To heal a Rogue

BONNIE

My body moved before my thoughts could form a single command. The need for escape took over, raw and primal, the same drive that had propelled me out of Lily of the Valley many years before, the same animal instinct that had kept me alive when logic or hope would have failed. I did not know where I was going—only that I needed air, space, and the illusion of safety, if only for a moment.

Bare feet smacked against cold stone, the corridor tilting and thickening at the edges, and in the echo behind me, I could still hear Ryker’s voice, ragged and furious as it ricocheted off the walls. The word monster lingered in the air, heavy and poisonous, refusing to dissipate.

”All retainers will suffer for your crimes.”

I had learned long ago to accept threats when they were aimed at me; there was a cold comfort in knowing where the danger landed. But it was the rest of it—the collateral damage, the punishment for proximity—that scraped something vital raw inside my chest. These were people who had offered me scraps of kindness without knowing how much it cost them. They had shared their bread, their stories, and their exhaustion, letting me slip unnoticed into the quiet rhythm of their days. They had not deserved this, and yet their only mistake had been to exist within my orbit. Now, for having done nothing more than stand near me, they would pay a price I could not bear to imagine.

Because I was a liar. A deceiver. An abomination.

I rounded a corner, lungs seizing with panic, every breath shallow and frantic. The air felt thin, barely there, as if the world itself had shrunk to a narrow, suffocating tunnel. I glanced down, not quite conscious of the movement, and caught the flicker of red in my palms.

It was nothing like the cool blue that sometimes shimmered there when I healed—a rare and almost gentle occurrence. This red was something else entirely, a hungry, pulsing light that seemed to feed on itself, alive with a ferocity that frightened me. I froze, rooted in the middle of the corridor, heart pounding, skin gone ice cold even as a feverish heat crawled up the back of my throat.

Why now? Why after years of nothing but blue, after so much careful distance, had this come back to claim me?

I remembered the last time. I’d buried that memory so deep I’d almost convinced myself it hadn’t happened at all, but it came back now in pieces, sharp and unwelcome. The cell. The Beta crouched in front of me, smiling like I was an interesting problem rather than a child. My mother’s blood on the floor. The room going red at the edges until it swallowed everything, and when my eyes opened again, there had been nothing left. Not the Beta. Not his sentinels. Just me, kneeling in cold silence, surrounded by an absence I had never been able to properly explain, even to myself.

They hadn’t come back. Not one of them. Ever.

I didn’t know what that meant. I still don’t, not really. But some deep, animal part of me understood it as a warning, and that warning was screaming at me now, louder than the panic already tearing through my chest.

”Bonnie!”

Lysander’s voice cut through the corridor behind me, closer than I expected, and I forced my legs to move again, faster this time, even though some distant, rational part of my brain already knew he was faster than me on a good day, and this was nowhere close to a good day.

”Give me space,” I said, or tried to say, the words coming out thin and broken between breaths that weren’t doing their job anymore.

”You are clearly not okay,” he said, his voice closing the distance with every word.

”I said give me space.”

”You did what you did to survive.” His voice had gone steady, even, the tone of a man choosing his words with care even while running. ”But that doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences, Bonnie. At the time, you beat the system. I understand why. But that was also a security threat to my uncle, who, as we all know now, is dead. Who knows what could have walked in behind you while every incompetent one of them was congratulating themselves on how careful they’d been?”

Something in me went very still and very hot at the same time.

I slowed down without deciding to, my whole body flooding with a rage so sudden and complete that it swallowed the panic whole for one blinding second.

”What the fuck did you just say?”

I’d forgotten entirely about my hand. About the flickering red glow still pulsing faint against my skin, about whether he could see it or not, about anything except the sheer, unbelievable audacity of the words that had just come out of his mouth.

He caught up to me in that stalled second and reached out, his hand closing around my wrist.

I don’t know if he meant it as comfort or restraint. Probably some tangled version of both. But the second his fingers closed around my skin, something in my memory snapped wide open, raw and immediate, and I was nine years old again, watching a Beta’s fingers reach for my throat with the same casual, unhurried certainty of cruelty, just before I watched the room fill with red and everyone standing in it suddenly ceased to exist.

”No!” I screamed, jerking my arm hard, trying to wrench myself free of his grip. ”Let go of me!”

I braced for it. For him to flicker and vanish the way they had, dust and shadow scattering across stone, some horrible gap in the world where a person used to stand.

He didn’t vanish.

He stood there, solid and real, his hand still wrapped around my wrist, his face caught somewhere between confusion and alarm, and when I finally forced myself to look down at where our skin touched, there was no red light there at all. My hand had gone still. Whatever had been building beneath my palm had simply stopped, the moment his fingers closed around me, like a candle snuffed out between two fingers.

We stared at each other. His breathing was fast too, I realized, though not from panic. From running.