CHAPTER FOUR

Kael's POV

The ceiling was the first thing I saw.

White and plain and unfamiliar, with a small crack running from the light fitting toward the far corner that my eyes traced twice before I understood that I was awake and that the ceiling did not belong anywhere I recognized.

I looked around to see if I could place a finger on where exactly I was.

I could feel the softness of the bed beneath me. The room was small and smelled like herbs and something medicinal underneath them. My body felt like it had been taken apart and put back together.

I pushed myself up slowly and the ache clarified into something sharper that made me stop halfway and breathe through it before continuing.

Sitting up, I looked down at my arm. There were deep scars on my arm, all around it. I turned my right arm over and studied the marks without fully understanding them and then looked up at the rest of the room. I was in a clinic of some kind.

I tried to remember how I had gotten here but nothing came to mind.

The last thing I remembered was standing In front of the blackthorn pack house with thousands of wolves gathered round me, it was my coronation day.

I remembered the elders giving me the alpha's title, a title my father had carried for years with so much pride.

That was the last clear thing I could remember. Standing in the hall with every Blackthorn wolf in attendance, the formal transfer of authority, the moment when something settled onto my shoulders that I understood I would carry for the rest of my life.

Apart from that I couldn't remember anything else.

The door opened and a woman came in, she looked a lot older.

"Oh good," she said. "You're awake."

She set her things down on the small table near the window.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

“I don't know but I feel terrible,”I said, trying to sit up but then I felt a sharp pain in my back.

She almost smiled. "That is not inaccurate. You were in bad shape when they brought you in. Blood loss, some other injuries I have been working through. You are considerably better than you were."

"Where am I?"

"Ashveil Pack clinic," she said. "You were found unconscious at our border."

I looked at her. "Ashveil."

"Yes."

I was in Ashveil territory. 

The name didn't ring any bells in my head, I guess it was just one of these not so popular werewolf packs.

What was I doing unconscious at the Ashveil territory?

"What do you remember about how you got there?" she asked, pulling a small stool to the bedside and sitting down calmly.

"Nothing," I said. "The last thing I remember is my coronation. After that there is nothing else."

She wrote something down. "And before the coronation? What do you remember about yourself?"

"My name is Kael Blackthorn," I said. "Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack. Northern territories. My father was Alpha before me. I was twenty-one when I was coronated." I paused. "That is where it stops."

She nodded slowly, still writing. "And currently? Any pain beyond the normal pain?"

"Yeah my left shoulder and my back."

"That's exactly what I have been treating," she said. "The wounds are closing well. Your healing ability is strong, which helped considerably." She looked up from her notes. "You are going to be alright, Kael. It will take time but you are going to be alright."

I nodded slowly, still trying to put the pieces of everything together.

The healer asked a few more questions. I answered them. She told me to rest and that someone would be coming to speak with me about the circumstances of how I was found, that it was routine, that I should not worry about it. She left with the same efficient movement she had entered with and the room went quiet again.

I sat in the quiet and looked at my hands.

These hands that had scars on them that I didn't know where they came from. 

I was still looking at them when the door opened again.

I looked up expecting the healer but it was not the healer, it was someone else.

The woman who walked in was not someone I could have looked away from if I had tried. She was tall with long dark hair that fell past her shoulders and an aura that filled the room the moment she stepped in.

She stared at me in silence for a moment, only stopping when I sat up. A strange look flashed across her eyes, but she quickly replaced it with a professional expression.

My wolf did something I could not explain. I growled inside my head, kicking restlessly.

What was going on?

I stared at her before finally finding the words.

"Are you the nurse?" I asked.

She did not answer immediately. She stood at the threshold of the room and looked at me with dark eyes.

The silence in the room was awkward and deafening. 

Her face kept looking familiar but I couldn't quite remember where I had seen that face.

"No," she said finally, her voice even. "I'm not the nurse. I'm here to do some investigating on how you ended up at our border."

We both kept staring at each other.

And then somewhere behind my eyes, in my memory , something flickered. An image of a woman flashed in my head.

A woman's face surfaced and dissolved before I could grasp it, leaving behind an unnamable feeling that sat heavy in my chest.

I pressed my fingers to my temple.

The vision flickered again, stronger this time, bringing a sharp pain completely separate from my physical wounds. It was a sudden, deep agony originating somewhere far beyond where any healer's medicine could ever reach.

I gripped my head with both hands.

The healer steps inside, her breath catching in her throat.