The Ashes of The Rejected Queen

Chapter 9 — What My Hands Could Do

Chapter 9 — What My Hands Could Do

Their names were Cole and Petra.

They sat across from me in Mara's small meeting room — on the same side of the table, which I noticed immediately, close enough that their arms were almost touching but carefully, deliberately not touching. The specific body language of two people who have trained themselves out of the thing they most want to do.

Cole was tall, dark-haired, jaw tight in the way of someone who has been holding something in for a very long time. Petra was smaller, steady-eyed, hands folded on the table with a control that looked like it cost her something.

They both looked at me like they weren't sure what I was supposed to do.

Honestly, neither was I.

Mara had told me — just sit with them. Just feel. Don't try.

So I tried not to try, which was its own kind of effort.

At first I felt nothing unusual. Just the room. The candlelight. The smell of woodsmoke from the small fireplace in the corner. Cole and Petra's careful not-touching.

Then — slowly — something else.

It was like learning to see something in your peripheral vision. You know the shape is there but every time you look directly at it, it disappears. I had to sort of — not look at it directly. Let it come to the edges of my awareness.

When I did that, I felt them.

Not Cole individually and Petra individually. Them. The bond between them — still there, still present, even after eight months of suppression. Mate bonds don't disappear because they are inconvenient. They wait. They endure. They go underground like roots in winter, alive and patient.

Theirs felt like a wire pulled too tight. Like something that had been stretched to its limit for so long it was vibrating with the strain of it. Still intact. But hurting.

"How long has it been since you touched each other?" I asked.

Cole's jaw tightened further. "Eight months, one week."

"And before the separation — you had acknowledged the bond? You knew?"

"We knew immediately," Petra said. Her voice was controlled. "We had two weeks before his former Alpha found out and forbade it. Sent him here as punishment." A pause. "I followed."

I looked at their not-touching arms.

"What would it mean if I tried to help you?" I asked. "What are you hoping for?"

"The pain to stop," Cole said. Simply. Like he was too tired to dress it up.

"And the bond to be real," Petra added. "Not suppressed. Not hidden. Real."

I nodded.

I looked down at my hands.

Don't try, Mara had said.

But what I was beginning to understand was that for me, not trying and trying were not what they were for other wolves. For me the thing was less about effort and more about — permission. About allowing something that was already present to do what it already wanted to do.

I put my hands on the table. Palms up.

"You don't have to," I said. "But if you want to—"

They each placed one hand in mine at the same time.

And the thing that had been pressing at the edge of my awareness came forward.

It wasn't a dramatic thing. No light, no sound, no visible change. What happened was more like — a knot being untied. Something that had been twisted and pulled and held in the wrong shape for so long that the untying of it was almost silent. Almost gentle.

Cole made a sound. Low. Involuntary.

Petra closed her eyes.

And then, slowly, Cole turned toward Petra. And Petra turned toward Cole. And the not-touching that had been holding them apart for eight months dissolved like it had never been — and they were just two people, reaching for each other across a table.

I let go of their hands.

I sat back.

Something inside me was ringing like a bell that had been struck — clear and resonant and slightly overwhelming. Nyx was perfectly still, the way she went still when something mattered more than she had words for.

Mara, standing in the doorway, was looking at me.

I looked back at her.

"That's not just sensing," I said. My voice came out quieter than I meant.

"No," she agreed. "That is not just sensing."

"I can heal bonds."

"It appears so."

I thought about that. About what it meant. About the particular cruelty of having the power to heal bonds when my own had been destroyed. About the Moon Goddess's sense of humor.

"Can I—" I stopped.

Mara waited.

"Can I heal my own?" I asked.

The silence that followed was very careful.

"The bond between you and Zane Carter is not suppressed," Mara said slowly. "It is damaged. That is different. A suppressed bond has been prevented from expressing. A damaged bond—"

"Was ripped out by choice," I said. "I know what it is."

"In the four centuries of recorded Black Luna history," Mara said, "there is one reference to a Black Luna healing a damaged bond. Her own." A pause. "It is noted only as a possibility. Not a certainty. And the text makes clear that it required—" she hesitated— "the willing participation of both parties."

Both parties.

Zane Carter.

The man who had looked over my head and called me unworthy in front of three hundred people.

"That," I said, "is not going to be an issue for a very long time."

"No," Mara agreed. "It is not."

I stood. Looked at Cole and Petra — still sitting together, her head now on his shoulder, both of them very quiet in the particular way of people who have stopped bracing against something painful.

Something ached in my chest.

Not the bond scar. Something older and softer.

"What's next?" I asked Mara. I didn't want to look at them anymore.

"Rest. Food. Tomorrow we work on the shield." She paused. "And Dax wants to speak with you."

"About what?"

"He would like to tell you something about Zane Carter's father." Her expression was very even. "Something he has been sitting on since he arrived here four years ago."

I went still.

"He knows about Aldric Carter?"

"He was there," Mara said quietly, "when Aldric Carter made the deal that started all of this. Three years ago. He was still Beta then." A pause. "He left his pack six months after. He has never explained why. Until tonight, apparently, he was not ready to."

Three years ago. When Zane was nineteen and the bond became detectable. When Aldric Carter had started engineering a rejection that would take three years to execute. Dax had been there. He had seen it. And he had carried it here to the Hollow Sanctum and said nothing.

Until now.

Until me.