Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by His Enemy

CHAPTER 10: THE CLAW MARKS

The healer's name was Orin. I hadn't met him before that morning and I've decided I never want to meet him under those circumstances again. He worked on Talia with his sleeves shoved up past his elbows, blood to the wrist, snapping orders at anyone standing too close, and I stood too close anyway because moving felt impossible.

"She's not going to die," he said, not looking up. "Not today. Ask me again tomorrow."

"That's not comforting."

"Wasn't trying to comfort you. Trying to keep my hands steady." He tied something off, hard, and Talia made a sound that wasn't quite consciousness. "Somebody get me more bandages. And somebody get her out of the doorway before she faints and gives me two patients."

He meant me. I moved. Barely.

Draven found me an hour later sitting on the floor outside the healing quarters with my back against the wall, because apparently sitting on actual furniture had stopped being an option for my body somewhere in the last week.

He sat down next to me. Didn't say anything at first. Just sat there, close, shoulder almost touching mine, and for once I didn't have the energy to notice it the way I usually noticed it.

"She's stable," he said, eventually.

"I know. I was there."

"I meant it as something to say. Not information." A pause. "I'm bad at this part."

"What part."

"The part where someone's scared and I don't have a fix for it." His jaw worked. "I'm good at borders. Threats. Things with edges I can push against. This isn't that."

I almost laughed. Almost. "Welcome to my whole life since the pack hall."

He didn't say anything to that. Just reached over and took my hand, plain, no ceremony to it, and I let him, and for about thirty seconds that was the only thing keeping me upright.

Then Fenrir showed up, and thirty seconds ended.

He came in fast, breathing hard, like he'd run the whole way from wherever he'd been. Draven's hand tightened on mine before he let go, slow, deliberate, the kind of slow that says I noticed you noticing this and I'm choosing not to make it a thing right now.

"I heard," Fenrir said. "Is she—"

"Alive," I said. "Barely."

Something in his face went gray. He crouched down near where Talia had been lying, and his eyes caught on something on the ground I hadn't noticed yet — a smear in the dirt, half-hidden by the mess of the healers' work.

"That's a claw mark," he said, quiet.

"So? We're wolves. Everyone here has claws."

"Not like that." He touched the edge of it, careful, not disturbing it. "Four points. Spaced wide. That's not an Ashwood strike pattern." He looked up at me, and something in his face had gone strange, careful, like he was choosing every word before he let it out. "That's Blackwood."

The whole hallway went quiet.

"Say that again," Draven said. Flat. Dangerous.

"I'm not saying I know who did it." Fenrir stood, hands out slightly, like he could feel how fast this was about to go wrong. "I'm saying the strike pattern matches our combat style. Which means either someone from my pack did this, or someone wants it to look that way."

"Convenient," Draven said. "That it points at you and somehow still isn't your fault."

"I didn't say it wasn't my fault. I said I don't know yet." Fenrir's voice had an edge now too, something tired and frayed under the careful control. "Do you think I want this? Do you think I want one more thing tying my pack to whatever's happening to her?"

"I think," Draven said, standing now too, "that you've had a habit lately of showing up right after things go wrong."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" Draven's voice dropped lower, colder. "You rejected her. Then you showed up at my border. Then a stranger died with a mark I've never seen before, and you had a story about your own dead scout from six years ago, conveniently. Now Talia's on a table half-dead with a Blackwood claw mark next to her, and you're the one who noticed it first."

Fenrir's face had gone very still. "You think I did this."

"I think I don't know what to think anymore, and neither do you, and that's the problem." Draven's hands were fists at his sides. "Everyone in this pack has a story that almost makes sense. Yours is starting to make sense a little too often."

I stood there between them, watching two men who'd started cooperating out of necessity now circling back toward the old hostility, and something ugly and tired in me almost — almost — didn't care whose fault it was anymore. I just wanted it to stop.

"Both of you shut up," I said.

They both looked at me like I'd grown a second head.

"Talia is unconscious in that room because someone attacked her. I don't care whose claw pattern it resembles right now. I care about who actually did it, and standing here accusing each other isn't finding that person." My voice cracked halfway through and I hated it. "So either help me figure this out, or get out of the hallway."

Neither of them moved for a second. Then Fenrir looked away first. "I'll pull records. See which of my wolves were unaccounted for last night."

"Do that," Draven said, still cold.

Fenrir left. Draven didn't relax, not really, but his hands unclenched a little.

"You didn't have to defend him," he said, once Fenrir was out of earshot.

"I wasn't defending him. I was defending Talia. There's a difference." I rubbed my face with both hands, hard. "Though for what it's worth, if he actually did this, I'll help you gut him myself."

"Noted." A pause. "For what it's worth, I don't actually think it was him."

"Then why push so hard."

Draven was quiet a second. "Because it's easier to be angry at someone with a face than at something I can't see coming."

That, at least, I understood completely.

I sat with Talia that evening, once Orin let people back in, once her breathing had gone from terrifying to merely bad. Her face looked wrong without the usual smirk on it. Too still. Too pale under the freckles.

"You'd better wake up," I told her, quiet, feeling stupid for talking to someone who couldn't hear me and doing it anyway. "You still owe me a rematch. I want to see if you've fixed your left side."

Nothing. Obviously. I hadn't expected an answer.

I sat there long enough that the candle burned low, long enough that my back started aching from the chair, and I was halfway to drifting off myself when her hand moved.

Barely. A twitch, fingers curling slightly against the blanket. I sat up so fast I knocked the chair back.

"Talia?"

Her eyes didn't open. But her lips moved, faint, dry, cracked from fever, and I leaned in close enough to catch it, my heart going somewhere loud and frantic in my chest.

"Not... Ravenshade," she breathed, barely audible. "Wasn't them. Saw... his eyes."

"Whose eyes, Talia. Whose."

Her hand went slack again before she could answer. Her breathing evened back out into whatever passed for sleep now, and I sat there gripping her hand too hard, staring at her closed eyes, my mind running through every face I'd trusted in the last week and finding, horribly, that I couldn't rule out a single one of them.