Bound to My Step-brother

Chapter Eight.

Victor's POV

I stood in the doorway of my son's room and made myself watch, because looking away had started to feel like its own kind of cowardice.

Ryker had been like this for days now , sheets soaked through no matter how often they were changed. The fever is increasing because of the poison. @

Draven knelt beside the bed, grinding herbs in a shallow stone bowl with the unhurried patience of a man who had done this a thousand times before, though nothing about his expression suggested he was confident it would work this time.

"How is he," I asked, though I could see the answer myself.

"Fighting," Draven said, without looking up. "For now."

Ryker groaned in his sleep, a low, wretched sound, his whole body curling inward around the pain the way a man curls around a wound he can't reach. I watched his hand fist in the sheets, watched his lips move around a name I didn't need to hear clearly to recognize.

Lila.

His eyes snapped open a moment later, glazed and unseeing, and he groaned again, louder this time, the sound scraping something raw in my own chest that I didn't want to examine too closely.

"He's hurting," Draven said quietly, setting the bowl aside and pressing a fresh compress to the wound. "More than the silver alone should account for at this stage. It's the injury." He glanced up at me, something searching in his expression. "And it's the thought of her. The bond doesn't let him rest, even unconscious. Every hour she's gone is an hour his body reads as a wound of its own."

I said nothing. I stood very still, the way I'd learned to stand still through decades of Council meetings where showing anything on my face was a liability I couldn't afford.

But my mind was not still at all.

I thought of the arrows, the screaming, the elders bleeding out around me while an entire Council I had spent my life courting watched the Blackthorn name come apart in real time. I thought of the whispers that had followed me every day since. The forbidden bond nobody had sanctioned. The humiliation of standing before men I'd once commanded respect from and having them look at me like a man who could not control his own household.

It was her fault. Lila had walked into my house a month ago, and every carefully built thing I had spent decades assembling had started crumbling in her wake, thread by thread, until it had cost me my standing in front of the entire Council.

When word came that the hunters had taken her, some small, shameful part of me had felt something close to relief. The problem, gone. The embarrassment, removed from my doorstep for someone else to manage now.

I hadn't expected what came after.

I hadn't expected to stand in this doorway night after night, watching my only son burn from the inside out because of a girl I had wanted gone. I hadn't expected the particular horror of understanding, all at once, that whatever relief I'd felt at her disappearance had cost me Ryker's health. He was suffering because of her. And watching him suffer was its own unbearable thing, a weight I hadn't budgeted for when I'd let myself feel that first flicker of relief.

I was suffering too, in my own way , caught in the impossible, grinding contradiction of wanting her gone and needing my son whole, both at once. But none is possible without the other.

"There's something I could do," Draven said, breaking the silence, his eyes still on Ryker's fevered face. "For him. Not the wound itself, the other wound. The thought of her, circling him day and night, keeping the poison fed."

"What do you mean?"

"I could extract her." He said it as simply as if he were offering to lance a boil. "The memory of her, from his mind. Not everything, just the sharpest thread, the part of the bond that keeps pulling him back to her every time his body tries to heal. A clean excision. He'd remember the facts of what happened between them. He simply wouldn't feel the pull of her anymore." He looked up at me now, steady, patient. "It would free him from this, Victor. He could heal. He could lead this pack the way he was always meant to, without a girl's absence eating him alive from the inside."

I looked at my son, pale, shaking, calling a name in his sleep that had cost him everything since the day he'd first spoken it aloud in that fire-lit clearing, and for one long, seductive moment, I let myself imagine it. Ryker whole again. Ryker mine again, in the ways that mattered, unburdened by a bond I had never wanted for him.

It would be so easy to say yes.

But another part of me, smaller than it used to be, and I hated how small it had become, understood exactly what I would be doing if I agreed. I would not simply be healing my son. I would be erasing the one thing keeping him fighting at all, and calling it mercy because it was convenient to call it that.

"Let me think about it," I said, and even as the words left my mouth, I wasn't entirely certain which answer I was hoping to arrive at.

Draven only nodded, unsurprised, and returned to his herbs.

“Whatever your response would be, make it quick. It would determine my next line of action.”

“What are you trying to say?” I asked him.

He gazed at Ryker and shook his head. “I’m just trying all I can. Two wounds, one I can heal, but the other, I can’t unless you accept the solution I proffered.”

My heart races with fear and my fingers became numb. “So what are you trying to say?”

He shrugged. “If you delay your response, we might lose him.”