The Decay Beneath

KAEL'S POV 

The medical house sits at the edge of the pack grounds, a squat building that's treated more broken bones and birthing complications over the years than anything resembling what's happening to me now.

Mara half-carries me through the door, and Dr. Kim looks up from his desk with the particular alarm of a man who's seen plenty of injuries and recognizes immediately that this isn't one of them.

"Sit," he says, already crossing the room. "Arm."

I give it to him without arguing. He's pack, a wolf himself, old enough to have treated three Alphas before me, and the way his nostrils flare the second he leans over the ritual scar tells me he's already found something he doesn't like.

"How long has it looked like this?"

"Looked like what?" I glance down at my own arm. The skin is unbroken, healed clean around the old cut, nothing visibly wrong with it at all.

Dr. Kim leans closer, his nostrils flaring slightly. He examines the scar for a moment before pressing two fingers lightly against the skin beside it. A sharp, unpleasant sensation travels up my shoulder, and I pull my arm back.

"There's a smell," he says, frowning.

"What smell?"

"Rot. Faint, but it's there." He leans closer again, his expression growing more troubled. "It seems to be coming from this area."

He presses around the scar once more, careful this time, as though trying to determine whether the source is beneath the skin. "There's nothing on the surface, but something doesn't seem right underneath. It almost feels like decay."

"Can you do anything about it?"

He looks at me, and for the first time since I walked in, he seems uncertain.

"I don't know what I'm looking at yet, Kael. I've never encountered anything quite like this."

I already knew that. Hearing it confirmed by someone whose entire profession is keeping this pack alive still manages to land harder than I expect.

"Call Lorenzo," I tell Mara. "And Darin. I want them both here."

She's already reaching for her phone before I finish the sentence.

While we wait, Dr. Kim works in silence, cleaning a wound that doesn't actually need cleaning, giving his hands something to do while his mind works on a problem he doesn't have the tools to solve. I sit there and let him, my thoughts drifting the same direction they always do now, no matter how hard I try to keep them anywhere else.

Is she eating. Is she hurt. Is she scared right now, in this exact minute, while I sit in a chair getting diagnosed with my own slow ending.

I almost laugh at myself. Dying, and still the first thing my mind reaches for is her.

Darin arrives first, Lorenzo a few minutes behind him, both of them taking one look at my face before either says a word.

"Tell me," Darin says.

"It's decaying," I say. "From the inside. Dr. Kim can't stop it, and Lorenzo's book doesn't tell us how, not without the rite." I press the heel of my hand against my chest, that same aching pull still sitting there, giving nothing away. "We don't have time to wait on perfect information. I need the search organized. Now."

"We don't have a location," Darin says.

"I know."

"No trail. Nothing solid since the quarry."

"I know that too." My voice comes out harder than I mean it to, frustration bleeding into every word. "Which means we stop waiting for a clean answer and start checking everywhere we haven't already ruled out. Every property Ashford's ever been tied to, every den, every piece of land his family's owned that can be found. Send pairs out in every direction. I want eyes on anything that isn't obviously nothing."

Darin nods, already moving toward the door, pulling out his own phone to start making calls.

"And think," I add, before he's fully gone. "All of you. Anything we've overlooked, anything that seemed unimportant three days ago. I don't care how small it is."

Lorenzo lingers, watching me with an expression I don't have the energy to interpret right now.

Mara stays beside me, quiet now, her earlier anger giving way to a worry she makes no effort to hide.

"You should rest," Lorenzo says.

"I don't have time to rest."

"You won't have the strength to search either, if you don't give your body something."

I don't answer that, mostly because I don't have a good argument against it and I'm not willing to admit he's right out loud.

It's only once the room empties out a little, Dr. Kim moving off to find something in another cabinet, that I realize I haven't looked at my phone since the den. I pull it out of my pocket, half expecting nothing, bracing for nothing anyway.

One new message.

Unknown number.

No text. Just an attachment: a thirty-one-second video from an unknown number, sitting in the notification like it's been waiting for me this whole time.

My thumb hovers over it.

Something in my chest, that same relentless pull that's been tugging at me all day, goes strangely still, like even it knows what's about to be on the other side of this.