The Alpha's Doctor.

Chapter Nine — Her Bodyguard

Darius's POV

The door closed behind me and I walked.

No destination. Just the corridor and the torchlight and the particular silence of a compound that had learned a long time ago to read its Alpha's footsteps and clear a path accordingly. People moved. I did not see them. I was looking at the stone floor and seeing a scalpel held over a steady hand and eyes that did not flinch.

She would rather hurt herself than stay.

With me.

I had been marked, shot, poisoned, and left for dead in my own compound in the last twenty four hours and this was the thing that sat wrong. That specific fact. That she had looked at me across my own war room table and chosen a scalpel over staying in the same mountain as me.

I filed it. Kept walking.

Cole fell into step beside me.

He said nothing. That was one of the few things I had always valued about Cole Frost — he understood the difference between silence that needed filling and silence that needed leaving alone. He had learned that distinction somewhere in the first year of knowing me and had never unlearned it.

We walked the length of the corridor.

Then I said — to no one, to the stone walls, to the particular quality of mountain air that had surrounded me my entire life —

"She would rather hurt herself than be here with me."

Cole was quiet for a moment.

"She is frightened," he said.

"I know."

"She does not understand yet what she is. What any of this means."

"I know," I said again.

We turned a corner. The corridor widened. The torches burned further apart here and the shadows between them were longer.

"Force her to stay," Cole said. Not a suggestion exactly. More like a fact he was laying on the table for me to do something with. "She is your mate. She is safer here than anywhere outside this territory. The bond will stabilize if she stays long enough to—"

"No."

He stopped.

I stopped too. Turned to look at him for the first time since I left the war room. Cole Frost who had known me for twenty years and had seen every version of me this life had produced — before the war, during it, after. Who had stood in the corridor outside the room where they told me about Eli and had not said a word and had not needed to.

He was looking at me now with an expression I recognized. The one he used when he thought I was wrong and had decided I needed to know it.

"She will be in danger," he said.

"I know," I said.

"Then—"

"I put a mark on her she did not ask for," I said. Quiet. Final. "I will not put chains on her as well."

The corridor was silent.

Cole held my gaze for a long moment. Reading me the way he always read me — not the Alpha, not the performance of authority and control that I wore in every room I occupied. The man underneath. The one that had fewer defenses than the Alpha and considerably more damage.

He looked away first.

"What do you want to do," he said.

I started walking again.

"Find me two wolves," I said. "The best we have. Rhys chooses them — I trust his judgment on this. They take her home tonight. They stay at a distance. Close enough to intervene if something moves against her. Far enough that she never knows they are there."

"She will not accept a visible guard," Cole said.

"Which is why it will not be visible," I said. "Rotating shifts. Report directly to you. Nothing — nothing — happens to her."

Cole nodded once. The nod of a man who had received an order and intended to carry it out completely.

"And if she spots them," he said.

I thought about her. The dark eyes that missed nothing. The way she had catalogued my war room in the thirty seconds between the door opening and her reaching the table. The woman who had noticed the gaps in a medical facility she had never seen before within four seconds of walking into it.

"She will spot them," I said. "Eventually."

"And then?"

"And then," I said, "that is a problem for a later day."

Cole left to carry out the order.

I stood in the corridor alone.

Around me Ironridge moved in its evening rhythms — the sounds of the compound settling into the later hours, voices low, the particular quality of a community that had held its breath for twenty four hours and was now, cautiously, beginning to exhale. Their Alpha was alive. The crisis had passed. The human woman who had saved him was leaving.

I walked to my quarters.

Passed Eli's door.

I always passed it without stopping. That had been true for seven years — through the war's aftermath, through the rebuilding, through every night I had walked this corridor with something I was not going to call grief because grief implied it had happened and was finished and this had never felt finished. I passed it without stopping every time because stopping meant something I had not yet decided to do.

Tonight I stopped.

I stood outside his door and looked at it.

Eli who had been twenty two and reckless and warm in the way I had never managed to be warm. Eli who had followed me into the worst two days of the war because I had needed every wolf I had and he was one of them and I had told myself that was strategy and not the specific arrogance of a man who believed he could keep track of everything he loved and lose nothing.

I had been wrong about that.

I stood outside his door and thought about a woman who had held a scalpel over her own hand and looked at me with completely steady eyes.

I thought about what it would mean to lose someone again.

I did not finish the thought.

I went inside my quarters. Sat. Did not sleep. The wolf was too unsettled for sleep — pacing somewhere beneath my skin, unhappy in the specific way it had been unhappy since I walked out of that war room and left her there. The mate bond pulled in the direction of the war room and then, as the hours passed and she was taken further from the compound, pulled in the direction of the city below the mountain.

Toward her.

I ignored it. I was practiced at ignoring things.

At two in the morning Cole's voice came through the door. Brief. Efficient.

She was home. The wolves were in position. All confirmed.

I said nothing for a moment.

"Good," I said finally.

Cole's footsteps moved away down the corridor.

I sat in the quiet of my quarters with the bond pulling quietly toward a city I could not go to and a woman who had chosen a scalpel over my company and I thought about what Eli would have said about all of this.

Something insufferable, probably.

Something warm and reckless and completely correct.

I leaned back. Looked at the ceiling.

"I know," I said to the empty room.

And sat with it until morning came.