Broken Crown

CHAPTER 4

"You need to show me."

I consider lying again. I am good at lying, not the vocal kind, but the kind where you control your face and your breathing and you give nothing away. It is the skill I am proudest of, which says something sad about my life.

But he is standing there with his arms crossed and his dark eyes holding mine with a steadiness that is harder to evade than anger.

"Can we go somewhere private?" I ask.

"Private," he repeats, like it is a word he is slightly unfamiliar with.

"Away from the hallway."

He leads me to his office. The blinds lower automatically when he touches something on the wall and the harsh midday light softens into something dim and even. Then he steps back and waits.

I reach for the hem of my shirt. My fingers won't cooperate immediately. Not because of modesty, I have been beaten, examined, and degraded enough times that modesty stopped meaning what it once meant, but because showing someone damage is different from having it taken from you. Showing someone means choosing. And I have not chosen to show anyone anything in a very long time.

I pull the shirt to the side.

The wound is four inches long and the edges are red and hot to the touch. The infection has been building for over a week. I know this because I know my own body the way you know a broken-down car you still depend on, every rattle and warning light, and what each one costs to ignore.

He looks at it. His expression does not change outwardly, but something behind his eyes does. He asks me to show him the rest.

I don't want to.

He waits.

I let the shirt come off.

The bruises start at my ribs and cover most of my torso and back. They are in different stages, some yellow and fading, some still deep purple, one near my hip that is still actively swollen. The scars from older damage live underneath them, white lines against my skin that Raven, his pack doctor, I don't know her yet, will later tell me are at least three years old.

He looks at all of it without looking away.

Most people, when they see damage this extensive, look away quickly. Like the sight of it is embarrassing for them. Like they are intruding. I have learned to read that look and know it means they will not help. Looking away is a way of deciding not to know.

Kael Drayden does not look away.

"Who?" He says it with his teeth close together.

I pull my shirt back into place. "All three of them. And sometimes the pack."

"Because of what happened with your parents."

"Yes."

"I don't believe you did it."

I look at him. I have heard a lot of things in my life, blame, pity, disgust, dismissal. I have not heard that. My throat closes around something unexpected.

"You don't have to say that," I tell him.

"I don't say things to be kind," he says. "I say them because they're true. A child of six doesn't know what Blood of Wolfsbane is. It doesn't grow wild. Someone planted it deliberately. Your brother either knows this and lied about it, or he was too angry to think clearly, and he has been punishing you for someone else's crime ever since."

The room is very quiet.

"I don't know how to…" I stop. My voice is doing something unreliable. I press my lips together and wait until I am certain of it again. "I don't know what to do with that."

"You don't have to do anything with it right now." He walks to the door. "You need a doctor. Come."

His pack doctor's name is Mira and she is, apparently, his sister.

She has his dark eyes and none of his stillness. She moves fast and talks at the same pace, and when she looks at my wounds, her expression goes through about six things in four seconds before she locks it down into something professional.

"How long since this happened?" She presses gently around the infected wound.

"I'm not sure exactly."

"Guess."

"Ten days. Maybe more."

She shakes her head slightly. Not at me. At the wound, or at whatever it represents. She reaches for a jar of cream and talks me through how to use it, three times a day, keep it covered, come back in two days regardless.

"Your healing is completely suppressed," she says. "With your wolf bound, your body is running entirely on human biology. You should be healing faster even without your wolf, something is interfering." She looks at me carefully. "Are you eating?"

I think about how to answer that honestly without sounding like I am asking for sympathy.

"Inconsistently," I say.

Something passes across her face. She hands me the cream and then, before I can move away, she squeezes my hand briefly.

I go still.

It is a small gesture. The kind people do without thinking. I haven't been touched like that, like a choice, like a kindness, in so long that I genuinely don't know what to do with my face while it is happening.

"You're going to be okay here," she says. Quietly. Not performing it.

I nod. I cannot speak at the moment.

Kael is waiting outside. He falls into step beside me without speaking and we walk back through the compound. When we reach the office, he stops me and applies the cream himself, one hand braced on my lower back to keep me steady, the other moving carefully across the wound with a focus that is clinical and nothing else.

"Don't hold your breath," he says without looking up.

I release the breath I have been holding.

"You don't have to be afraid of me," he says.

"I know," I tell him.

And I realize, slowly, that some part of me almost believes it.

That terrifies me more than any of the rest of this.