THE HEALER'S HIDDEN FANGS

CHAPTER 5

Cassian's POV.

I'd felt uneasy for two days straight.

I finally understood why the moment I saw her fighting stance out there in the moonlight.

Runa moved like a warrior.

Not like someone who had stumbled through basic self-defense out of simple necessity like someone trained, drilled, shaped by a discipline that took years and years to build properly.

Healers didn't move like that. Healers held their hands like they were protecting something breakable and precious.

She held hers like she was ready to break something herself, without a moment's hesitation.

I should have asked more questions two years ago, when a quiet stranger appeared at our gates with no pack and no past. I hadn't, because Nadia vouched for her and because grief-thinned strangers weren't unusual after border wars.

Now I wondered how much of that had been my own carelessness, and how much of it had been her, carefully making sure I never looked too closely.

I didn't have time to press her before the howl came.

Some cold, instinctive part of me was almost grateful for the interruption, because I wasn't entirely sure I was ready for whatever answer she might have given me.

Fot two years, I had watched her move through this pack like a shadow, quiet and useful and utterly unremarkable.

Then, in one moonlit hour she had become the most complicated thing in my life.

We reached the eastern border to absolute chaos.

Three rogue wolves had already breached the outer line, and two of my warriors were down, bleeding into the frost-hardened grass beneath them.

I shifted mid-stride, the change tearing through me in the half-second burn I had long since stopped noticing, and threw myself into the nearest fight before my paws had even fully hit the ground.

The rogue I tackled was strong.

Too stronger for a random border-testing wolf.

And something about the coordinated way all three of them moved set off alarms in the back of my mind even as I fought for my footing.

Rogues didn't usually attack in formation like this.

They panicked.

Scattered.

Fled the second real resistance showed up to meet them.

These three fought like they had been given careful, deliberate orders.

I drove mine back toward the treeline, got a solid grip on his throat, and he finally went still beneath me.

His eyes wide with something that looked less like fear of me and more like fear of failing whoever had sent him here tonight.

"Who sent you," I snarled, still mid-shift, my voice a half-growl I barely recognized as my own.

"Talk. Now."

He said nothing.

He simply stared past me toward the infirmary tents that had been hastily set up for the wounded.

Something in his expression made my blood run cold even before I turned my head to look for myself.

Runa was there.

Exactly where a healer should be.

Kneeling over one of my fallen warriors with her hands steady and sure as she treated his wounds.

She was doing precisely the work I'd expected from her.

Except the rogue pinned beneath me wasn't looking at the wounded warrior at all.

He was looking directly at her.

"You know her," I said.

It wasn't a question anymore.

His mouth twisted into something between a smirk and a grimace.

"Everyone in the old territories knows an Ashworth when they see one fight," he rasped. "Didn't think the last one of them was still breathing, honestly."

The word hit me like a physical blow to the chest. Ashworth.

I knew that name.

Every wolf raised in Blackthorn knew it.

It lived in half-finished stories about a rival pack that used to control the eastern valley before it was wiped off the map five years ago.

The official records simply called a tragic territorial conflict.

I had never once questioned it closely. It happened before I took the Alpha title, buried somewhere in my father's final years of leadership, one grievance among a dozen old grievances I had quietly inherited without ever asking for the details underneath them.

I looked back at Runa.

Her steady hands.

Her carefully flat expression.

The fighting stance I had caught her in less than an hour earlier.

Suddenly, every piece I'd failed to understand clicked into a picture I wasn't ready to see.

The mate bond that had rewritten my entire chest the moment I first caught her scent.

The masked scent she layered on so thick it took me two full days to even register that something underneath it was wrong.

The training she clearly possessed and clearly worked hard to hide from everyone around her.

No home pack.

No sponsor.

No past that ever quite added up.

"Ashworth," I said again, testing the sheer weight of the name on my tongue, and the rogue beneath me laughed, a broken, delighted sound, like he had just handed me a grenade with the pin already pulled clean out.

"Ask her yourself, Alpha," he said. "Ask her why a dead pack's last surviving heir has spent two whole years living quietly inside the walls of the very family that killed them all."

The world tilted sideways hard beneath my feet.

Across the yard, as if she had felt the shift in the air between us, Runa looked up from her patient.

Her eyes found mine across the chaos of wounded wolves and dying torchlight.

And for the first time since the day I had met her, she didn't manage to hide the fear on her face fast enough.

She knew.

She had always known exactly who I was, from the very first moment we met.

And I had absolutely no idea who she really was.

My mate.

Or the last heir of a family my own father had burned to the ground.