The Alpha's Rejected Healer

Chapter 7 — A Cure Is Not Forgiveness

The scroll burned cold against my fingers.

Kael's blood. Mixed into the ink. Reacting to my crescent mark like a hand reaching through paper to grip my throat.

*Blood Rot.* The Alpha who threw me into the snow was rotting from the inside out.

"Burn it," I whispered.

My own voice surprised me. Cracked. Mean. A voice I didn't know belonged to me.

Rhain stood very still at the other end of the oak table, firelight sliding along his jaw. He didn't reach for the scroll. He didn't reach for me.

"Is that what you want, Elara?"

I wanted a lot of things.

I wanted Kael on his knees in the snow the way I had been on mine. I wanted Mira's smug smile to c***k. I wanted the memory of my name being struck from the Shadowfang registry to stop echoing in my skull every time I tried to sleep.

I wanted to not feel the hum in my collarbone that said *sick, sick, sick, heal him.*

My hand shook over the parchment. The silver crescent above my heart pulsed once, warm as a heartbeat that wasn't mine.

"My body already answered," I said. "Before I could."

Rhain's eyes softened. He didn't pity me. That was the thing about Rhain Ashford. He looked at me like I was a woman, not a wound.

"A Moonsinger's instinct is not a leash," he said quietly. "You can feel the sickness and still refuse to run to it."

"Tell that to the elders pacing outside your door."

His jaw tightened. So he'd heard them too.

The doors opened before he could answer.

Elder Bryn came in first, ancient and narrow as a blade, flanked by two others whose names I hadn't learned yet. They smelled like cedar smoke and fear.

"Alpha." Bryn didn't bow. "A Shadowfang courier confirms it. Their Alpha is infected. If he dies under our roof's refusal, Shadowfang marches on Crimson Hollow within the month."

"Then let them march," Rhain said.

My stomach dropped.

"Rhain—"

"She is not a cure to be spent," he said, without looking away from Bryn. "She is a guest under my protection. Shadowfang made its choice on the altar stones. They do not get to unmake it because their Alpha coughs blood."

Bryn's eyes cut to me. Old. Tired. Not cruel.

"Child," he said. "There is a farmer in our east holding. Second case this week. His daughter is eleven."

The crescent mark flared.

I was already standing.

---

The cottage smelled like iron and wet wool.

The farmer lay on a pallet by the hearth, lips grey, black veins crawling up from his wrist like ivy looking for sun. His daughter sat on the floor holding his other hand. She had freckles. She had her father's mouth.

She looked up at me and didn't say *please.* She just looked.

I knelt.

"What's your name?" I asked her.

"Nella."

"Nella. I need you to keep holding his hand. Don't let go, even if I look scared. Understand?"

She nodded, solemn as a priestess.

I pushed back my sleeve.

Rhain crouched across from me, silent, steady, his big hand hovering near my shoulder without touching. Ready to catch. Not ready to stop me.

I pressed my palm flat to the farmer's chest, right over the worst of the black.

The crescent mark screamed silver.

Heat poured out of me like I'd opened a vein. Not blood. Something deeper. Something that had a name in the old tongue my grandmother used to hum and I had never learned to spell.

The black veins shuddered. Slowed. Began to retreat toward the bite on his wrist like a tide called home.

Nella gasped.

I locked my jaw and pushed harder.

Somewhere far away my knees started to shake. My vision frayed at the edges, grey fog eating the firelight. I tasted copper. I tasted moonlight. I tasted the snow Kael had left me in.

*Not him. This one. This father. This Nella.*

The rot broke.

It hissed out of the bite in a thin black steam and the farmer drew a ragged, whole breath, and Nella started crying without making any sound, and I—

I tipped sideways.

Rhain caught me before I hit the floor.

"I've got you," he said, low, right at my temple. "I've got you, Elara, breathe, breathe with me—"

I couldn't feel my hands.

"Is he—"

"He's alive. You did it. Breathe."

The cottage tilted. My crescent mark was cold now, cold as the Moonstone altar, and the place behind my ribs where the power had lived felt scraped raw.

"It costs," I whispered. "Rhain. It costs me. Every time."

His arm tightened around my back.

"I know."

"No one told me it costs."

"I know, little healer. I know."

---

He carried me back through the snow.

I didn't let him. I walked. I walked because if I let him carry me I would cry, and if I cried once for the right reasons I would cry for all the wrong ones too, and I wasn't ready to cry over Kael Voss in front of a man who deserved better than to witness it.

Rhain matched my pace. Didn't speak. Didn't push.

At the keep's door he finally said it.

"You can choose mercy without choosing surrender, Elara. Healing him is not crawling back to him. Saying no is not murder. Whatever you decide, it is yours. Not the elders'. Not mine. Not his."

I looked up at him. Snow caught in his dark lashes.

"And if my saying no kills him?"

"Then he dies of what he did," Rhain said, "not of what you are."

My throat closed.

I was still trying to find an answer when the raven came.

It dropped out of the black sky like a stone, skidded on the icy step, righted itself with a furious shake of oil-dark feathers. Shadowfang sigil. Kael's personal seal, cracked and hasty, pressed crooked into the wax.

My fingers wouldn't obey. Rhain broke the seal for me.

One line. No signature. Just the scrawl I'd spent two years learning to read across council tables and love letters and, finally, a notice of rejection.

My knees nearly gave out a second time.

Four words, in Kael Voss's own unsteady hand.

I am dying. Please.

---