WHAT HER HANDS REMEMBER

The east courtyard is chaos by the time I reach it.

Wolves crowd around the fountain, shouting over each other, and I shove through them without a single polite word, because politeness is for people who are not watching the ground turn red under the man they love.

Kael is on his back near the fountain's edge. His shirt is torn open at the shoulder, and beneath it the wound gapes wide and wrong, black at the edges like something has poisoned the blood around it instead of just spilling it.

His eyes are open. Barely. His breathing comes in short, wet pulls that scare me more than the blood does.

"Move," I say, and something in my voice makes the crowd actually listen.

I drop to my knees beside him. My hands go to the wound before my mind has finished deciding to let them.

"Rue." His voice is barely there. His hand finds my wrist, weak, but holding on like it is the only solid thing left in the world. "You should not be here."

"Be quiet," I say. "Save your strength for staying alive."

"Bossy," he breathes, and somehow, impossibly, there is the ghost of a smile under all that pain, and it breaks something loose in my chest.

Nyra arrives seconds later, dropping her bag, but one look at the wound and her face goes pale.

"This is not a normal wound," she says. "The edges — they are not healing. Something is stopping it."

"I know," I say.

I do know. I knew the second I saw it. I have seen this before, in another life, in a healing room that smelled of herbs and salt, on a wolf brought in from a border skirmish who nearly died before I understood what I was looking at.

"Nyra, I need boiled silverleaf and crushed moth-thistle. Now. And clean linen, as much as you can carry."

She stares at me. "How do you know that."

"I do not have time to explain. Go."

She goes. She does not question it again, not with him dying in front of us both.

I press my hands flat against the wound, ignoring how his blood soaks warm and wrong through my fingers, ignoring the way half the courtyard is staring at an Omega giving orders like a healer twice her rank.

The moment my palms make full contact with his skin, something happens that has nothing to do with medicine at all.

The world tilts sideways.

I am somewhere else. Somewhen else.

I see him — Kael, five years younger, standing at the edge of black water with his hands out, screaming a name that is my name, watching the surface close over a face that is my face.

I feel what he felt. Not remember it — feel it, raw and immediate, like it is happening to me right now instead of to him five years ago.

The terror. The helplessness. His body frozen, arms too heavy to move, legs too heavy to jump, like something is holding him down from the inside.

He was drugged, I understand, all at once, the knowledge landing in me like a stone dropped in still water.

He wanted to save me. He could not move. Someone made sure he could not move.

I see him after — years compressed into seconds — standing over an empty grave with no body in it because they never found one, writing three words over and over in a journal until the ink bled through the page.

I see him refusing every match the Elders bring him, year after year, until they stop bringing them at all. I see him standing at a window at midnight, every single night, staring out at the Moonless Forest like he is waiting for it to give something back.

I feel five years of a man drowning slower than I ever did, on dry land, in full view of everyone, and nobody once asking if he was all right.

I gasp and come back to myself, hands still pressed to his wound, tears streaming down a face that is not entirely mine and entirely mine at once.

"You did not do it," I whisper, before I can stop the words. "You could not move. They drugged you. You did not let me drown. You could not save me."

Kael's eyes, half-closed with pain, snap fully open.

"What did you say," he breathes.

I freeze. The words are already out. I cannot pull them back into my mouth.

"Nothing," I say, too fast. "I do not know what I said. I was just—"

"You said save you." His hand tightens around my wrist, strength coming back into it from somewhere, fever-strength, desperate strength. "You said me. Not her. Me."

"You are confused. You are hurt. You should not be—"

"Elara."

The name drops between us like a stone through ice.

I go still. Completely, entirely still, my whole body locking around the sound of it in his mouth after five years of silence.

"Do not," I whisper.

"Elara." He says it again, softer this time, wonder breaking through the pain in his face.

His hand comes up, shaking, and touches my cheek, smearing blood there, his blood, mixing with the tears already falling. "It is you.

It has always been you. I knew it. I knew it the first time I saw you in that courtyard and I told myself I was going mad."

"Kael, please—"

"Say it," he says. "Say my name is right. Say I am not imagining this."

Behind me, I hear footsteps, and Nyra's voice calling out that she has the herbs, and further off, the low murmur of a gathered crowd that has gone very quiet, straining to hear a private moment happening in a very public place.

"Someone will hear," I say, desperate now, glancing over my shoulder at the ring of wolves still watching. "The law—"

"I do not care about the law."

"I do." My voice cracks down the middle. "I care enough for both of us, because if I say it out loud before the year is done, I lose everything, Kael. I lose you all over again, forever this time, no coming back from it.

Do you understand? There will be no third chance."

That reaches him. I watch it land, watch the fever-bright hope in his eyes bank down into something more careful, more controlled, though his hand does not leave my face.

"Then I will not make you say it," he says, quiet, rough. "But I know. I know now. And I am not letting you go again.

Whatever this costs. Whatever the law says. I already lost you once because I could not move. I am not standing still this time."

Nyra drops to her knees on his other side, pressing crushed herbs into the wound with hands that shake only slightly.

"Whatever you two are discussing," she says, not looking up, "it will have to wait. He is still bleeding."

I nod, grateful for the excuse to look away from those silver eyes before I say something that cannot be unsaid in front of half the castle.

We work in silence after that, Nyra and I, packing the wound, binding it tight, and slowly, slowly, the black creeping at the edges of the cut begins to pull back, like poison losing a fight it thought it had already won.

It is only once his breathing evens out, once color starts coming back into his face, that I let myself look up — and find Riven standing at the edge of the crowd, arms crossed, green eyes fixed on me with an expression that is no longer suspicious.

It is something worse than suspicious.

It is certain.

He heard. Of course he heard. He was close enough, and wolves hear things they are not meant to hear better than anyone.

He does not say anything. He does not need to. He simply holds my gaze for one long, unbearable moment, and then turns and walks away into the crowd, leaving me kneeling in blood beside the man I am not allowed to love out loud, with a secret that just grew one more pair of ears than I can afford — and no way of knowing yet whether those ears belong to a friend or to the next person who decides that some ghosts are worth killing twice.