Where You Belong

Christie's POV

Lyon didn't answer my question.

He just looked at me across the kitchen table with a steady expression that gave nothing away, and then he stood up and took both our plates to the sink.

I let it go. For now.

I went back upstairs to check on Nima. She was still sleeping, her vitals holding at the same steady reading from the morning. I noted everything down and stepped out into the hallway to give her some quiet.

That was when I heard them.

Two men, somewhere around the corner of the corridor. Their voices were low but the hallway carried sound well.

"She's still here. Spent the whole night and doesn't seem to be leaving yet."

"Lyon has lost his mind. This is what grief does to an Alpha. Sarah dies and five years later he's dragging a human girl into the pack house and cooking her breakfast like she's his kind."

His kind?

A short, dry laugh. "A human can never be part of us. It's bad enough that we let her administer human treatment to one of us. No matter what Lyon thinks, the pack laws don't bend for sentiment. She needs to go before he does something irreversible."

"And what about the Luna ceremony? Kendra has been waiting—"

"Kendra is the only reasonable option. At least she understands what royalty is. He better stop playing around with some human girl and do what's neccessary."

Their footsteps moved away down the corridor.

I stood against the wall and stared at the ceiling for a second.

Part of us. Luna. The same word again.

I didn't know what it meant in full but I understood the hostility underneath it well enough. I had spent my whole life being the person in the room that everyone agreed didn't belong there. I knew exactly what that felt like.

I heard footsteps behind me and turned.

Lyon was walking up the hallway. He slowed when he saw my face.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said. "I was just standing here."

He looked at me for a moment, then at the empty corridor behind me. He just came and stood beside me, his back against the wall, looking at nothing in particular.

We stood there in silence for a while.

It wasn't uncomfortable. That was the strange part.

"Can I ask you something personal?" he said eventually.

I looked at him. "You can try."

"What did you want to be before medicine? When you were small. Before you decided on the degree and the lab and all of it."

The question caught me completely off guard. Nobody had ever asked me that. Not once.

"I wanted to be someone who loved people well," I said. I hadn't planned to say it that honestly but it came out before I could reshape it. "I grew up in a house where love was conditional on how useful you were or how good you looked or how much money you could bring in. I wanted to be the opposite of that. I wanted to extend warmth to people the way nobody ever did for me."

Lyon was looking at me. Not at the wall, not at the corridor. At me.

"Medicine came naturally," I continued. "I was good at science and I loved solving problems that actually mattered. But underneath the degree and the research, that's still the reason. I want people to live. I want them to have more time."

He didn't say anything for a long moment.

"That explains a lot about you," he said quietly.

"Does it?"

"You didn't have to stay here. You could have made a run for it yesterday when I was gone. But you sat with my mother and kept her stable because that's just who you are."

I didn't know what to say to that so I said nothing.

We stood there a little longer and then I pushed off the wall.

"I should go back and check her again," I said.

Lyon nodded and followed me in.

Nima was in the same position, her chest rising and falling slowly. I picked up my stethoscope and leaned over her, pressing it gently to her chest. Her heartbeat was steady, a good strong rhythm.

Then the monitor screamed.

A long, flat tone cut through the room and my body moved before my brain caught up. I spun around, reaching across the bed to check the lead connections, my hands already running the emergency protocol.

Lyon grabbed my hand.

He didn't mean to. I could tell by the way it happened, sudden and tight, his fingers closing around mine like he had no control over it.

"Lyon," I said, keeping my voice level. "The lead came loose. She's okay. Look at the screen."

He looked. The line came back, steady and even.

He didn't let go of my hand immediately.

He stood there staring at me, his chest moving fast, and then from somewhere deep I heard a low sound, more like a growl that seemed to come from inside him rather than his throat.

He dropped my hand and stepped back.