To heal a Rogue

LYSANDER

The tailors moved around me with swatches of fabric fanned out like cards in a dealer’s hand, holding each one up against my shoulder and murmuring to each other in the clipped shorthand of people who’d spent decades perfecting an aesthetic language I had no interest in learning.

”Any preference on color, Alpha Lysander?” the older one asked, holding a bolt of deep navy against my chest.

”I don’t care,” I said. ”Pick whatever you think works.”

He nodded and reached for another swatch, and that was when I noticed Bonnie’s eyes drift toward the fabric table, quick and involuntary, gone again before I could be certain I’d actually seen it.

”You have opinions about the colors,” I said. ”I can tell.”

She looked up from the last of the bread on her plate, startled. ”I didn’t say anything.”

”You didn’t have to.”

I felt it through the bond before she could talk herself out of showing it, some faint discomfort, almost a cringe, at being singled out in a room full of strangers who already looked at her like she was something dangerous wearing a person’s skin. I didn’t particularly care that she was uncomfortable. Not in a cruel way. I simply valued whatever opinion she was hiding more than I valued her comfort in hiding it, and some stubborn part of me wanted to keep chipping away at whatever wall she kept trying to rebuild between us every time I got close enough to touch it.

”I haven’t exactly had the luxury of being a fashion person,” she said, ”considering the life I’ve lived for the last few years.”

”I always assumed women had an eye for this sort of thing,” I said, mostly to see what she’d do with it.

She gave me a flat look that suggested she found the assumption both tired and mildly insulting, which was fair.

The younger tailor held up a bolt of rich purple fabric, turning it toward the light. ”Purple is your color, Alpha Lysander,” he said. ”It sends the right message tonight. And it complements your eyes.”

”Burgundy,” Bonnie said, before I’d even had the chance to respond.

The tailor blinked, clearly gearing up to argue the merits of purple over whatever she’d just proposed, his mouth already opening around the beginning of a polite correction.

”Burgundy it is,” I said, cutting him off before he could finish forming the sentence.

He closed his mouth. He was not impressed. But he also knew it would be foolish to refuse or argue. ”Of course, Alpha Lysander.”

I didn’t look at Bonnie to see her reaction. Not one muscle moved from her face to give anything away. Her mind, however, was a different ballgame.

I felt something small and grudging shift through the bond, something that might have been surprise at being listened to at all. But she did quite a good job hiding it, and when our eyes met, I was certain she wanted to immediately shield me, but decided that doing so would just show how much of an effect I was having on her.

They finished the measurements quickly after that, murmuring about timing, about having something ready an hour before the ceremony began, and the older tailor glanced toward Bonnie mid-sentence and then simply let the thought die unfinished, like he wasn’t entirely sure what role she was meant to play in the evening’s arrangements and didn’t want to be the one to guess wrong out loud.

”Right,” I said, filling the silence before it could stretch too long.

I wanted to pull her out of that room the second the fitting ended, but she was still working through the last of the bread with the focus of someone who hadn’t eaten properly in longer than she’d admit to, so I left her to it and crossed to the window instead.

The estate grounds below were filling fast. Vehicles rolled through the front gates in slow, steady lines, sleek and dark and unmistakably foreign, each one bearing some crest I recognized from years of tedious diplomatic dinners. Visiting Alphas. Visiting Lunas. All of them arriving to mourn a man most of them had genuinely respected, and none of them aware yet of the shape the evening was actually going to take.

My mind drifted back to what Bonnie had told me in the corridor. Beware of the night children. My uncle’s last coherent words, apparently, spent on a line from a rhyme every pup in this territory got taught before they were old enough to understand what any of it meant.

Why would a dying man spend his final breath on a nursery rhyme?

There had to be something underneath it. Some hidden meaning the elders would know and I didn’t, buried under generations of retelling until it had worn down into something soft enough for children. But I wasn’t certain I trusted the elders currently occupying this estate. Not with Johann circling and the Elder Circle already halfway to deciding Bonnie’s fate for their own political convenience.

I pulled out my phone.

It had been buzzing steadily against my hip for the better part of an hour, missed calls stacking up in a way that would have alarmed me on any other day, messages piling in faster than I could be bothered to read them. I scrolled past most of it, searching for one name specifically.

Elder Freya. My own pack’s elder, the one who’d been close to my mother once, back before everything, the one person in Lily of the Valley I actually trusted to give me something honest instead of something politically convenient.

She’d already sent two messages.

I am so sorry for your loss.

And beneath it, the elders of Lily of the Valley would like to request a private meeting, given the news now spreading that you’ve been named heir to the Alpha King’s seat.

I typed back a quick agreement to the second message, then paused, thumb hovering over the screen, before I added the question that actually mattered.

Freya, do you know anything about the hidden meaning behind the childhood rhyme every werewolf gets taught? The one that mentions the night children?

The two checkmarks turned green almost instantly. Then the second message went through as well. A moment later, the little indicator appeared showing she’d started typing.

I watched it for longer than I needed to, my chest tight in a way I didn’t like.

There is no hidden meaning, she wrote. It is one of the first facets of our history as werewolves. It chronicles the love of our Lady Selene, and of course, her punishment of the vile ones who committed atrocities and claimed they did so in her name. The Night children are regarded as the abominations, Lycans.

My blood went cold.

I looked up from the phone and found Bonnie already staring at me, her hand frozen halfway to her mouth, some faint reflection of whatever I was feeling visible on her own face. The bond carried it both ways, apparently. She didn’t need to ask what I’d just read. And even if she could not possibly know, she already felt the shape of it settling into my chest, cold and unwelcome.

I typed back with fingers that weren’t quite steady.

Lycans?

I’d always considered that a myth. A stupid one, the kind parents used to scare pups into behaving, half-forgotten by the time anyone reached adulthood and started taking the actual history seriously. That was exactly why the phrase had been eating at me since the moment Bonnie repeated it to me in the corridor. Why would my uncle, dying, choose to spend his final coherent breath on something that childish? Something that shouldn’t have mattered at all.

Is that not just a stupid myth? I typed.

Freya’s reply came fast.

No. Lycans did exist.

I stared at the word did sitting there on the screen, something settling low and heavy in my stomach.

Did? I typed back.

Yes, she wrote. Did. They are an extinct race now.

I hit the power button on the phone and shoved it back into my pocket, my hand not quite steady, my mind already racing ahead of me toward conclusions I didn’t want to reach.

Extinct. According to every history I’d ever been taught, according to an elder who would know our archives better than most people. And yet my uncle had spent his last breath warning me about them. I wondered... The two masked men who had put a bullet in his chest... Did they have something to do with this?

Rogues...

That had been my working theory since this morning. Disgruntled, unregistered wolves with a grudge against the crown, hired or manipulated into doing something they’d never have managed alone.

But rogues would not invoke the mention of Lycans.

Unless the men who’d killed my uncle weren’t simply rogues acting out of grievance at all.

Unless creatures who were supposedly extinct had somehow survived long enough to walk into my uncle’s library and put a bullet through the heart of a man who’d apparently known exactly what he was dealing with before he died.