To heal a Rogue

LYSANDER

The rage had barely settled in my chest from seeing her in fucking chains when I noticed it.

The gash at her temple, the one that Sentinel’s rifle had left, the one I’d watched them clean with my own hands in that infirmary, was gone.

Not scarred over or maybe even the tell that it was still healing. It was gone, as if it had never happened at all.

My eyebrow rose before I could stop it.

I forced my attention back to the words the elders had drilled into me, my voice carrying out over the crowd as I laid out the fate they’d decided for her. Still, underneath the performance my mind kept circling back to that missing wound, worrying at it the way a tongue worries a loose tooth.

She was an Omega. She’d told me that herself, in the corridor, her voice flat with old resignation. That alone did nothing to explain plenty. What it did explain was that it was the reason half the rogue population existed at all, Omegas fleeing packs that treated them as barely more than furniture.

But an Omega healed slowly, even slower than any other designation, no faster, no better. No version of ordinary biology closed a wound that size in the space of an afternoon.

My mind kept dragging me backward through everything she’d told me since that stairwell.

Like her mother being murdered by my late father’s now dead Beta. I’d assumed it was punishment for some broken rule, some infraction against Lily of the Valley’s then rigid order. But what if it hadn’t been about rules at all? What if it had been about something else entirely, something her mother had died protecting.

Bonnie had survived. She’d run, young enough that survival alone should have been remarkable, let alone escape.

My thoughts snagged hard on the one obsession that had apparently outlived my own father, carried across his entire life and into whatever conversation he’d had with me in his room when I had decided to take his life to protect someone I deeply cared about. Healers. The healers from the age of legend, the ones practically wiped from existence generations ago, spoken of now mostly in myth and warning.

Johann’s words came back to me too, unbidden. The reason half this court couldn’t trust Bonnie’s story. The simple, glaring fact that she had walked out of that library alive when a King twice her strength had not.

I looked out across the crowd, toward Fia, some question forming in the back of my mind as I finished the sentencing. The word had not even settled before my dear cousin, Johann’s voice, cut through everything, dropping his poison into the room.

”...Death does not frighten her. Neither, I suspect, does this.” He let his gaze drag slowly over me, deliberate and cruel. ”I believe she should be humiliated here. Stripped and taken like the breeder she is, right now, to send a proper message.”

He wanted her assaulted publicly, wanted the show of it, and his grandfather rose to back him, and I filed that away with cold, deliberate precision. Once this settled, I intended to demand an oath from Johann.

A DNA test alongside it, something undeniable enough to strip whatever claim he still imagined he held to that throne, bastard or not.

I was done being patient with him.

Then a man stood up near the middle of the hall, and something in his stillness, in the deliberate calm of his voice, made every instinct in me sharpen at once.

”Comrade,” he said. ”I would never let a fate worse than death befall you. For us rogues, you will be a martyr. You deserve a kinder end.”

His hand slid toward his pocket, and I almost tasted bloodlust.

I felt it before I fully understood what I was looking at.

Some primal recognition firing through me faster than conscious thought could keep up.

I moved.

I didn’t think about how it looked, didn’t think about the elders or the crowd or the crown that would soon be balanced precariously on my shoulders. I thought only of getting my body between hers and whatever was about to happen. The metal flashed. The bang cracked out loud enough to shatter the stillness of the entire hall.

I made it in time to save her.

I did not make it in time to save myself.

Pain exploded through my throat, hot and total, stealing the air right out of my lungs before I even registered falling. The floor came up hard beneath me.

I heard her scream my name.

Hell, Bonnie was there almost instantly, scrambling across the stone, chains dragging loud against the floor, and the look on her face would have earned a smile out of me on any other night.

She’d been so guarded since the moment I dragged her out of that cell, careful and cold in all the ways that made sense given everything she’d survived. But there was nothing guarded in her face now. Just raw, unguarded terror, entirely for me.

I told myself I would be fine. I’d survived worse than this. It felt like a foolish thing to cling to even as I thought it, given that my vision had already started swimming at the edges and my back was growing slick and warm against the stone beneath me.

I wanted to say something. Something to calm her, something to keep that terror from tipping over into whatever came next. I couldn’t find the words. My throat wouldn’t cooperate, wouldn’t do anything except leak heat down the front of my ruined collar.

Screaming surrounded us, layered and chaotic, and beneath all of it I felt something move through the bond, sharp and unmistakable.

Determination.

I wasn’t certain my earlier suspicion had been right, that word healer sitting strange and enormous in my mind, but there was something in her eyes now that left no real room for doubt.

I can save you. That was what her whole face said, clear as if she’d spoken it aloud.

I reached for her hand and forced a whisper past what was left of my throat.

”No.”

She didn’t listen.

That terrified me more than the bullet had. I hadn’t lived through the era when healers still existed openly, but I’d heard enough, absorbed enough secondhand horror from old stories and older grudges, to know exactly what happened to people who could do what she was apparently about to do, in front of an audience this large, this powerful, this hungry for anything that strengthened their standing.

My own father had been one of those.