CHAPTER 6: What the Doctor Found

Elira’s POV

The healer’s hands were gentle, which somehow made it worse.

I sat on the edge of a bed in one of the estate’s private treatment rooms, still faintly trembling from whatever had happened in that archive room, still not entirely certain how much time had passed between the door slamming shut and the door tearing open again. Someone had wrapped a blanket around my shoulders at some point. I didn’t remember who.

Dr. Aldren worked with the quiet efficiency of someone who’d done this exact examination a thousand times before, though something in the set of his mouth told me this particular case was different. He pressed careful fingers along my ribs, checked the fading bruises at my jaw, turned my wrists over to examine the faint white lines crossing both of them — old scars, long healed, that I’d stopped trying to hide sometime around the six-month mark.

“These are old,” he said quietly, more to himself than to me.

I didn’t answer.

He continued, cataloging in the low, clinical voice doctors use when they’re trying not to let their own reaction show. Malnutrition, evident in the sharp lines of my collarbones, the hollows beneath my eyes that no amount of rest since release had softened. Two fractures in my left hand that had healed without ever being properly set, leaving the bones slightly misaligned. A pattern of scarring along my back that he didn’t ask about directly, though his fingers paused there longer than anywhere else.

“How’s your appetite been,” he asked, almost gently, “since you’ve been home?”

“Fine,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. Food still felt strange to me — too plentiful, too easy, the kind of abundance that made some old animal part of my brain suspicious it was about to be taken away again. I ate small amounts, quickly, out of habit rather than hunger, and hadn’t told anyone that the full plates set in front of me at every meal made my chest tighten rather than settle.

“How long were you held?” he asked.

“Two years.”

“And during that time, were you seen by any healer at all?”

“No.”

He wrote something down, jaw tight, and didn’t ask anything else for a long moment.

Ronan stood near the door, arms crossed, having insisted on staying despite my telling him twice that he didn’t need to. I watched him from the corner of my eye as the doctor worked — watched the color drain slowly from his face with every new observation, every quiet clinical detail stacking on top of the last.

“The hand,” Dr. Aldren said eventually, holding it up gently to the light, tracing the slight misalignment with one finger. “This would have been extremely painful when it happened. And it was never treated.”

“No,” I said again.

“Do you want to tell me how it happened?”

I looked at him for a long moment — kind eyes, careful hands, no judgment anywhere in his expression — and still found I couldn’t make the words come. Not because I didn’t remember. I remembered every second of it, sharper than I wanted to. A guard’s boot, a door slammed on my fingers for moving too slowly during transfer, three months into my sentence, back when I still believed explaining myself might help.

It hadn’t helped. Nothing had.

“It doesn’t matter how,” I said instead. “It’s done. It healed however it healed.”

“It matters for your treatment,” he said gently. “And it matters because someone should know.”

“Someone does know,” I said. “I know.”

Something in his expression shifted — not quite pity, something closer to the recognition of a wall he wasn’t going to get past today. He nodded slowly and returned to his examination, quieter now, and I let the silence settle back over the room like something familiar.

***

Ronan didn’t say anything until the doctor finished, packing away his instruments with the same careful precision he’d used to examine me.

“I’ll want to see her again in a week,” Dr. Aldren said, addressing Ronan directly now, the way healers sometimes did when a patient had gone somewhere they couldn’t follow. “The malnutrition will take time to reverse properly. I’d recommend smaller meals, more frequent, and I’ll prepare something for the pain in her hand.”

“Of course,” Ronan said. His voice sounded strange, thinner than usual.

“And I’d strongly suggest,” the doctor added, glancing briefly at me before lowering his voice slightly, though not quite low enough that I couldn’t still hear him, “that someone in this household actually sit down and ask her what happened. Properly. Not to interrogate her — just to listen. Sometimes that alone makes a difference in how someone heals.”

I kept my eyes on the window, pretending I hadn’t heard, giving Ronan whatever privacy he needed to receive that particular piece of advice without an audience.

“Has anyone asked her?” the doctor continued, quieter still. “Since she came home?”

The silence that followed lasted a beat too long.

“I—” Ronan started, and stopped.

I didn’t turn to look at his face, but I could hear it in the quality of that silence — the particular weight of a question he suddenly realized he didn’t have an honest answer for. Two years. A full examination cataloging fractures and scars and a body that had learned to survive on almost nothing. And in five days since my release, not once had he sat down and simply asked.

“No,” he said finally, quiet, almost to himself. “I haven’t.”

Dr. Aldren didn’t press further. He gathered the rest of his things, gave me a final gentle nod, and left the room with the particular tact of someone who understood exactly what kind of silence he was leaving behind him.

Ronan stood very still by the door for a long moment after he’d gone.

“Elira,” he said finally.

I turned to look at him then, blanket still around my shoulders, hand throbbing faintly where the doctor had examined it. Whatever he was working up to, I could see it costing him something — some old certainty finally cracking loose.

“I should have asked,” he said. “A long time before now.”

“You’re asking now,” I said, because it seemed easier than telling him what I actually thought — that five days of silence following two years of it had already answered a question neither of us needed spoken aloud.

“What happened to you in there?” His voice was quieter than I’d heard it since I came home, none of the Alpha authority in it now, just something rawer underneath. “Really happened. Not what you’ve been letting everyone assume.”

I looked at him for a long moment, weighing the cost of answering honestly against the cost of continuing to carry it alone.

“Not tonight,” I said finally.

He nodded slowly, like he understood, though I doubted he really did — not yet, not the full shape of it. But something had shifted in the room regardless, something that hadn’t been there five days ago when he’d driven me home in near silence and told himself my reaction to his touch was simply anger settling.

He didn’t leave right away. He sat down instead, in the chair beside the bed, close enough that I could tell he intended to stay a while, and didn’t say anything else at all — just sat with me in the silence, like he was finally willing to let it be uncomfortable instead of filling it with easy reassurances.

It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t even close to enough.

But it was, I realized, the first time since I’d come home that he’d chosen to stay in a room with me without needing me to perform being fine.

Outside, the light had shifted toward evening, gold turning slowly to grey against the window, and somewhere below us the household would already be moving back into its usual rhythm — dinner preparations, quiet conversation, the ordinary business of a family that had spent five days deciding my silence meant something simpler than it did. None of that reached us here. For once, the noise of the house stayed downstairs where it belonged, and I let myself sit in a quiet that didn’t ask anything of me at all.

I didn’t know if it would last. I didn’t know if tomorrow he’d wake up and decide this evening had been an aberration, something grief-adjacent and temporary, easier to file away than to build on. Some tired, guarded part of me expected exactly that.

But for tonight, at least, someone had finally sat with the discomfort instead of asking me to smooth it over for him. It wasn’t healing. It wasn’t even close.

It was, however, the first honest thing that had happened between us since I walked back through that gate.