Chapter 8: Hands Covered in Blood

<Cassandra>

I couldn’t for the life of me explain why in the goddess’ name I did what I did.

One second, I was standing at my door with my hand hovering an inch above the handle, listening to Dominic's voice through two floors of stone. And the next, I was already in the corridor, the cold seeping up through the soles of my bare feet, as the hem of my robe snagged around my ankles with every step.

'Go back to bed, Cassandra. This isn't yours to be a part of.'

Twenty-one years of being shown, in a hundred small and deliberate ways, exactly where my usefulness ended had taught me that lesson well. But my body had apparently already made up its mind without consulting the rest of me, taking the stairs two at a time the same way it had once carried me across the ceremony grounds toward Rafael before my brain had agreed to any of it. 

Except this time, there was no bond tugging me forward like a compass needle pointed north. This time… it was just me.

I reached the top of the main staircase and stopped so fast I nearly lost my balance and toppled over.

The entrance hall had become something else entirely. Two guards were half-carrying, half-dragging a third wolf between them, his shirt torn open at the shoulder and soaked until it had turned a deep, wet black. His legs seemed like they weren't working right beneath him, and blood dripped onto the polished floor in a trail that led all the way back to the front doors.

And in the middle of all of it was Dominic.

I had seen him composed. I had seen him charming enough to make an entire congregation of wolves believe he'd married for love. I had seen him cold enough to make my skin crawl in a sitting room that still smelled like Alice's scent.

But I had never seen him like this.

Whatever version of him existed for council meetings and ceremonies was gone completely. This version of Dominic moved fast, with a small sense of — believe it or not — panic.

"Where the hell is the healer—" he snapped, to no one and everyone at once, already down on one knee beside the injured wolf, his hands pressed hard against a wound that didn't seem to want to stay closed. "Someone get her, now!"

One of the guards had a hand fumbling somewhere near the wound, pressing in the wrong place entirely, his sudden panic doing more of the work than any actual training. The other stood frozen with a strip of torn fabric in his hands, staring at it like he'd forgotten what it was for.

Nobody so much as glanced toward the staircase. Nobody expected the Luna to do anything down here but watch from a safe distance, or better yet, disappear back up to whatever room she'd been assigned, and neither did I.

But there was a wounded wolf bleeding out at the bottom of the stairs beneath me, and I couldn’t just stand there and watch.

So I didn’t.

The stone was freezing under my knees when I dropped down on the other side of the wounded wolf, and up close, the wound wasn't complicated at all — it just needed someone whose hands weren't shaking.

"Move your hand," I said to the guard fumbling at the shoulder, "you're pressing beside it, not on it."

He looked at me like I'd spoken in a language he didn't know.

"Now," I said, and something in my voice must have carried more weight than I expected, because he actually listened.

I got both hands flat over the wound and pressed down, hard, the way I'd done it a dozen times before in the Bloodwyn pack for wolves who couldn't afford a healer, and had only me and whatever I'd managed to teach myself. Warm blood pushed up between my fingers immediately, but the flow beneath my palms slowed, just enough.

"Cloth," I said, not looking up, and the other guard pressed the cloth in his hands into mine.

"Clean, not that." The strip in the guard's hands was already soaked through and useless. "And water. Someone needs to hold him still, he's going to try to move the second the pain catches up to him."

Nobody argued. Somewhere behind me I heard footsteps scatter in three different directions at once.

It wasn't glamorous work, and I didn't have the luxury of making it look like professional. I kept my hands where they needed to be, my voice flat and useful instead of gentle, and I didn't let myself think too hard about the fact that I hadn't asked anyone's permission before I'd knelt down in the middle of a role Jasper had spent an entire evening making very clear wasn't mine to occupy.

I felt Dominic's eyes on me before I looked up and confirmed it.

He was still crouched across from me, his hands no longer needed now that mine had taken over, and he was watching me with an expression I hadn't seen on his face before.

"Where did you learn this?" he asked finally in a low and clipped tone, the words coming out faster than he’d have liked.

I didn't look up. My hands were still working, and the wolf beneath them had started to shake, which was either a good sign or a very bad one, and I honestly didn't have the attention to spare on figuring out which.

"Nobody taught me," I said, matter-of-factly. "You tend to learn fast when nobody's coming to help you."

I didn't mean for it to land the way it did. I barely had time to register that I'd said it at all before a foreign voice cut across the hall.

"Move. All of you, move—" A woman shoved through the front doors, still fastening a robe over her nightclothes, a bag already open in her hand. She took one look at the scene and didn't break stride. "Alpha, Luna, out. Now. I don't need an audience, I need space."

I sat back on my heels, my hands slick and red to the wrist, and for a moment neither Dominic nor I moved.

"You heard her," Dominic said finally, and there was nothing warm in it, but there wasn't anything cold in it either. He was already straightening, "Let her work."

I got to my feet slowly, my knees stiff from the cold floor, and stepped back to let the healer and a pair of servants close around the wolf on the ground. Someone pressed a damp cloth into my hands without asking, and I realized only then that I didn't know what to do with it, or with myself, now that there was nothing left that needed doing.

I turned and walked toward the staircase without waiting to be told to.

Behind me, I could feel Dominic watching. I didn't turn around to confirm it. I'd already given this house more of myself tonight than I'd intended to, and I wasn't in the mood to hand over whatever was left on my face as well.

*

<Dominic>

I watched her walk away with blood drying on her hands and no expression on her face at all.

Tomas would live. The healer had said so before she'd even finished unpacking her bag, muttering something about how whoever had gotten the bleeding under control before she arrived had likely bought him the difference between a scar and a grave. I saw no need to correct her; she was right. I'd been kneeling right there when it happened.

Tomas was one of my best warriors… he was mine. 

And I didn’t mean that in the way the Manor was mine, or the territory, or the throne I still didn't technically hold, was mine. I meant it the way every wolf who bled for this pack was mine, the way Jasper was mine, the way the wolves who'd followed my mother through fifteen years of nothing had earned a permanent place in my chest.

So when I say I was grateful, understand that it wasn't the kind of gratitude that softens a man's face. It was something with a much deeper meaning.

I hadn't expected her to leave her quarters, much less help save him.

'Nobody taught me. You learn fast when nobody's coming to help you.'

The words sat wrong in my chest. I knew something about that particular education myself. I'd learned it at ten years old, watching my father's blood soak into ground that no longer belonged to us, with no one coming to help either.

I stood in the entrance hall long after the servants had finished scrubbing the floor, long after Selene; the healer had left and the front doors had closed shut, turning the last hour over in my head and not liking how much space it was taking up.

No matter how I tried to sugarcoat it, she'd married me under duress. By every reasonable account, she owed this pack nothing. She owed Tomas even less — a man she'd never met, bleeding out on a floor she'd been told, explicitly, not to ever occupy when I was present.

And she'd knelt down beside him anyway.

'How much have you actually changed since you got here, Cassandra?' I found myself thinking.

It wasn't a question I had an answer to. Which, for a man such as myself who prided himself on having an answer to everything, was becoming a rather uncomfortable situation.

I decided, standing there in the cooling quiet of the entrance hall with her blood still faintly staining the stone at my feet, that I intended to find one.

Not through Jasper, or the Manor staff, whose loyalty to her was already starting to feel less like duty and more like something they'd chosen on their own. I would find out exactly what kind of person my wife was the only way I trusted anymore — by myself.