The Alpha's Rejected Healer

Chapter 10 — On His Knees

The silver chains rattled before I even stepped into the light.

Kael lifted his head, and for one cracked second I saw the Alpha who'd thrown me into the snow. Then I saw the dying man underneath.

"Elara." His voice scraped the stone walls. "Come here."

Old instinct tried to move my feet. I let it die where it stood.

"No."

The sickroom went quiet. Rhain was a warm wall at my shoulder, two Crimson Hollow guards behind him. Mira pressed herself against the far corner like a spider that had run out of web.

Kael's throat worked. The black veins there pulsed, climbing toward his jaw in slow, oily threads. Blood Rot. I'd seen it kill grown warriors in a single night.

"Healer." He tried again, softer. "Please. It burns."

"I know it burns." My voice didn't shake. That surprised me more than anything. "I know exactly how it burns, Kael. You watched me burn for three winters."

His eyes closed.

"Look at me," I said.

He opened them.

"Not like that. Like I'm a person. Like I'm the woman you swore the Moon to, before you unswore her in front of your whole pack."

A sound tore out of him. Not a word. Something lower, wounded.

Rhain shifted, just enough to remind the room he was there. "Speak, Voss. Or die quiet. The healer doesn't owe you either."

Kael's hands fisted against the silver. Smoke hissed where the metal met his wrists. He didn't pull away from it. I wondered if he was using the pain to stay conscious, or to punish himself. Both, maybe.

"Unchain me," he rasped at the guards. "I won't beg from a floor."

"Yes," I said. "You will."

Every head turned.

I stepped closer. Close enough to see the sweat along his hairline, the gray under his tan. Close enough that the silver crescent over my heart began to hum, the way it did whenever death leaned into a room.

"You will beg from the floor, Kael Voss, because the floor is where you sent me. In front of every warrior who called me your mate. In front of the priestess who smiled while you did it." My breath hitched once. I hated that it hitched. "You want my hands on you? Then put yourself where you put me."

Mira made a small, furious noise. "You can't speak to an Alpha like—"

"Mira." Rhain didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "One more word and my guards escort you to a cell. Your cousin is not Alpha of anything tonight."

She swallowed the rest.

Kael stared at me. The black at his throat jumped another inch. His pupils were already blowing wide with the fever that came right before the rot took the heart.

He had maybe minutes.

He knew it. I knew it. The whole room knew it.

"Guards," he said. His voice shook. "Unlock the cuffs."

They looked at Rhain. Rhain looked at me.

I nodded, once.

The silver clicked open. Kael's arms dropped. For a second I thought he'd fall on his face, and a small, ugly part of me wanted it. Then he braced one palm on the stone, dragged himself forward, and went down on both knees in front of me.

Not the half-kneel a warrior gives his Alpha. The full one. Forehead almost to the floor.

"Elara Seren," he said, and the name broke in his mouth like he hadn't been allowed to say it in months. "I rejected you in front of my pack. I let them throw you into the snow. I believed a lie because believing it was easier than believing I'd chosen wrong." He dragged in air. "I watched you walk into the storm and I did nothing. That is what I did. I am saying it. In front of witnesses. In front of you."

The silver crescent on my chest burned hot enough to sting.

"Say the rest," I whispered.

His shoulders shook.

"I don't deserve your hands."

"No," I said. "You don't."

I knelt anyway.

Not for him. For the girl I used to be, who still lived somewhere in my ribs and would never forgive me if I let a man die at my feet just because he'd earned it.

I pressed two fingers to the hollow of his throat, right over the worst of the black. My crescent flared. Light poured out of my skin in a thin silver thread, sinking into him like water into cracked earth.

He gasped.

I felt the Rot recoil. Felt it curl back from his heart, hissing, furious. I wasn't pulling it out. I wasn't cleansing him. I was just holding it at the door.

"This is all you get," I told him, quiet enough that only he could hear. "Enough to keep you breathing. Not enough to make you whole. You want to be whole again, Kael, you earn it. One truth at a time."

His eyes were wet. "Elara—"

"Don't." I pulled my hand back.

And that was when I saw it.

A single drop of my blood had welled up where the silver in his cuff had nicked my knuckle. It slid off my finger. It landed on the bare skin just under his ribs, where his shirt had torn.

The blood hissed.

Not like water on a hot stone. Like acid. Like something alive meeting something it hated.

Kael jerked. A line of silver light bloomed under his skin, right where my blood had touched. Thin. Curling. A sigil I'd seen only once in my life, in the oldest book in my mother's chest, the one she'd made me swear never to open again.

A priestess binding mark.

Hidden. Branded into the ribs of the Alpha of Shadowfang Pack, under his own skin, where no mate, no healer, no wolf would ever find it without Moonsinger blood to light it up.

My mouth went dry.

Rhain saw my face. "Elara. What is it."

I couldn't speak.

Kael looked down at his own ribs. At the glowing sigil pulsing there like a second heart.

"What," he breathed, "is that."

The sickroom door slammed open behind us.

High Priestess Seraphine stood in the frame, white robes, calm smile, eyes fixed on the light under Kael's skin.

"Oh, child," she said softly. "You weren't supposed to see that yet."

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