The Rouge Luna's Retribution

What I Would Become For Him

I didn't remember deciding to move. One second I was frozen in horror, watching silver arc toward Malakai's unguarded back; the next, the Bound Door blew open wider than it ever had in training, power flooding through me in a wave that felt less like control and more like desperation given claws.

I don't know how fast I actually moved. I only know that I reached him a half-second before the blade did, throwing myself between Malakai and the hunter with a speed that didn't feel entirely like my own, and the impact of silver meeting flesh landed across my shoulder instead of his spine.

Pain exploded through me, sharper and colder than any wound I'd ever imagined, silver burning through skin and muscle in a way that made every nerve in my body scream at once. It didn't feel like ordinary pain — it felt like something actively eating through me, a cold, corrosive burn that spread outward from the wound faster than any injury should. I heard myself cry out. I heard Malakai's voice, suddenly right beside me, saying my name with a raw urgency that cut through even the agony.

I didn't fall. I refused to fall, some stubborn animal part of me insisting that going down now, in front of an enemy who'd come here to kill everything I'd started to love, would be its own kind of surrender. I turned on the hunter who'd struck me, claws still lengthened, and met his next strike with a fury that had nothing left to do with training and everything to do with instinct.

He didn't survive the exchange.

The rest of the fight blurred after that — pain and adrenaline tangling together until I couldn't fully separate one from the other, my shoulder screaming with every movement, silver poison already working its slow, burning path through my blood. I fought anyway, because stopping felt more dangerous than continuing, until the last of the hunters finally broke and fled back through the breach they'd come through, Malakai's warriors giving chase only far enough to be sure they wouldn't circle back.

Around me, the courtyard slowly stilled into something that looked less like battle and more like its aftermath — warriors tending wounds, the fires along the outer wall finally smothered, the sharp copper smell of blood hanging heavy over black stone that had seen far too many nights like this one, if the old scorch marks scattered across the ground were any indication.

Then, and only then, did I let my knees finally give out.

Malakai caught me before I hit the ground, his arms closing around me with a desperation that stripped away every careful, guarded layer he usually kept wrapped around himself. "Aria." My name in his voice sounded nothing like it had in Killian's mouth — no cruelty underneath it, no calculation, just fear, plain and unguarded. "Aria, look at me."

"I'm fine," I managed, though the words came out slurred, my vision already blurring at the edges.

"You're not fine. That's silver in your shoulder, and you just took a blade meant for me." His hands were steady even as his voice wasn't, pressing firm pressure against the wound with a competence that told me this wasn't the first time he'd had to do this for someone he cared about. "Why would you do that?"

"Because you would have died," I said, simply, like it was the only answer that had ever made sense. "And I wasn't going to let that happen. Not after everything you've—" I stopped myself, suddenly aware of how close I'd come to saying something I wasn't ready to say out loud, not with pain still fogging my thoughts and my judgment nowhere near steady enough to trust.

The rest of the sentence dissolved into a gasp as pain lanced through my shoulder again, sharper this time, the silver working deeper with every heartbeat that passed without treatment.

Malakai's expression did something I'd never seen it do before — cracked open entirely, every careful wall stripped away, leaving something raw and furious and frightened all at once. "We need to get the silver out. Now." He was already lifting me, careful of the wound, carrying me across the ruined courtyard like I weighed nothing at all, shouting orders to warriors who scrambled to clear a path ahead of us.

"I can walk," I protested weakly, though even I could hear how little conviction the words carried.

"You almost died for me tonight," he said, voice rough with something that sounded dangerously close to breaking. "You'll let me carry you the rest of the way, and you'll live to argue about it later."

I didn't have the strength to argue further. I let my head rest against his chest instead, listening to the frantic, uneven rhythm of his heartbeat, and found myself thinking, through the haze of pain and silver poison, that no bond had ever made me feel the way that single unguarded moment did — chosen, not by fate, but by a man's own desperate, terrified choice to keep me alive. Killian's bond had burned in my chest for three years and still somehow meant less than the raw fear in Malakai's voice as he carried me across a battlefield he hadn't even finished securing.

The healer's chambers smelled of herbs and firelight, and the process of extracting silver turned out to be exactly as agonizing as every story I'd ever heard claimed it was. I gritted my teeth through it, Malakai's hand gripping mine hard enough to hurt in a way that somehow helped rather than worsened the pain, his eyes never once leaving my face even as the healer worked, murmuring low instructions to an assistant grinding herbs I didn't recognize into a poultice that smelled sharply of mint and something bitter underneath it.

"You shouldn't have done that," he said quietly, once the worst of the extraction was finished and exhaustion had started dragging me toward sleep despite the lingering ache. "You barely know how to control your own shift. You could have died proving a point you didn't need to prove."

"I wasn't proving a point," I murmured, eyes already slipping closed. "I told you. I wasn't going to let you die. Not when—"

I didn't finish the sentence. Sleep pulled me under before I could decide whether I actually wanted to say the rest of it out loud, and the last thing I registered before the darkness took me completely was Malakai's hand, still holding mine, and his voice, low and rough, murmuring something I couldn't quite make out — something that sounded, impossibly, like a vow.

I woke hours later to raised voices outside the chamber door, tense and urgent, one of them unmistakably Rhea's.

"You need to see this," she was saying, her tone stripped of its usual easy confidence. "Now, before it spreads through the whole city. Someone's identified the hunters' employer."

I forced myself upright despite the protest from my healing shoulder, the room swimming briefly before settling, and strained to hear Malakai's response through the door. My heart was already pounding faster than my injury could account for, some instinct warning me that whatever came next would matter far more than a single skirmish in a courtyard.

"Say it," he said, low and dangerous, a tone I hadn't heard from him even in the thick of battle.

A long pause followed, long enough that I found myself holding my breath despite the ache it cost my shoulder.

Rhea's answer, when it finally came, made my blood run colder than the silver ever had.

"It's Ashwood," she said. "Killian's pack hired them."

Silence fell on the other side of that door, heavy enough that I could feel it even through the wood, and I sat frozen in the healer's bed with my heart hammering against a wound that hadn't finished healing, waiting to hear what Malakai would say next.