To heal a Rogue

BONNIE

”The last thing you should be worried about,” he said quietly, ”is a few incapable retainers who weren’t equipped enough to keep a threat away from the King’s side. If it was easy for you to walk into that estate, imagine how easy it would have been for someone far worse. That is a problem with the security, Bonnie. Not with you existing.”

I finally managed to shrug his hand off, my whole body still trembling, my breath still coming in short, useless pulls.

”For a short while,” I said, ”they were my family.” My voice cracked somewhere in the middle of the sentence, and I let it. ”I didn’t intend to hurt anyone. I just wanted a system that worked for me for once. I was uneducated. I couldn’t function in the human world, couldn’t get real work there, no papers, no history, nothing. So I still needed pack structure. I still needed the very thing I was so sure I could just walk away from, needed it to survive long enough to build something. To buy a house someday.” My hands curled into fists at my sides, nails biting into my own palms. ”I was so close. It would have ended so well. I would have just disappeared into some quiet human street and never bothered anyone again.”

”This is why I despise her,” I said, my voice dropping lower, bitter and shaking.

”Who?” he said.

”The goddess.” I looked up at him, my eyes burning, and I didn’t bother hiding how much I meant it. ”I might not be anything special. Maybe she has some kind of vendetta against me specifically, some grudge from before I was even born. She even marked me with this hair, and that is fine. I’ve made peace with that. But what about them? The retainers. The staff. People who never did anything except stand near me. Surely she has to favor them at least. Why would she let my bad luck bleed onto people who never asked for any part of it?”

”Stop saying that,” Lysander said, something sharp entering his voice now. ”Why do you keep saying that? What happened to you that made you this way?”

I realized, too late, that I’d said far more than I meant to.

I shut the bond down immediately, slamming whatever door I could find between us, locking him out with a force that probably felt like a physical wall from his side of it.

”Nothing,” I said. ”It’s nothing.”

”You’re shutting me out again.”

”I’m not obligated to hand you everything.”

”If you want me to actually help you,” he said, ”you have to let me in somehow. I can’t work with half a person, Bonnie. I can’t fix what I can’t see or what you do not want me to see. If you should trust anyone in this world, it should be me. I am your mate.”

”It’s hard to trust you,” I said, my voice fraying at the edges. ”You have no idea the risk I’m taking just standing here talking to you at all in good faith when every rational part of me wants to run for the hills. I am trying. I am pushing past every limit I’ve ever set for myself just to still be having this conversation instead of running. But there are walls I cannot let you cross. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

He didn’t answer right away, and I used the silence to drag in one steady breath, forcing my chest to slow, forcing my hands to stay still and normal and blessedly free of any color at all.

”Please,” I said. ”Do what you can to make sure those people are spared. The retainers. Whoever else gets caught up in this because of what I did. Please.”

”Nobody is going to die,” he said. ”I will make sure of that.” He paused, something in his jaw tightening. ”But there still have to be consequences. You said as much yourself, earlier, when I offered to use the crown to stop them branding you a breeder tonight. You told me not to abuse the position. You told me it wasn’t worth burning the goodwill I’ll need.”

”This is different.” My voice rose again, sharp and desperate now. ”This is so different, Lysander. Please. Bend the law here. Please save them.”

I knew I sounded insane; I knew there was no rationality in the words that I was saying, but I did not give a damn.

I just wanted a way out. The easy way out.

”Sometimes what is cruel is necessary,” he said.

I went still.

The words landed somewhere old and deep, somewhere I hadn’t visited in years, and suddenly I wasn’t standing in a corridor in his uncle’s estate at all. I was standing in the back rooms of Lily of the Valley, watching an Omega get dragged out for some infraction I would never fully understand, watching the way the crowd looked away, the way the punishment was carried out in full view of everyone, specifically so it would be seen.

I remembered asking my mother why. Why it had to be that way, why cruelty got dressed up in ceremony and called justice.

Sometimes what is cruel is what is necessary, she’d told me, her voice flat and resigned in the way of someone repeating a lesson she hadn’t chosen but had learned to survive by anyway. As the Alpha would say, Everyone has a part to play.

My lips parted before I’d fully decided to speak.

”You sound just like your father,” I said.

The words hung there between us, and I watched something shift across Lysander’s face immediately, his eyes going wide, sharp with a kind of alarm I hadn’t expected.

”What?!” he said. ”How would you even know what my father sounded like?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer ready, because the truth had slipped out of some buried place before I’d built the proper wall around it, and now it was simply standing there in the open air between us, impossible to take back.

His eyebrows drew tight, some realization visibly assembling itself behind his eyes, piece by piece, faster than I wanted it to.

He looked back at me, his lips parting slowly.

”Were you Lily of the Valley? Before all of this?”

My skin prickled with a wave of goosebumps so sudden and complete it felt like the temperature in the corridor had dropped ten degrees in a single second. I took three steps back without deciding to, putting distance between us the same way I’d tried to put distance between myself and everything else since I opened that lounge door two nights ago.

”What?” I said, though I heard exactly what he’d asked, and some part of me already knew there was no version of this conversation where I got to walk it back now.