The Alpha's Rejected Healer

Chapter 13 — Mira's Smile Cracks

The goblet hit the floor before I understood what was happening.

Kael was on his knees, one hand at his throat, the other gripping the edge of the high table. Wine pooled near his boot like blood.

"Poison," someone shouted.

And then every head in the great hall turned to me.

I was standing ten feet away, still holding the tray of healing tinctures Rhain had let me bring as a peace offering. My fingers went cold around the glass.

"Her." Mira's voice cut through the shouting. "It was her. I saw her add something."

"I didn't touch his cup."

"She's lying." Mira stepped forward, and tears, real-looking tears, slid down her perfect cheeks. "I warned you, Kael. I warned you she came back for revenge."

Two guards crossed the hall toward me. Rhain moved faster. He was at my shoulder before their boots finished the second step, a low growl building in his chest that made the nearest warrior stop mid-stride.

"Touch her," Rhain said, "and Crimson Hollow leaves with a war on its back."

"Stand down." Kael's voice was ragged, but it was still an Alpha's voice, and the guards froze. He dragged himself upright against the table. Sweat shone at his temples. His pupils were blown wide, too wide. "No one moves. No one."

I could see it on him. The slow bloom under the skin. Wolfsbane, cut with something darker. Not enough to kill an Alpha quickly. Enough to make him suffer for three days and beg for it to end.

I'd read about that blend. In my mother's book.

My stomach turned.

"I want a public test," I said.

Every eye swung back to me.

"What?" Mira breathed.

"A public test." I set the tray down carefully, because my hands were shaking and I would not let them see it. "You say I poisoned him. I say I didn't. A Moonsinger can trace a poison back to the vessel that carried it. Let me prove where it came from."

"She's stalling." Mira's laugh was bright and brittle. "She'll fake something. She'll use her so-called gift to trick you all."

"Then you have nothing to fear." I met her eyes. "Unless you do."

Her smile cracked.

Just for a second. Just at one corner. But I saw it, and so did Rhain, because his hand settled, warm and steady, at the small of my back.

"Do it," Kael rasped.

"Kael, no, she'll—"

"Do it, Mira."

The hall went silent.

I walked to the table. My legs felt like someone else's. I knelt beside the spilled goblet and pressed two fingers into the wine-soaked wood.

The mark under my collarbone began to burn.

I hadn't called the light in front of this many Shadowfang wolves since the night Kael threw me out. My skin remembered. My blood remembered. Silver crept along my fingertips, faint as breath on glass, and the stain on the wood shivered and lifted, a thin pale thread of something that should not have been there.

Gasps. A child crying somewhere near the back.

I closed my eyes and let the thread pull me.

It tugged me across the floor. Past the guards. Past the hearth.

Past Kael.

Straight to Mira.

I opened my eyes. The silver thread was winding up her skirt like ivy, curling around a small glass vial tucked into the embroidered pocket at her hip. The perfume vial she never went anywhere without. The one she'd pressed to her throat at court three days ago and laughed about being a gift from a suitor.

"Empty your pocket," I said.

"How dare you—"

"Empty it." Kael's voice had gone quiet in that way that made grown warriors kneel. "Now, cousin."

Her hand shook as she drew it out.

The vial caught the torchlight. Even from across the table I could smell it, now that I was listening. Sweet floral top note. Underneath, that faint rotten sweetness I knew from my mother's notes. Monkshood tincture, aged in silver. A poisoner's signature, not a healer's.

"That isn't mine," Mira whispered. "She planted it. She must have—"

"It has your crest on the stopper," someone said from the crowd.

The silence that followed was the kind that chews at a pack from the inside.

Kael's eyes, fever-bright, fixed on me, and something broke open in his face. Guilt. Grief. An apology he hadn't earned the right to speak.

"Elara—"

One of Mira's guards lunged.

I didn't see him start; I felt Rhain shove me sideways and heard the snap of a blade meeting something. But it was Kael who caught me. Kael who put himself between me and the steel. Kael whose arm locked around my waist and whose chest I was suddenly pressed against, his heart hammering wrong under my ear from the poison.

For one breath I was seventeen again, and he smelled like pine and home, and the mate-bond we'd never finished flared up through my skin like a struck match.

I tore away from him.

"Don't." My voice shook. "Don't touch me, Kael. You don't get to do that anymore."

He looked at me like I had put the blade in him myself.

I turned my back on him, because if I looked one second longer I was going to break, and I had not survived the snow to break in his hall.

"Bind her," Kael said hoarsely, behind me. I heard chains. I heard Mira begin to sob, loud and theatrical, and then, abruptly, stop.

Because she had seen something in my face as I walked past her.

She leaned in as the guards closed her wrists in iron. Her breath was warm against my cheek, and her tears were already drying.

"She begged, you know," Mira whispered, smiling again, smiling properly now. "Your mother. At the end. On the Moonstone altar. She begged, and Seraphine laughed, and I was there, Elara. I was the one who held the knife."

The hall tilted.

And Mira's guard, the one Rhain hadn't reached, lifted a second vial from his belt, uncorked it with his teeth, and threw the contents straight at my face.

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