The Lycan Princess and The Four Cardinals

Chapter Five: What Shouldn't Heal

POV: Malia Moon

The infirmary ceiling is the first thing I see when my eyes finally open, pale stone arched overhead, sunlight slanting through a narrow window in a way that tells me hours have passed rather than minutes. The room smells faintly of dried herbs and something sharper underneath, medicine perhaps, or the kind of tonic meant to numb pain before it fully sets in. Rows of empty beds line the far wall, all neatly made, all unoccupied except for mine.

My shoulder throbs when I try to sit up, though the pain feels duller than it should, distant somehow, like my body has already started smoothing over whatever damage Wilder's hit left behind. I flex my fingers experimentally, testing the range of motion, half expecting a sharper protest from the joint that never comes.

"Don't move too fast." A voice comes from the chair beside my bed, and I turn to find the silver haired boy from the training yard sitting there, arms crossed, watching me with the same tense uncertainty he wore from a distance.

"Good. You're awake." He says it quickly, almost like he's relieved to have an excuse to stop sitting there. He's on his feet before I can respond, already halfway to the door.

"Wait." I push myself upright despite the ache in my shoulder. "Who are you? Why were you even here?"

He hesitates at the door, hand on the frame, not quite looking back at me. "Lukan. Silva Pack." A beat passes, like he's deciding whether to say more, then clearly deciding against it. "I should go."

"That's it? You're just leaving?"

"I shouldn't have stayed this long in the first place." He finally glances back, something unreadable crossing his face, gone as quickly as it appeared. "Get some rest."

The door shuts behind him before I can ask anything else, leaving me sitting alone in the quiet, more confused by his abrupt exit than I was by anything he actually said.

I sit with that confusion for a moment, turning it over, wondering what exactly made him bolt the second I opened my eyes. There had been something in the way he looked at me right before he left, brief and unreadable, like a question he'd decided not to ask out loud. It isn't the first time since arriving here that someone has looked at me that way, like I'm a puzzle they're half afraid to solve. It probably won't be the last.

I don't have an answer that's safe to give anyone, so instead I glance down at my shoulder, easing the collar of my shirt aside to check the damage, bracing myself for whatever mottled bruising should still be blooming there after a hit that hard.

There's nothing there.

Not a bruise, not a mark, nothing to suggest Wilder's fist connected hard enough to send me sprawling into the dirt only hours ago. My skin is smooth, unblemished, like the injury never happened at all. I press two fingers against the spot where the pain had been sharpest, half expecting some phantom ache to flare up in protest, but there is only smooth, ordinary skin beneath my touch. Werewolves don't get their wolf until they turn thirteen, and until then they heal like anyone else, slow and human, bruises taking their time, bones setting the way bones are supposed to. Even after the wolf comes, healing that fast should still be impossible for someone everyone insists doesn't have one at all. I stare at it for a long moment, half convinced I'm misremembering how bad it looked, though the ringing silence that had swallowed the training yard before I blacked out tells me otherwise.

This has happened before, though never quite this fast. A scraped knee healed overnight when I was seven. A twisted ankle that stopped aching within a day when most girls my age would have been limping for a week. My mother always brushed it off as good fortune, told me some people simply mend faster than others, and I believed her because I had no reason not to. I don't believe that anymore. Not after watching an entire fractured bone disappear in the space of a few hours.

I am still staring at my own unmarked skin, heart hammering, when the infirmary door swings open again.

Vargus steps through it, already mid-stride, like he didn't bother knocking or announcing himself at all. His eyes sweep the room once, taking in the empty chair by my bed, the closed door Lukan just vanished through, before settling on me with an intensity that makes the air feel thinner.

"You're alone," he says, like he was expecting otherwise.

"Should I not be?"

He doesn't answer that. Instead, he crosses the room in a few long strides, stopping close enough to my bed that I have to tilt my head back slightly to hold his gaze. Up close, the tension in his jaw is even sharper than it was in the doorway of the housing hall, like he's been carrying something heavy since the moment he walked in here.

"What do you want?" I ask, keeping my voice steady despite the unease crawling up my spine.

"I want to know why the healer who was supposed to check your injury an hour ago never made it through this door." His jaw tightens, gaze flicking briefly toward my shoulder, exactly where the bruise should be and isn't. "I want to know why the report I just read said you were carried in unconscious with a fractured collarbone."

The room goes very quiet.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I say, though the lie feels thin even as it leaves my mouth.

"Don't." His voice sharpens, closer now to command than question. "I've spent my whole life learning to read people who lie to me. You're not nearly as good at it as you think you are."

"Maybe you're not as good at reading people as you think you are."

Something almost like a smile flickers at the corner of his mouth, gone before it can fully form. "I used to think that too. Lately I'm not so sure." He straightens slightly, arms crossing over his chest, though the posture does nothing to soften the intensity in his gaze. "You want to know something strange? I've spent years learning to catalog every lie a person might tell me before they tell it. It's practically a requirement, growing up the way I did. And yet here you are, and I can't tell if you're lying or if you genuinely believe what you're saying."

"Maybe that's because I'm not lying."

"Maybe." He doesn't sound convinced.

"And I want to know," he continues, voice dropping lower, closer now, close enough that I can see the flecks of gold hidden in his otherwise dark eyes, "why you're sitting here right now looking like nothing happened to you at all."

"Maybe the report was wrong."

"The report was written by the instructor who carried you off that field himself. He doesn't make mistakes like that." Vargus's gaze drops to my collar, still adjusted just enough to hide the truth beneath it, and something shifts behind his expression, calculation sliding into something more urgent. "I've seen a lot of things in this academy. Alphas who heal fast, alphas who heal faster than they should. I have never seen anyone heal a fractured bone in under two hours. Not once. Not ever."

"Maybe you haven't seen everything there is to see."

"That," he says quietly, "is exactly what worries me."

He leans in slightly, close enough now that I catch the faint scent of cedar again, close enough that I can hear the controlled edge in his breathing, like he's holding something back that wants very badly to come out. Whatever calculation he's been running since he walked through that door seems to be reaching some kind of conclusion, and I don't think I'm going to like what it is. The silence between us stretches long enough that I can hear my own pulse in my ears, loud and unsteady, betraying exactly how little control I actually have over this moment.

I have no answer that won't unravel everything my parents spent years hiding. Every instinct I have tells me to lie again, to insist he's mistaken, to hold this secret the way I have held it my entire life. But something in the way he's looking at me now, less like an enemy cataloging a threat and more like a boy who has stumbled onto something he doesn't know what to do with, makes the lie stick in my throat.

Before I could decide whether to lie or say nothing at all, Vargus reaches out and, before I can stop him, pulls my collar aside himself.