Chapter 6: What the Body Doesn't Lie About

Wren POV

The healer's name was Marta. She tended Voss wolves longer than I'd been alive, and she still didn't recognize me until she rolled up my sleeve and went completely still.

"Moon goddess," she muttered, more to herself than to me. "What happened to your arm?"

"Nothing."

"This isn't nothing." Her fingers pressed along an old break near my wrist, one that had healed crooked because nobody ever set it right. "This healed wrong. On purpose or by neglect, I can't tell which yet."

"Does it matter?"

She looked up at me sharp, like the question surprised her. I didn't answer it either way. I just sat there on the edge of the bed, arms out, letting her do her job, the way I learned to let people do things to my body without fighting it. Fighting only ever made it worse.

Damian stood by the door the whole time, arms crossed, jaw tight enough I could hear his teeth grinding from across the room.

"Keep going," he said, when Marta hesitated.

"Alpha, maybe she should have privacy for…"

"Keep going, Marta."

Marta glanced at me. I nodded. It didn't matter much to me who watched. My body had stopped being something I was ashamed of a long time ago. Shame was a luxury for people who thought anyone was going to protect them from what happened next.

She kept going.

Three old fractures. A scar along my ribs that pulled tight when I breathed too deep. Bruising in patterns that weren't accidental, the kind that comes from hands gripping too hard. When she pressed along my collarbone I made a sound I hadn't meant to make and Damian's whole body flinched like he felt it too.

"Christ," he said under his breath. "Wren…"

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. Look at you."

"I've had two years to get used to looking at me. You've had five minutes." I didn't say it was cruel. I just said it. He didn't have anything to say back to that.

Marta moved to my legs next, checking for the same things, and found more of them. She wrote it all down on a little pad, quiet and clinical, the way healers do when they've learned not to react out loud to what they're seeing. I respected that about her. Nobody needed my injuries turned into a performance for their horror.

"Malnourishment," she said eventually, mostly to herself. "Severe, by the look of the muscle wasting. Old breaks, multiple, never properly set. Scarring consistent with repeated restraint.." she paused there, glancing at the marks circling both my wrists, "..and consistent with confinement in low light for extended periods, going off the skin tone here."

"You get all that from looking at somebody's wrists?" I asked.

"I get all that from thirty years of patching up wolves who came home from worse places than they should've had to go." She didn't look up when she said it. "This wasn't a hard camp that roughed you up a little, girl. Somebody did this to you deliberately, and kept doing it."

"Wren." Damian's voice cracked a little on my name. "Why didn't you tell me any of this?"

"Tell you what, exactly." I kept my eyes on the wall. "That guards liked to hit prisoners? That's not exactly breaking news, Damian."

"That's not what I…"

"You want details?" I finally looked at him, and something in my face must've told him he didn't actually want the answer, because he shut his mouth. "I didn't think so."

He looked like he wanted to argue that. He didn't.

The door was still cracked open, and I hadn't noticed the King standing there until he stepped fully into the room. He must've been listening for a while. He had that stillness about him, the kind that made you feel watched even when you weren't looking directly at him.

"Your Majesty." Marta straightened fast, dipping her head. "I wasn't aware.."

"Don't stop on my account." He didn't move any closer. Just stood there with his hands folded behind his back, eyes moving over the marks on my arms with an expression I couldn't quite read. No pity. Something more careful than that. Like he was cataloguing it.

"I'll need a full written report," he said to Marta. "Every injury, dated as best you can estimate."

"Of course, Your Majesty."

"Wait outside for a moment. I'd like to speak with her alone."

Marta gathered her bag and left without arguing. Damian didn't move.

"Damian," the King said, not unkindly, "you too."

"With respect, she's my sister…"

"And I'm asking you to give us a minute." His voice didn't rise. Damian looked at me, some silent question in his face I didn't have the energy to answer, and then he left too, the door clicking shut behind him.

For a second neither of us said anything. He pulled the single chair in the room a few feet closer, not close enough to crowd me, and sat down across from me like we were just two people talking, not a king and whatever I was to him.

"You didn't defend yourself there," he said. "When your brother asked why you didn't tell him. You didn't explain any of it."

"Wasn't aware I owed anybody an explanation."

"You don't." He said it plainly, no argument in it. "I'm not here to make you give one either. I have a different question."

I waited.

"Your wolf," he said. "How long has she been silent?"

The question landed strange, coming from him. Nobody else in this house had asked me that. Nobody else seemed to think it mattered.

"Two years," I said. "Since about a month into the quarry."

"The entire two years. Not on and off. Not fading in and out."

"No. Nothing. Not once."

Something shifted behind his eyes, small but real, like a piece just clicked somewhere it shouldn't have fit that cleanly. He didn't say anything for a second. Just looked at me the way Marta had looked at my wrists like he was reading something written on me that I couldn't see myself.

"That's a long time for a wolf to go silent," he said finally, careful with every word, "even after severe trauma. Most come back sooner. Weaker, maybe, scared, but they come back."

"Mine didn't."

"No," he said, quiet now, almost to himself. "Apparently she didn't."

He stood up slowly, still watching me like I handed him a puzzle piece he didn't know what to do with yet, and for a second I thought he was going to say something else. Explain whatever had just crossed his face,but he didn't.

"Get some rest," was all he said, heading for the door. "I'll have Marta check on you again in a few days."

He paused with his hand on the handle, looking back at me one more time, and whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.

The door shut. I sat there alone in the quiet, staring at my own bruised wrists, wondering what exactly I just said that put that look on a king's face.