THE HEALER'S HIDDEN FANGS

CHAPTER 2

Runa's POV.

I didn't sleep that night.

I lay on my narrow cot in the small room behind the infirmary, staring at the same ceiling beam I had stared at a thousand nights before.

Except tonight, it felt like the beam was staring back, judging me for the thing curling warm and unwelcome in my stomach that refused to listen to reason.

A mate bond.

With Cassian Vane, of all wolves in this world.

I had read about bonds in the old healing texts, how rare they were, how they were supposed to feel like coming home, like your whole body finally exhaling after years of holding its breath.

I always assumed I would never have one.

Wolves like me, wolves who had erased their own names.

Weren't supposed to get things like that.

We got vengeance instead, and I had built my entire life around it, brick by careful brick.

I thought about running.

I actually packed a small bag in my head, mapped the route to the southern border, calculated how many days I could survive on dried rations before I'd need to steal from someone.

I had done it before, after all.

Run.

Rebuilt.

Disappeared into a new life.

I could do it again if I had to.

But running meant leaving the journal behind.

It meant five years of patient, careful work turning to ash, the same way my family had.

And some stubborn, furious part of me refused to let Elias Vane win twice.

Nadia found me an hour before dawn, elbow-deep in drying herbs, tying bundles with a precision that had nothing to do with need and everything to do with keeping my hands busy.

"You look like you fought a rogue wolf and lost," she said, dropping onto the stool across from me.

Nadia was the only person in Blackthorn who knew pieces of the truth, not all of it, never all of it, but enough that she watched me now with the particular concern of someone who suspects a storm without knowing which direction it would come from.

"I'm fine."

"You're lying. You always tuck your chin when you lie."

She reached over and stilled my hands before I could crush the leaves I was bundling.

"What happened?"

I could have lied again.

Some tired, aching part of me needed to say it out loud instead, even in pieces.

"The Alpha. Yesterday, in the infirmary. He looked at me, Nadia, and I felt it too.The pull.”

I swallowed.

“I think we're mates."

Nadia went very quiet.

She was smart enough to understand immediately what that meant, especially given everything else she already knew about me.

"Does he know who you really are?" she finally asked.

"No, and he can't find out. Not yet. Not until I finish what I came here to do."

"Runa."

She said my name the way you say it to someone standing too close to a cliff edge.

"If the bond is real, he's going to come looking for you. Alphas don't ignore a mate pull. He'll ask around. He'll dig. You've hidden for five years because nobody had a reason to look closely at you.”

Her eyes held mine.

“Now you've given the most powerful wolf in this territory every reason in the world."

She wasn't wrong.

And that terrified me more than anything else had in a long time.

By afternoon, my careful world cracked a little further.

I slipped into the small records room off the infirmary, the one place nobody bothered checking because nobody thought a healer's apprentice had any reason to be interested in old pack ledgers.

I came here at least once a week, sifting through decades-old patrol logs, searching for anything connecting Elias Vane the previous Alpha, Cassian's father, dead three years now to the night my family died.

I had found fragments before.

A requisition for silver-lined weapons filed the week before the m******e, marked simply as border security.

A patrol roster with names crossed out that matched, almost exactly, warriors who vanished from Blackthorn's records within a month of the fire.

Pieces.

Never the whole picture.

Never proof I could hold up and say, this is what happened, and this is who ordered it.

Today, tucked behind a shelf of tax records nobody had touched in years, I found a leather journal with Elias Vane's initials pressed into the cover.

My hands went cold before I even opened it.

I sat on the dusty floor and read entries written in a careful, controlled hand, a man documenting decisions the way a general documents a campaign.

Land disputes.

Resource shortages.

Then, halfway through, a single paragraph tilted the whole room sideways around me.

The Ashworth pack controls the eastern valley and refuses to cede grazing rights despite three formal requests. The council has authorized decisive action to resolve this permanently. I take full responsibility for what follows.

I read it four times before the words finally stopped swimming in front of me.

There it was.

Not a rumor.

Not a guess pieced together from half-burned records.

A confession.

Written in the hand of the man who fathered the wolf my body had just chosen as its mate.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside.

Unhurried.

Familiar.

My stomach drop before my mind caught up to why.

I shoved the journal into my satchel, pressed my back against the shelf, and held my breath.

The door opened.

Cassian stood in the frame.

He wasn't looking not for records.

He was looking for me.

"There you are," he said softly, like he'd been searching for something lost, not something hidden. "I've been looking for you all day."

And I sat there with his father's confession pressed against my ribs, unable to say a single true word.

He was still watching me, waiting for an answer to a question he hadn't even asked yet.

And in that moment I understood that hiding from Cassian was about to become the hardest thing I had ever done.