Chapter 9 — Back Through the Gate
1092 Words
The Shadowfang gates looked smaller than I remembered.
Strange, how a place that swallowed my whole life could shrink once I stopped being afraid of it.
Rhain's hand hovered near the small of my back without touching me. He had promised. He kept his promises.
"Breathe, Moonsinger," he murmured. "You walk in. You do not crawl."
I lifted my chin.
The iron gates groaned open, and a hundred pairs of eyes turned on me at once.
I knew those eyes. I had knelt under them. Bled under them.
Now they widened as if a dead girl had climbed out of the snow wearing silk.
Because I had.
My cloak was Crimson Hollow scarlet, lined with white fur. My braid was crowned with a thin silver circlet Rhain's sister had pressed into my hands that morning. No chains. No bare feet. No trembling.
Six Crimson Hollow warriors walked at my back in perfect wedge formation. Rhain walked at my left, exactly one pace behind, close enough to protect, far enough to honor the agreement.
A warrior's courtesy. Kael had never once offered me that.
I heard the whispers start.
"Is that—"
"It can't be. She was—"
"The healer. The wolfless—"
"Not wolfless," someone hissed back. "Look at her neck."
My fingers itched to cover the silver crescent glowing faintly over my collarbone. I didn't. Rhain had trained me against that flinch for three straight days.
*Let them look. Let them remember what they threw away.*
Omegas I had healed through fevers stared at me like I was a saint returned. Warriors who had spat at my feet on rejection night dropped their gazes to the snow.
Good.
Then the crowd split, and she came through.
Mira.
She wore Luna red. She had no right to it, but she wore it.
Her lips were painted the same color as the dress, and her hand rested on a little silver dagger at her hip like it was jewelry.
"Well," she said, voice pitched for the crowd. "The stray came home."
My stomach clenched. Old instinct. I breathed through it.
"I am not your stray, Mira."
"No?" Her smile was sweet poison. "You came running the second Kael whistled. Some things never change. Should I have the kennel prepared, or will you sleep at the foot of his bed like before?"
Heat flashed up my neck.
Before I could speak, Rhain stepped forward. Just one pace. It was enough.
The air snapped.
Every Shadowfang wolf within ten feet flinched. Crimson Hollow Alpha power rolled off him like a cold tide, and Mira's knees actually dipped before she caught herself.
"Lady Voss." Rhain's voice was pleasant. That was what made it terrifying. "You will address the Moonsinger Healer of Crimson Hollow by her title, or you will not address her at all. Are we clear?"
Mira's painted mouth opened.
"Are we clear," Rhain repeated, softer.
"Yes," she whispered.
"Yes, Alpha Ashford."
"Yes, Alpha Ashford."
I did not smile. Rhain had trained me out of that too. *Do not gloat. Gloating makes you look like you used to be small. You were never small, Elara. You were only surrounded by smaller people.*
I walked past her.
Her perfume hit me as I passed, jasmine and something metallic underneath, and for half a heartbeat my crescent mark burned cold against my skin.
I filed that feeling away. I would think about it later.
The sickroom was in the east wing, past the Moonstone altar chamber. I knew every stone of this hall. I had scrubbed most of them.
Beta Corin met us at the door. His face was gray. He had aged ten years in a week.
"Healer," he said, and then, hoarsely, "Lady Seren. Thank the Moon."
"How bad?"
"Worse every hour. We lost two more warriors last night. The Rot is in the wells now."
In the wells. Gods.
"Take me to him."
Corin hesitated. His eyes flicked to Rhain.
"Alpha Ashford comes with me," I said, before he could try to peel us apart. "That was the agreement."
"It's not that." Corin swallowed. "It's— you should prepare yourself, my lady."
"For what?"
"For him."
He opened the door.
The smell hit me first.
Not death. Not yet. But the sweet copper rot that came before it, the smell I had spent my childhood learning to break apart in my mother's stillroom. Blood Rot at stage three. Maybe later.
The room was dim. Someone had drawn the shutters. A single oil lamp burned low on the bedside table, and the moonstone basin beside it was cracked straight down the middle.
Then I saw him.
My breath stopped like a hand had closed around my throat.
Kael.
The Alpha who had stood on the Moonstone altar and called me unworthy in front of his entire pack was chained to his own bed with silver.
Silver cuffs on both wrists. Silver collar at his throat, the metal biting deep enough to blister the skin around it. Each link hissed faintly where it touched him. They had chained him because he had been tearing the healers apart in his fever.
He was shirtless. I could see why they had risked the silver.
Black veins.
They crawled up from beneath his ribs like ink spilled under his skin, branching, reaching, curling around his throat in a slow, living pattern. One thin tendril had already climbed his jaw. Another had reached the corner of his left eye.
He had days. Maybe hours, if the tendril at his eye crossed into the brain.
My knees wanted to buckle. I locked them.
"Elara." Rhain's voice at my shoulder, low and steady. "You do not have to do this. Say the word. We walk out."
I couldn't answer.
Because Kael had turned his head on the pillow.
His eyes were fever-bright, glazed silver at the edges where his wolf was trying to surface and could not. He did not seem to see the room. He did not seem to see Rhain, or Corin, or the chains eating into his wrists.
He saw me.
Only me.
His cracked lips moved.
"Elara." It came out broken. Barely a sound. "Elara. Elara, Elara, Elara—"
He was whispering my name like a prayer. Like the only word he had left.
Like he had been whispering it for days.
A single black tear slid from the corner of his left eye, tracked down his temple, and disappeared into his hair.
And the silver crescent over my heart began to burn.
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- Writer
