To heal a Rogue

LYSANDER

The way she recoiled, stumbling backward as if I had struck her, told me everything I needed to know. Words might lie or withhold, but her body betrayed the truth she could not bring herself to say. That sharp flinch, the way color drained from her cheeks at the idea that I might have figured it out... figured her out.

I had.

”When?” I asked, my voice gentler than I intended, weighted with something like dread. The question hung in the air, heavy with the knowledge that whatever answer she gave would change the ground beneath both our feet.

”I just said I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her denial was instinctive, but the crack in her voice made it brittle.

”You can tell me,” I said evenly, ”or I can find out on my own. Given who I am about to become tonight, that second option will not take long.”

She barked a short, humorless laugh, the kind that sounded more like a wound than amusement. The sound of it scraped across something in me I did not know was still raw.

”I was an Omega,” she said, her words clipped and tired. ”Back in Lily of the Valley. The usual runt, the one no one bothers to remember. I would not have mattered to anyone who kept records.”

”If you were there while my father was alive,” I replied, ”then you are on a list somewhere. He documented everything. Everyone.” I did not mean for the words to sound like an accusation, but they landed that way all the same.

She let out a long breath, her shoulders sagging beneath the weight of memory. For a moment, she looked years younger, as if the fight had drained out of her bones. ”It was a long time ago,” she said quietly. ”I was probably nine or less when I ran.”

”With your mother?”

”She was already dead by the time I ran.” The words fell flat. It felt like something practiced after years of silent repetition, worn smooth by the habit of keeping pain close but invisible. ”I hid in the territory for a few days after. I was terrified I would be caught with all the sentinels patrolling, that what happened to her would happen to me, too. But I got out. Eventually.”

Her words faded, and the space between us grew dense with things left unsaid. I studied her posture... the way she folded her arms protectively across her middle, with her body angled as if she might ward off the past by sheer force of will. There was a fragility in the way she held herself, but also a kind of battered resilience, as though she had learned over time that survival sometimes meant holding every piece of yourself together with nothing but memory and the refusal to collapse. I felt the urge to reach for her, to bridge the gap with touch or gentle reassurance, but I hesitated. The distance between us was not only physical; it was thick with the accumulated weight of history, regret, and the restless presence of all that could not be undone.

A chill crept into my chest at the mention of her mother, a heaviness settling there as I considered the legacy of grief and violence we both carried. It was a coldness that had nothing to do with the air in this closed space and everything to do with the realization that the tragedies shaping us were not simply our own, but inherited from those who had walked these halls before us. The echo of her loss reverberated in the quiet, making the corridor itself feel haunted.

I found myself thinking of the words that had slipped from my mouth minutes before.

Sometimes what is cruel is necessary.

My father’s wisdom, or at least his rationale, handed down like a family relic, polished smooth by repetition and wielded as justification for every hard choice. I had not realized until she called me out how deeply that phrase had embedded itself in me, how easily I had let it become my own, how insidiously a parent’s logic can take root in the child who heard it often enough.

In her eyes, I saw the sting of that inheritance, and I wondered, not for the first time, whether any of us ever truly escape the patterns set for us by those who came before.

I didn’t want to ask the next question. But I asked it anyway.

”Did my father kill your mother?”

”It wasn’t him,” she said. ”Not directly. But it was done in his name, so it might as well have been his own hands doing it.” She wrapped her arms around herself, a small, unconscious gesture that made her look younger than she was. ”It was his Beta.”

”Beta Casimir,” I said, the name settling heavy in my mouth.

She didn’t confirm it, but she didn’t need to. Her silence did that for her.

”The Beta line in Lily of the Valley has been compromised for years,” I said. ”My father’s Beta died some time ago. No heir stepped forward to claim the position, not properly.”

I didn’t tell her the rest of it. That the current line waiting in the wings belonged to a child born specifically to preserve a bloodline that had nearly gone extinct. A boy destined for a role that would likely tangle itself around whatever children I eventually had of my own. It felt irrelevant standing here, watching her come apart in a corridor that smelled like old stone and older grief.

”Did he really die?” she said. ”Casimir?”

”My father hired both a Delicate and a healer to determine what happened to him,” I said. ”Both came back with the same answer. He perished.” I paused. ”I’m... I’m... sorry.”

”Well,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, quick and rough, like she resented the tears for showing up at all, ”that’s part of the reason I became a rogue in the first place. I never felt safe in Lily of the Valley. Never truly felt safe here either, if I’m being honest. But it worked. It paid well.” Her voice cracked slightly. ”The others, though... The people I worked alongside here. This was their home. Their family. And now they’re going to suffer and die because of me. People are going to suffer and die because of me again.”

She scrubbed at her face one more time and steadied her breathing, forcing something calm back into her features that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

”But I understand,” she said. ”Some things just have to happen. That’s the way of the world.”

I reached for her, some instinct in me wanting to close the distance, to offer something with my hands since my mouth had nothing useful left to give her. I stopped myself halfway, my arm hanging awkward and unfinished in the space between us.

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to fix it, wanted to hand her something that would undo all her pain entirely, but there was no version of a fantasy that could give her that, and I refused to insult her with an empty one.

”Trouble in paradise, cousin?”

The voice came from behind me, light and mocking, entirely too pleased with itself.

I turned and found Johann standing at the mouth of the corridor, arms crossed, an expression on his face that looked almost cheerful, which on any other day, in any other context, would have been the single most alarming thing about him.