The Alpha's Rejected Healer

Chapter 11 — The Mark Beneath His Skin

The thing under Kael's ribs was not a wound.

It was a sigil.

Thin as a spider's leg, black as wet ink, drawn in a pattern I had only ever seen sketched in the margins of my mother's oldest books. My blood had lifted it to the surface like oil floating on water.

"Back away from him."

Rhain's voice. Low. Close. His hand settled at the small of my back, not to pull me off, but to remind me I still had a spine of my own.

I did not move.

I could not move.

Because the mark was pulsing. Faint. In time with Kael's breath. And every pulse whispered against my Moonsinger sense like a fingernail dragged down glass.

"Elara." Kael's voice was hoarse, wrecked. "What is it. What did you find."

I lifted my eyes to his. The Alpha who had thrown me into the snow looked up at me from his knees, and for one terrible second I saw the boy I had grown up beside, before the crown, before Mira, before the lie.

"Your Blood Rot," I said, "was not born in you."

His pupils blew wide.

"Someone carved it into you."

A ripple went through the witnesses in the hall. A warrior cursed. Someone dropped a cup, and the clatter sounded like a bell at a funeral.

Mira stepped forward fast. Too fast. "She's lying."

"I'm not finished."

"She's a rejected mate throwing a tantrum in our throne room, Kael, you cannot seriously—"

"Mira." Kael did not look at her. "Quiet."

She went white around the mouth.

I pressed two fingers just above the sigil, careful not to touch it, and traced the air an inch over his skin. The mark tracked my hand. Leaned toward me. Hungry.

"It's a bind-rune," I murmured. "Priestess work. Someone stitched the rot into your ribs and fed it there, slow, so your pack would think the line was cursed. So you would be weak enough to rule through."

"Through who," Kael breathed.

The doors at the far end of the hall opened.

She came in on a draft of incense and candle smoke, as if she had been waiting just behind the threshold for her cue. White robes. Silver at her throat. A string of dark prayer beads wound three times around her wrist.

High Priestess Seraphine.

She smiled at me the way a woman smiles at a child holding a knife.

"Oh, my poor girl."

My stomach folded in on itself.

"Alpha." She moved past me as if I were furniture, knelt gracefully at Kael's side, and laid her palm on his forehead. "Forgive me. I was at the Moonstone altar when I felt the disturbance. What has she done to you."

"She saved his life," Rhain said.

Seraphine's eyes flicked up. Blue. Depthless. Kind the way still water is kind right before you drown in it.

"Alpha Ashford. How generous of Crimson Hollow to concern itself with our domestic griefs." She turned back to Kael. "My lord, this girl has been through unspeakable trauma. Rejection wounds the mind as surely as the body. She sees shadows where there are none. She may even believe what she is saying."

"There is a sigil under his skin," I said.

"There is a bruise, sweet one. From the fall he took when the rot seized him yesterday. I dressed it myself."

"You dressed it."

"With my own hands."

Of course she had.

I looked at the beads on her wrist.

And my Moonsinger sense went cold.

They were not stone. They were not wood. Each dark little sphere had a hairline grain running through it, like frost cracking glass from the inside, and under my gift they hummed. Low. Rotten. A frequency I had felt only once before, in the earth around a plague pit outside my mother's village the winter she died.

Blood Rot.

She was wearing it.

Strung like a rosary.

My face must have changed, because Mira made a small, choked sound at the edge of my vision and took a stumbling step back. Just one step. But I saw it. And Seraphine saw that I saw it.

The High Priestess's smile did not move. Her fingers did. They closed, slow and deliberate, around the beads, hiding them in her fist.

"Alpha Voss," she said gently, "this poor creature is clearly unwell. Let me take her to the temple. A night of moon-water and quiet, and—"

"No."

Kael's voice.

Rough. Certain. The first certain thing I had heard out of him since the snow.

"She stays with me."

"My lord—"

"She stays with Ashford," he corrected, and something in his jaw tightened like a man swallowing glass. "Under his protection. Until I understand what has been done to my body."

Seraphine's knuckles went white around the beads.

"As you wish, Alpha." She rose. Bowed. The incense moved with her like a tame animal. "I will pray for clarity. For all of us."

She glided past me. Close enough that her sleeve brushed mine.

And I felt the beads pull.

Not toward her. Toward me. Toward the silver crescent above my heart, the way one rotten magnet reaches for a clean one.

I kept my face still until the doors closed behind her.

Then my knees nearly went.

Rhain caught my elbow. "Breathe."

"She's the one." My voice did not sound like mine. "Rhain. She's the one who put it in him. The beads, they're—"

"I know. I saw your face."

"Mira knew too. Did you see her step back—"

"I saw."

I turned to find Mira, to pin her where she stood, to drag the truth out of her throat with my teeth if I had to.

She was already gone.

And that was when I felt it.

A warmth against my sternum. Small. Insistent. Heating through the linen of my borrowed shirt like a coal pressed to my skin.

I reached inside my collar with shaking fingers.

My mother's pendant.

The silver crescent she had pressed into my palm the night she died and made me swear I would never take off. It had been cold for eleven years. Cold through every winter, cold through my rejection, cold through the snow.

It was hot now.

And it was pulling.

Not toward Kael. Not toward Seraphine.

West. Down. Through the stone of the floor and the root of the mountain, toward the place I had been f*******n to enter even as a child in this pack.

The temple vault.

The pendant jerked in my hand like a living thing on a line, and somewhere far beneath my feet, something answered it.

Something that had been waiting eleven years for me to come home.

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