To heal a Rogue

EDELINA

The phone’s warmth lingered in my palm as Johann’s voice cut through again, sharper now, nothing like the boy who once wept at his father’s thunder across the dinner table.

”What do you even want to use the bite for, Mother?” he said. ”You want to give two rogue lowlifes the power to turn people into what we supposedly are, and you do not think you should explain why?”

I pressed the phone harder to my ear and stared at the window, the bleak afternoon light spilling in, useless against the ache burning behind my eyes.

”Because they see themselves in us,” I said.

He went quiet for a beat too long. That silence always meant he was shaping something in his mind before letting me hear its edges.

”Even in their own so-called blessing,” I said slowly, ”there’s a caste system. Lowborns who never shift. No wolf. No power in their veins beyond whatever scraps get handed down. And our curse, twisted as it is, could look like salvation to men and women like that. It is salvation.”

”A way to break something that was never going to bend for them otherwise.” He chipped in.

I let a small, tired smile pull at my mouth even though he couldn’t see it.

”Precisely,” I said. ”You always did understand people faster than your father ever did.”

”Don’t,” he said. ”Not right now.”

I let it slide. Grief always made sons sharper with their mothers. I remembered that lesson from my own life, though memories of my own mother had worn thin, eroded by years and things harsher than grief.

”Then they’d better be ready to die for it,” Johann said, and something in his voice had gone flat and cold in a way that made me sit up straighter against my pillows. ”Before you hand either of them anything permanent, they need to finish what they started.”

”They will. Sacrifice was always necessary for this. You were intended to be the one who would hunt them down for their heads, strengthening yourself when you climbed the throne.”

He ignored that entirely.

”The girl,” he said. ”The one who saw them. She told the room one of them has a scar. Corner of the mouth to the ear. That’s going to be our eventual fall guy, whichever of them it is. But before we get there, I need them to do something first. I need to spread a little poison of my own.”

I sat forward, the blanket sliding off my shoulder, my curiosity sharpening past the exhaustion sitting in my bones.

”What do you have in mind?”

”The scar rogue has to come back,” he said. ”His new objective would be pretending to save her. The rogue.” He exhaled, and I could hear him pacing somewhere, his footsteps hitting some hard floor with a rhythm I recognized from when he was a boy working himself into an idea. ”I make sure he is caught doing it. Caught trying to help her, or caught close enough to her that it looks like they are accomplices indeed. And then I sell it. Fully. That cousin has thrown support behind my father’s killer.”

”Johann—”

”Let me finish.” His voice cracked through the line with an edge that silenced me, the way his father’s used to, the way I’d never expected to hear from my own son this soon. ”Lysander is going to be announced formally this evening. Heir apparent, in front of every visiting Alpha and Luna who’s crawled into this estate to gawk at Father’s corpse. What better way to plant the first seed that he can’t be trusted to lead than to make sure he’s seen opposing his own Elder Circle? Taking the side of the woman who murdered his uncle?” A pause settled, and I could hear the satisfaction settle into it, thick and quiet. ”Given how unnatural Father’s death already looks, a beautiful story writes itself. Grief-stricken cousin, blinded by a mate bond, defying the very elders who crowned him. And I get painted in a much better light for whatever comes after. For the coup that has to happen eventually.”

I sat with his words for a long moment, turning them over as I did with anything anyone gave me, searching for the soft spots, the places that might break under real weight.

”I never doubted you, my boy,” I said finally, and I meant every word of it, even through the tightness climbing up my throat. ”You will have it. Whatever you need from me.”

”Good,” he said, and then, after a beat that felt almost careless, almost like an afterthought, ”also. Your false family. The ones that sold the story that you were a werewolf. Can they be here as well? In case I need strong political figures to stoke things along when evening comes, and everything goes according to plan?”

”I don’t see why not,” I said.

”Hmmm... That will be all then.”

He didn’t say goodbye. He never did anymore. The line simply went dead in my hand, the small click of it landing somewhere under my ribs like something falling out of a high shelf.

I sat there for a moment with the phone still against my ear, listening to nothing, and then I lowered it into my lap and scrolled through my contacts with a thumb that trembled more than it used to.

I found the one marked Father.

I pressed it and listened to it ring. Once. Twice. Three times. Four. It kept ringing in that hollow, patient way that told me exactly what was coming before it came, and then his voicemail picked up, his recorded voice as smooth and unbothered.

”Hey, it’s Sterling. Leave a message after the beep.”

I ended the call before the beep. I did not have it in me to leave a message. Especially not in trying times like these.

I called again anyway.

It rang the same four times. It went to the same recording. I hung up before his voice could finish telling me he wasn’t available, because I already knew that better than anyone.

Something thick and sudden clawed up my throat, the cough building before I could stop it, that awful tightening now as familiar as breath. My fingers fumbled for the tissue box, but my reflexes were too slow, and I barely pressed one to my mouth before the cough ripped out, deep and wet and ugly.

When I pulled the tissue away, there was blood on it. Dark and thick, spread across the white in a pattern I’d stopped being surprised by months ago, though it never once stopped disgusting me.

I stared at it for a moment, then let out a long, slow sigh and let my head sink back into the pillow.

It made me think of Cornelius. For some strange reason, he was at the back of my mind.

”It didn’t have to end like this, Conny,” I said to the empty room, my voice barely above a whisper, meant for no one but myself and whatever remained of a man whom I used to at least pretend to love.

I tossed the tissue into the bin beside the bed and closed my eyes.

A soft knock landed against the door a moment later, careful and deferential, and I opened my eyes to find one of the healers standing just inside the frame, her hands folded in front of her in that posture they all learned before they were allowed anywhere near royal quarters.

”Luna Edelina,” she said. ”Someone is here to see you.”

”Who?” I said, not bothering to lift my head from the pillow.

”He says his name is Alpha Sterling.”

A cold, familiar weight settled in my chest, and I let out a breath through my nose that nearly became a laugh.

”Speak of the devil,” I said under my breath.

The healer blinked at me, unsure whether she’d heard correctly, unsure whether she was meant to respond to that at all.

I pushed myself upright against the pillows, ignoring the ache slicing through my ribs, and let a slow, deliberate smile spread across my face—the kind I had not practiced in decades, because some expressions simply lived in the blood.

”He’s my father,” I said. ”Call him in.”

The healer’s eyes widened slightly, some new understanding rearranging itself behind them, and she bowed low and quick.

”Of course, Luna Edelina,” she said, and then she was gone, her footsteps fading quickly down the corridor, leaving me alone with the metallic taste of blood lingering at the back of my throat as I prepared for Sterling’s unavoidable explosion.