The Alpha's Broken Chain

chapter 5: The Door He Closed

POV: Ronan

I did not think. I only moved.

Wren's body had gone limp against the leather seat, her breathing shallow, her skin cold under my hands. The healer's wing was less than a minute from the gates. Every instinct trained into me for twenty-eight years said take her there, hand her to trained hands, let the professionals do their work.

I drove past it without slowing down.

Bricklen's voice crackled through the radio on the dash, tight with confusion. "Alpha, the infirmary is right—"

"Not the infirmary," I said.

I did not explain further. I was not entirely sure I could have, even if I tried. Something in me refused to let her wake up surrounded by strangers in a cold, sterile room. She had spent her whole life waking up to people who did not care whether she lived or died. I was not about to be one more stranger standing over her bed.

I pulled the car up to my own front steps instead.

Two guards posted at my door straightened at the sight of the car, then went very still when I climbed out and lifted Wren carefully into my arms. She weighed almost nothing. That fact alone made something twist hard in my chest.

"Alpha," one of them said carefully, "should I call for the healer to meet you inside?"

"Do it," I said, already moving past him toward the door.

I felt their eyes on my back the entire way up the steps. No Alpha in Stonemere's history had ever carried anyone through that front door except family. I knew exactly what it looked like. I did not care.

Inside, the house was quiet, the kind of quiet that only existed because everyone who worked here had learned long ago not to ask questions when my expression looked like this. I carried Wren up the stairs to the guest room nearest my own, laid her down on the bed, and pulled the blanket over her shaking frame.

Her wrist twitched. Her breathing was evening out, slow and steady now that we were no longer moving. The pain that had gripped her in the car seemed to be fading, though her face still held tight lines of exhaustion even in whatever half-sleep she had fallen into.

I sat down in the chair beside the bed and did not move.

Behind me, I heard the door open and close softly. Bricklen. I did not need to turn around to know the particular weight of his footsteps.

"The healer is on her way," he said. Then, after a pause that stretched a beat too long, "Alpha, may I speak freely?"

"When have you ever asked permission first?"

A faint huff of breath, almost a laugh, though there was no real humor in it. "This room," Bricklen said carefully. "It's beside yours."

"I'm aware of the layout of my own house."

"The staff are already talking."

I finally turned to look at him. Bricklen had served as my second since before either of us had earned our full rank, and in all that time, I had never once seen him hesitate to say exactly what he thought. He was not hesitating now either, not really. He was choosing his words the way a man chooses his footing on ice.

"Let them talk," I said.

"They're saying you carried a Thornfield slave into your private wing instead of the infirmary." He kept his voice low, careful, but the words landed anyway. "Some of them are saying you've lost your mind. Others are saying something else entirely."

"And what are you saying?"

Bricklen's eyes flicked toward Wren, still and pale against the white sheets, then back to me. Something shifted in his expression, understanding dawning slow and careful.

"I'm saying," he said quietly, "that I've known you a long time, and I've never seen you look at anyone the way you looked at her getting out of that car."

I did not answer right away. There was no point pretending with Bricklen. He would know a lie the moment it left my mouth, the same way I would know his.

"She's my mate," I said finally.

The words felt strange leaving my mouth, foreign after five years of believing I would never say them about anyone again. Bricklen went very still, processing the weight of what I had just told him.

"Does she know?"

"No." I looked back toward the bed, toward the girl who did not yet understand that the invisible thread pulling at both of us had a name. "And she's not ready to. Not after what that collar did to her. Not after what her own brother did to her for sixteen years."

"So what do we tell the pack?"

"Nothing," I said. "Not yet. She stays here, under my protection, until she's strong enough to understand what's happening to her. Until she's strong enough to choose, instead of having one more thing decided for her without her say."

Bricklen studied me for a long moment, and I watched him weigh the order against everything he knew about how quickly rumors could spread through a territory this size. Whatever he saw in my face settled the matter for him.

"I'll handle the staff," he said. "Quietly."

"Thank you."

He moved toward the door, then paused with his hand on the frame. "Ronan." My name, not my title, which he only used when something mattered enough to drop the formality entirely. "After everything with your last mate. Are you certain about this?"

I looked at Wren again. At the collar scar still visible along her throat, raw and red even after the metal had come off. At the way her hands, even in sleep, stayed curled tight and defensive, like she expected pain to find her even in her dreams.

"I've never been more certain of anything," I said.

Bricklen nodded once and let himself out, closing the door softly behind him.

I stayed in the chair through the healer's examination, through the quiet murmured instructions about rest and food and time. I stayed long after the healer left, long after the house went dark and silent around us.

Sometime near midnight, Wren's eyes opened.

She looked around the unfamiliar room, confusion and fear flashing across her face before her gaze landed on me, sitting close enough to reach her, closer than I had let myself get since the moment I pulled her out of that car.

"Where am I?" she whispered.

I opened my mouth to answer.

And that was when I realized, with a cold drop in my stomach, that I had absolutely no idea how to explain why she was sleeping one door down from my own room without terrifying her all over again.