The Alpha's Rejected Healer

Chapter 6 — The Order in His Blood

The wax seal felt warm under my thumb.

Too warm.

Kael's crest, a snarling wolf inside a crescent, pressed into crimson wax that pulsed faintly, like it still had a heartbeat of its own. My fingers wouldn't stop shaking. The parchment in my lap weighed more than stone.

Forty-eight hours.

That was what the Shadowfang messenger had said before Rhain's warriors marched him back to the gate. Forty-eight hours to return to the mate who had stripped my name in front of his entire pack and thrown me into a blizzard to die.

"Elara."

Rhain's voice. Quiet. Closer than I expected.

I looked up. He stood at the edge of the healing room, arms folded, his grey eyes fixed on me with that steady, unreadable weight he carried everywhere.

"You don't have to open it," he said.

"I know."

"You don't have to go."

"I know that too."

But my hand kept trembling, and he saw it.

He crossed the room in three strides and knelt. Not near me. In front of me. An Alpha on one knee in his own territory, eye-level with a rejected, shivering healer in a borrowed cloak.

"Elara Seren." His voice dropped into something formal, something ancient. "By the Moon and the roots of Crimson Hollow, I offer you sanctuary. My walls are your walls. My warriors are your warriors. No Alpha crosses this border to take you. Not while I draw breath."

I forgot how to breathe.

Nobody had ever stood between me and Kael before. Nobody had ever stood between me and anything.

"Rhain…" My throat closed. "You don't know what you're promising."

"I know exactly what I'm promising." His jaw set. "Say yes, and Shadowfang can burn their scroll."

I wanted to. Moon help me, I wanted to say yes so badly my ribs ached.

But the wax was still warm against my palm, and something inside it was… calling.

"I have to read it first," I whispered.

His eyes darkened. "Elara."

"If I don't know what he wants, I'll spend the rest of my life flinching at shadows." I swallowed. "Let me see. Then I'll answer you."

A long pause. Then he nodded once, stood, and stepped back. Not far. Just enough.

I turned the scroll over in my lap.

And that's when I noticed the thing that made my stomach drop.

The messenger. Before Rhain's warriors dragged him out, he'd leaned forward, all sweat and panic under his hood, and muttered something only I was close enough to catch.

*He doesn't want you back for love, healer. He wants you back because something's wrong. Something at the Moonstone altar. Something in his blood.*

I'd thought he was trying to twist the knife.

Now, staring at the pulsing seal, I wasn't so sure.

I slid my thumbnail under the wax.

It split with a soft, wet sound. Not dry. Not old.

Fresh.

The parchment unrolled across my knees, and the letters on it weren't black. They were dark, dark red, the color of rust and pomegranate and something deeper. Ink mixed with blood. Alpha blood. Kael's blood, signed into every stroke the way old bindings used to be signed, the way vows were carved in the days before paper.

I hadn't even read a word yet.

The mark under my collarbone flared.

A white-hot sting, sharp as a blade, right over my heart. I gasped and pressed a hand to my chest. Beneath my shirt, the silver crescent was burning, actually burning, and through the fabric I could see it glowing faintly, pulsing in the exact rhythm of the wax seal.

"Elara." Rhain was at my side in a heartbeat. "What is it? What's it doing?"

"It's reacting to him," I breathed.

"To Kael?"

"To his blood." I stared at the parchment. The red ink was moving. Not flowing, exactly. Lifting. Tiny threads of it rose from the page toward my crescent like filings toward a lodestone. "Rhain. It's pulling toward the mark."

He reached for the scroll. "Give it to me."

"No." I caught his wrist. "Don't touch it. It's bound to Alpha blood and mate-thread. If you break it, I don't know what it does to him, or to me."

His pulse hammered against my fingers. I let go fast.

"Read it, then," he said, hoarse. "Fast."

I looked down.

*Elara,* it began, in a hand I knew too well. I'd seen it on pack ledgers, on training orders, on the rejection decree itself. My stomach turned.

*I know what I did. I know what I said. I have no right to ask.*

*I am asking anyway.*

*Come home.*

*The Moonstone altar has gone dark. Three warriors are dead in their beds with black veins up their throats. Seraphine says it is contained.*

It is not contained.

I stopped breathing.

I am writing this in my own blood because the pack scribes cannot know. Mira cannot know. If this letter reaches anyone but you, I am already dead. The mark on your chest was never wolfless, Elara. It was Moonsinger. I was told it was a curse. I know now I was lied to.

The ink trembled on the page. My crescent pulsed harder. Something inside me, something I'd spent six years crushing down, answered it with a low, aching hum.

Come home. Not as my mate. Not as anything. Come as a healer.

Because the Blood Rot is already inside me.

I can feel it climbing toward my heart.

The scroll slipped from my numb fingers.

Rhain caught it before it hit the floor. He read the last line. I watched his face turn to stone.

"Elara." Low. Dangerous. "Breathe."

I couldn't.

Because I could still feel Kael's blood pulling at my mark across two territories and a mountain of snow, and under the terror and the fury and the grief, one horrifying, traitorous truth was rising in my chest like a tide.

The bond wasn't broken.

He'd rejected me with his mouth.

But his blood had never let me go.

And somewhere, at that exact moment, a fist began pounding on the doors of Rhain's great hall, and a voice I knew far too well screamed my name through the wood.

Mira's voice.