless, exhausted, unguarded in a way I hadn't allowed myself to be in five entire years, and now the Alpha of Blackthorn was looking at me like a puzzle whose pieces had just stopped fitting the picture he thought he knew so well.

"Runa.”

His voice was quieter now.

And there was something in his voice that sounded almost like fear.

"Who are you really?"

Before I could answer, before I could decide whether to lie again or finally, let some fragment of the truth loose into the world, a howl split the night air from the eastern border.

Sharp.

Urgent.

The unmistakable sound of an attack call.

Cassian's entire body went rigid, Alpha instinct overriding everything else in an instant.

"Rogues," he said. "At the border.”

“Stay here. stay safe."

"I'm a healer," I said, grabbing my satchel on pure reflex. "You'll need me out there."

He looked like he wanted to argue, but another howl cut through the night, closer this time, and there simply wasn't time left for arguing.

He turned and ran toward the eastern border, and I ran after him, my questions unanswered.

His suspicion unresolved.

And somewhere behind us in the dark, I couldn't shake the growing feeling that this attack wasn't a coincidence at all.