Chapter 12: What he lost

POV: AVA

Before I could say anything else, he dropped to one knee and took my injured hand, he turned it over to inspect the cuts across my palm before checking the leg I'd been limping on since leaving the training pit.

I couldn’t help staring at him. The almighty Rogue King was actually kneeling in the middle of the corridor, tending to my scrapes like this was a perfectly normal thing for him to be doing.

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to pull my hand back. “I can handle it myself.”

He ignored the protest and reached into the leather pouch at his side. A small vial came out first, followed by a clean cloth, and he poured some of the liquid onto it before pressing it against my palm.

The sting made me suck in a sharp breath. “You could’ve warned me.”

Darius kept cleaning the cut, apparently deciding my complaints weren’t worth answering. When he finished with my hand, he moved to my leg and carefully checked the bruising before wrapping it.

“I said I’m fine,” I muttered, although I didn’t try pulling away again.

He gave me a look that made it obvious he’d heard me, then packed the supplies back into the pouch and rose to his feet. “My study.”

“Why?”

“I need to finish treating the injury.”

There wasn’t much point arguing with that, so I followed him down the corridor.

Darius’s private study was warmer than the rest of the fortress, with maps covering one wall and books scattered across a broad wooden desk. He motioned toward a chair, and I sat while he brought the medical supplies over and continued working on my leg.

That’s when I noticed the scar.

It disappeared beneath the collar of his shirt, pale against his skin and wide enough that it clearly hadn’t come from some harmless accident. I watched his hands pause over the bandage before asking, “How did you get that?”

He didn’t answer immediately. His fingers remained against the edge of the cloth, and something in his expression shifted before he finally said, “My father was murdered.”

I hadn’t expected that answer.

Darius told me someone inside his council had betrayed them. The betrayal gave their enemies a way into the stronghold, and when the attack came, he tried to protect his father but was badly wounded in the process.

They left him outside in the snow.

He remembered lying there, bleeding into the frozen ground while the cold slowly crept through his clothes. He could barely move, barely breathe, and still he waited for someone to come back for him.

Nobody did.

His father was already dead, and the people who had betrayed them simply walked away, leaving Darius there to die too. Somehow, he survived.

“After that night, I made an oath,” he said, securing the bandage around my leg. “Anyone under my protection would never be treated like they were worthless. I wouldn’t let someone in my care become a person everyone could discard.”

The words hit somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

Silvercrest had done exactly that to me.

My fingers moved before I could think better of it, brushing the scar beneath his collar. Darius went still, but he didn’t pull away, and I didn’t move my hand either.

The quiet between us became awkwardly charged, neither of us quite knowing what to do with it. Yet strangely, I wasn’t afraid of being this close to him.

Maybe the almighty Rogue King wasn’t as terrifying as I’d thought.

Then I noticed the warmth spreading through me, and I knew it had nothing to do with Kael. There was no mate bond tugging at my wolf, no invisible force demanding that I move closer to him; I simply felt something toward Darius that I didn’t understand yet.

And that was what unsettled me most.

The door flew open so hard it slammed against the wall. A scout stumbled into the study, his chest heaving as he tried to catch enough breath to speak.

Darius straightened. “What happened?”

The scout swallowed and forced the words out. “We caught someone sneaking around the eastern ridge. She appears to be from Silvercrest.”

My hand dropped from Darius’s scar.

Silvercrest.

“She refused to leave,” the scout continued, wiping sweat from his forehead. “We’ve tried getting answers from her, but she keeps demanding to speak with Ava.”

Darius’s attention shifted to him. “Her name?”

The scout hesitated, then shook his head. “Bethany Croft.”

I knew that name.

A memory came back so sharply I could almost hear her laugh again, surrounded by other people while she pointed at me and called me the fat reject.

And now she was here.

In Hollow Fang.

Asking for me.

“She is demanding to speak to the ‘fat reject’ she once laughed at.” the scout said.