From His Luna to His Rival's Mate

Chapter 23

SELENE

The infirmary bed felt too hard under my back. I lay there with my eyes half closed, staring at the ceiling and trying to breathe through the pain in my shoulder.

Every small movement sent a fresh wave of hurt rippling out from the wound. I had tried shifting onto my side once and immediately regretted it.

Now I stayed as still as I could and focused on keeping my breathing even. The medicine the nurses had given me helped with the worst of it, but not enough to let me forget it was there.

The door opened quietly and Kael stepped inside. He looked at the nurses first, checking the room before his eyes moved to me.

The worry on his face was plain and unguarded in a way I didn't see from him often. He walked to the side of my bed without saying anything to anyone and sat down in the chair beside it. His hand reached out and took mine gently, wrapping around my fingers with a warmth that seemed too steady to be accidental.

The pain in my shoulder eased, not completely, but enough that I let out a slow breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, his voice came out low, meant only for me.

"Still hurts," I said. "But better when you do that." I looked at our joined hands. "How do you do that, Kael? Every time you touch me the pain pulls back. What is that?"

He was quiet for a moment, his thumb moved slowly over the back of my hand, back and forth, like he was thinking about how much to give me. Then he looked up and met my eyes.

"I take suppressants," he said. "Every day, they hide my real power."

I waited for him to continue.

He looked back down at our hands. "Right from when I was little, people told me my strength was too much. That it would get me killed if I did not learn to control it. That others would come after me if they knew what I could really do." His jaw tightened. "So I started taking the suppressant. To stay hidden, to stay alive."

I watched his face while he spoke, the tiredness in his eyes was the kind that came from carrying something for a very long time, not from one bad night but from years of the same weight. "Why are you telling me now?" I asked. "You have been so careful about keeping everything close."

He looked at me. "Because you got hurt, and I was standing right there and I could not just watch and do nothing." His hand tightened slightly around mine. "I had to help. But I can't show the full strength of it. It's not safe for me, and if people connect it to you, it will not be safe for you either."

"How strong are you?" I asked. "Your real strength, I mean."

He gave me a small, tired almost-smile. "Strong enough that it scared people who were supposed to protect me."

I let that sit for a moment, then I squeezed his hand. "Thank you for saving me. I don't know what would have happened out there if you had not come when you did."

"Don't think about that." He leaned forward slightly, his free hand came up and brushed a loose strand of hair away from my face, his fingers moving carefully, like I was something that could break under too much pressure.

"I will always come. But Selene, you need to be more careful. The academy is not what it looks like from the outside, someone put that arrow in you deliberately. That was not an accident."

"I know," I said quietly. "It did not feel random."

"No." His eyes stayed on mine. "It was not."

We sat together without talking after that. The nurses moved around us, checking my bandages and adjusting the medicine, and Kael stayed in the chair the entire time and his hand never left mine.

The pain in my shoulder stayed manageable, and I wasn't sure how much of that was the medicine and how much was him. I didn't ask again, I just let myself rest.

Later that afternoon I made my way to the cafeteria, my shoulder still ached under the fresh bandage, a deep, slow throbbing that sharpened when I moved my arm too much. I kept it close to my side as I carried my tray to a quiet table near the window and sat down carefully.

The room was full of students eating and talking about completely ordinary things. I kept my head down and picked at my food without much appetite.

I had eaten maybe half of it when a chair scraped across the floor on the other side of my table and Calder sat down.

I looked up, already tensing. But the face across from me was not the one I had been bracing for, his eyes were quieter than usual and the hard set of his jaw had loosened.

He looked tired in a way that went deeper than one bad night, and he wasn't leaning forward or gripping the edge of the table or filling the space with the kind of energy that usually came off him like heat from a fire. He just sat there and looked at me.

"How is your shoulder?" he asked. His voice came out low, almost careful.

"Still hurts," I said, watching him. "The nurses say it will heal."

He nodded, his hands rested flat on the table in front of him. His fingers tapped once, lightly, then stilled. "I am glad it was not worse."

I didn't say anything.

He looked down at the table for a second. "When I came around the path and saw you bleeding like that..." He stopped. "I did not think. I just moved. I just needed to get to you."

I studied his face, this version of him was unfamiliar in a way I was still adjusting to. The obsession was still somewhere underneath it, I could feel that, but right now it was buried under something more tired and more honest. "Thank you," I said. "For helping Kael carry me back. You did not have to do that."

"Yes I did," he said simply.

I looked at him for a moment longer. "What do you want, Calder?" I asked.

He met my eyes. "To know you are okay. That is all I came over here for." He paused. "And I wanted to ask if you would meet me somewhere later. Somewhere private, just to talk. I am not going to make demands." He opened one hand on the table, palm up, then closed it again. "I just want to talk, like two people who know each other."

I kept my face still. "That is different from how things have been lately."

"I know." He didn't look away. "I know how I have been. I am not going to pretend otherwise."

The honesty of it caught me off guard more than anything else he could have said. I looked down at my tray and thought about it, the Calder who had stood in the courtyard shaking with rage felt far from this one. I didn't know which version was more real, maybe both of them were.

"I will think about it," I said finally.

He nodded and didn't push. He didn't ask me to decide right then or tell me why I should say yes. He just accepted it and pushed his chair back and stood up slowly. "Take care of your shoulder," he said. "I mean that."

He walked away through the cafeteria, and I watched him until he disappeared through the far door.

I sat with my food going cold in front of me and turned the conversation over in my mind. He had come to check on me because he was worried.

He had helped carry me back because he needed to get to me, not because he wanted something in return. He had sat across from me and spoken quietly and left when I didn't give him a clear answer, that felt new.

I didn't know what to do with it yet. Calder had made me feel afraid and trapped and watched for long enough that one quiet conversation didn't undo any of it. But it sat differently than I expected it to. It didn't feel like a performance, it felt like someone who was tired of himself and didn't know how to say so directly.

I picked up my fork and made myself eat a few more bites.

My shoulder throbbed under the bandage. Kael's words from the infirmary sat in the back of my mind alongside Calder's face just now, someone had put that arrow in me on purpose, and I was still no closer to knowing who or why.

I finished what I could of my food, picked up my tray, and stood carefully. The cafeteria moved around me, loud and ordinary and completely unaware.

I walked out into the hallway and headed back toward the dorm with my good hand pressed lightly over my bandaged shoulder.

I needed to think, and I needed to heal. I needed to be more careful than I had been, because whoever had come after me once already knew where to find me.