To heal a Rogue

EDELINA

Sterling filled the doorway as if he owned the very air, broad and unhurried, carrying himself like the room should thank him for his presence. The healer slipped past, bowing low and whispering about leaving us alone, and then the door clicked shut, sealing us in with nothing but the sharp tang of antiseptic and the stale scent of old fear.

His gaze swept the room before it ever found me, as if the walls themselves might offer answers I could not.

”What happened to the great infirmary?” he said. ”I heard through the grapevine you were tucked away here in some backwater hospice. If I’m being generous and calling it civilization at all.” He shook his head slowly, taking in the plain walls, the single monitor, the absence of anything that looked like it belonged to royalty. ”I could not believe my ears. And then your husband dies.” He spread his hands. ”What in the goddess’s name is happening, Edelina?”

”As you can see,” I said, ”my curse is progressing rapidly.”

”That did not answer a single one of my questions.”

I held his gaze for a long, unbroken moment. There was never a gentle way into these things, and I had never wasted time pretending otherwise.

”Sterling,” I said. ”Cornelius found out I’m a Lycan.”

His eyes flew wide, so theatrically I nearly laughed, if not for the cold dread lurking beneath it all.

”What the fuck,” he said. ”Why would you not tell me that immediately? Do you understand what that implicates for me?”

”Calm down.”

”Do not tell me to calm down.”

”If he wanted you dead,” I said, keeping my voice level even as his rose, ”he had weeks to do it.” I let that settle before I gave him the rest of it. ”And he didn’t. So maybe he forgave you.”

Sterling stared at me as if I had suddenly started speaking in a tongue he could not hope to understand.

”Goddess,” he said. ”In what world does a werewolf, especially an Alpha King, forgive and forget something like that?”

”Does it matter?” I said. ”He’s dead now.”

Something flickered behind his eyes, quick and razor-sharp, the instinctive calculation of a man who had survived by reading danger before it ever announced itself.

”You did it,” he said. ”Didn’t you?”

”Are you asking me questions you already have the answers to?”

He let out a long, slow breath through his nose and sank into the chair beside my bed, claiming the space without waiting for permission.

”What is the game plan, Edelina?”

”I was tired.” The words came out simpler than I expected them to, worn thin from repeating them to myself in the dark for weeks. ”I could have played the long game. I have played long games my entire life, Sterling, you know that better than most men alive. But Conny found out, and once he found out, it was only ever a matter of time before the whole thing came apart at the seams.” I looked down at my hands, at the faint tremor that lived in them now permanently. ”I’m dying. You know that. And Johann is going to start feeling the pull of the curse soon enough. You know the males suffer worse than we women do, and faster.” I looked up and met his eyes squarely. ”I am so close, Sterling. Closer than any of my bloodline has come in generations. I will not start over. I refuse.”

”So, keep looking at me like an ally,” I said before he could argue, ”instead of looking at me like I’m something to be afraid of. You should be rejoicing with me right now.”

”I cannot rejoice.” His jaw worked, the muscle in it flexing hard enough that I could see it from where I sat. ”If Cornelius knew what you were three weeks before you did what you did, why wouldn’t he have arrested me? Confronted me, even once for pretending that you were my daughter? There was nothing. Not a single word to my face in all that time or consequence.”

”He could have exposed me,” I said. ”I was a Lycan wearing a Luna’s crown for many years. He could have killed me right there in that infirmary the moment his healers confirmed it. Ended his own hybrid son’s life along with mine.” I felt something bitter climb up the back of my throat, old and familiar. ”Instead he shipped me here to die quietly, where no one important would ask questions. Told our son nothing until I had to sit him down myself and spill every last secret I’ve been carrying since before he was born.” I paused, watching Sterling’s face. ”Do you know why, Sterling?”

”Why?” he said, though it came out flat, like he already suspected the shape of my answer and hated it in advance.

”Because of his own bigotry,” I said. ”His own pride. How exactly was he supposed to acknowledge that Lycans beat him? That after being hunted and forgotten for a thousand years, we finally crawled our way into the highest werewolf seat in this territory and sat there smiling at his side for three decades? That I even gave him a son, a real heir, and he never once suspected a thing until his own healers dragged it out of my blood?” My voice had climbed without my permission, and I let it. ”So he settled for the next best thing available to a proud old man. Erasure. Quiet, tidy erasure, dressed up as mercy.”

”You’re acting on assumption,” Sterling said. ”That’s all this is. Guesswork dressed up as certainty. He has a Beta! Do you know what a Beta is to their Alpha?”

”Who gives a shit?” I said. ”His Beta is currently out of the country.”

”That does not mean he did not know.” Sterling leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and something genuinely afraid moved across his face for the first time since he’d walked through that door. ”The one thing worse than a Lycan sitting on a werewolf throne, Edelina, is a werewolf found allied with one. If word of that gets out before we control the narrative, they will not simply kill me. They will make an example that echoes through every pack in this territory for a fucking hundred years.”

”Sterling,” I said, softer now, ”you are safe. As long as you keep standing at my son’s side moving forward, you will continue to have everything you’ve ever wanted from this arrangement.”

”What is that supposed to mean?”

”It means you should leave here as soon as possible,” I said, ”so you make it back to the castle in time to grieve properly alongside my son. He is going to need you standing next to him tonight, in front of every visiting Alpha and Luna who’s crawled in to grieve as well. And the play he’s about to direct is going to be worth watching unfold.”

”Do not speak to me in riddles, Edelina. Not today.”

I sighed, and a deep weariness settled in my chest, curling up beside the ache that had become my constant companion.

”He will need you there because there is one thing I did not anticipate,” I said, ”before I had Cornelius killed.”

His eyes sharpened, every trace of the earlier fear folding itself into pure, focused attention.

”What?” he asked.

I let the silence spool out, heavy and inevitable, letting it settle between us the way I always did before surrendering something that mattered.

”He changed his heir,” I said. ”Named his nephew instead. Lysander.” I watched the name land on Sterling’s face, watched him work through everything it meant before I finished it for him. ”The son of that bastard Wenzel.”