To heal a Rogue

BONNNIE

For one long, disjointed second, I genuinely thought he was talking to me the way a person talks to someone they respect. So naturally, the question in my heart was, was this dude talking to me? My brain simply refused to process the shape of what came next fast enough.

He pulled a gun from beneath his jacket and fired.

The world went sideways.

Two shots cracked out in rapid succession, one from my left, one from my right, and several Alphas surged up out of their seats toward the man, and it was only then, in the chaos of bodies scrambling, that I recognized him properly. The scar was gone from the corner of his mouth, but the rest of his face matched the man I’d seen in the library last night, standing over King Cornelius’s body with a gun in his hand.

The bullet meant for me never reached me.

Lysander shoved me hard, his whole body slamming into mine, and I went sprawling sideways across the floor, my shoulder cracking against stone, chains rattling loudly against the ground. I didn’t have time to process the impact before I registered what had happened in the space where I’d been standing.

He hadn’t had time to dodge himself.

I watched the bullet punch through the side of his throat, watched blood erupt outward in a violent spray of crimson that painted the air between us before it hit the floor, watched his body jolt with the impact, his hand flying up to his own neck on instinct even as his legs buckled beneath him.

Everything in me went white and hollow at once.

”Lysander!”

The scream tore out of me before I’d even decided to make a sound, raw and broken, and I scrambled across the floor toward him, chains dragging heavy against stone, my hands shaking too hard to be useful the second I reached him.

Blood poured from his throat in thick, dark waves, soaking into the collar of his burgundy regalia, spreading fast across fabric that had been chosen, hours ago, in a room that suddenly felt like it belonged to another lifetime entirely.

His eyes found mine, glassy, wide, panicked in a way I’d never seen on him before, his mouth working uselessly around sounds that couldn’t form past the wound tearing his throat apart.

”No,” I said, my voice cracking apart entirely. ”No, no, no, stay with me. Stay with me right now.”

Around us, the hall had dissolved into complete chaos, sentinels grappling the shooter to the ground, screams and shouted orders overlapping into something I couldn’t separate into individual voices, Alphas and Lunas scrambling back from their seats in a wave of black fabric and panic.

None of it mattered.

I pressed both hands against the wound at his throat, blood immediately soaking hot and slick between my fingers, and I felt the hum rise in my palms before I’d even consciously called for it, faster and more desperate than it had ever come before.

”Don’t you dare,” I said, my voice shaking violently now, tears blurring everything in front of me. ”Don’t you dare leave me after everything. Not like this. Not because of me.”

His hand found my wrist, weak, trembling, but there, holding on with whatever strength he had left, and somewhere beneath the blood and the panic and the chaos exploding around us, I felt the bond between us pulse once, faint and desperate, still holding, still alive.

I also heard the elders somewhere behind me, screaming for healers, their voices tangled together in a panic that did nothing to speed up time.

There wasn’t time.

I’d seen this bullet before. Felt what it did to my own body in that library, the way it refused to heal the way ordinary wounds healed, the way it sat in the flesh like poison rather than injury. This was the same material that had killed the King, the same slow, deliberate cruelty, and Lysander’s throat was already turning a shade of grey beneath the blood that had nothing to do with the loss of it and everything to do with what the metal and whatever else was in it, itself, was doing to him from the inside.

He had seconds. Maybe less.

My mother’s face flashed behind my eyes, sudden and merciless, the memory of her throat opening under a Beta’s claws while I knelt frozen and useless beside her. I remembered the promise I’d made to myself and to her in that cell, that I would never let my gift be used as leverage, nor show it. That I would rather let someone die in front of me than hand over what I was to people who only wanted me for the blue light that regularly burned in my palms.

And for one single, ugly heartbeat, something dark and small curled up from the bottom of my chest.

If he died, the bond died with him. No more chains. No more mate. No more throne, no more crown, no more court full of strangers deciding what my body was worth in front of an audience.

The thought was gone before it finished forming, burned away by something far louder and far more insistent screaming through every part of me. I didn’t want him gone. I wanted him alive, breathing, arguing with me in some corridor about locks and trust and stupid rhymes, and the wanting was so fierce it frightened me more than the bullet had.

”No,” he said, or tried to, the word barely more than a rasp forced past a ruined throat, his hand tightening weakly around my wrist like he already knew exactly what I was about to do and was trying, with the last of whatever strength he had left, to stop me.

I’d already decided.

The healers wouldn’t make it in time. I could almost hear their footsteps somewhere distant, too far, chaos slowing everyone down, and I was the only thing currently touching him with any hope of doing something about it.

I hadn’t been able to save the King.

I would not fail this one, too.

”Sorry,” I said, and I meant it for more than just this moment, meant it for every wall I’d built and every promise I’d made to keep this part of myself buried and safe.

Then I let go.

Both my hands ignited at once, a blue so violent and bright it swallowed the color out of everything around us, washing over the stone floor, over his ruined throat, over my own trembling fingers until I couldn’t tell where the light ended, and my skin began. The hum inside me didn’t rise gently this time. It tore loose, wild and enormous, more than I had ever called forward in my entire life, more than I even knew I had.

A scream ripped out of me, raw and involuntary, my whole body arching under the force of whatever was moving through me and into him, and somewhere in the blinding wash of light I heard the entire hall go silent around the sound of it.