Chapter 12: The Price Of Protection








Alpha Veyron Mordane






I stepped into the room and stopped.


The silence hit me first—a heavy, wrong silence that had nothing to do with peace. Then the smell: infection, sweet and cloying, layered over dried blood and fever-sweat. My eyes adjusted to the dim light, taking in the narrow bed, the thin blanket, the figure curled beneath it.


She lay on her side, shivering despite the fever that flushed her skin. The bandages on her back were visible even from the doorway—crude, filthy things, stained brown and yellow, wrapped too tight around swollen flesh. Her breathing was shallow, too fast, the rhythm of a body losing its fight.


A maid dropped to her knees beside the bed, her hands clasped so tight her knuckles were white.


"Alpha, please..." Her voice cracked, raw with days of weeping. "Please save my Lady... it's been two days... please, Supreme Alpha... she was misjudged."


I looked at Kael.


He understood. He always understood. He crossed the room in three strides, took the maid's arm, and lifted her without gentleness. She didn't resist as he dragged her out, her pleas dissolving into choked sobs that cut off when the door clicked shut.


I was alone with her.


I moved to the bed and sat on the edge, the wood creaking beneath my weight. From this close, I could see the damage clearly—the way her lips were cracked and bleeding, the hollows beneath her eyes dark as bruises, the tremor that ran through her small frame in constant waves. Her hand lay on the blanket, fingers curled inward like a dying flower.


I took it.


Her skin was burning, dry as parchment, and so fragile I could feel the bones beneath. I reached for the bond that should have connected us—Alpha to... what? Not mate. Not yet. But something. A thread that had begun forming during the blood moon, strengthened when I took her again in my office.


Nothing.


Her wolf was silent. No flicker of response, no stirring of the creature that lived beneath her skin. Just emptiness where there should have been life.


I brought her wrist to my mouth.


My teeth pierced the soft flesh without hesitation, and I tasted her—copper and honey and the sour tang of sickness. I forced my blood into her, feeling the dark power of it surge through the wound, seeking out the poison that had taken root in her veins. She whimpered, a thin sound like a wounded animal, and her fingers closed weakly around my hand.


"...cold..." she muttered, the word slurred, unconscious. "...don't... please..."


I kept going, pulling the infection out as I pushed my life in. It was a brutal exchange—my darkness for her sickness, my strength for her survival. She twisted beneath me, her body recognizing the intrusion even as it greedily drank what I offered. When I finally pulled back, her breathing had shifted—still shallow, but slower. Deeper.


The worst of the poison was gone.


I didn't move from the bed. I sat there, her hand in mine, watching the color slowly return to her face. It wasn't redemption. It wasn't mercy. It was calculation. She had survived what no one else could survive, and that made her valuable. That made her mine.


The Royal Physician arrived ten minutes later, bowing so low his forehead nearly touched the floor. He worked quickly, efficiently—liquid injections first, then a thick herbal paste that he began applying to the wounds beneath the filthy bandages.


The moment the paste touched her open flesh, she came alive.


She cried out—a sound torn from somewhere deep—and her free hand shot out, striking my arm with surprising force. Her eyes stayed closed, her face twisted in pain, but her body fought with desperate strength. She hit my hand, my shoulder, anywhere she could reach, her movements wild, uncontrolled.


The physician froze, his hands hovering over her back. He dropped to his knees, his face pressed to the floor.


"Mercy, Supreme Alpha—it is the herbs. She does not know what she is doing. Please, forgive—"


I said nothing.


I only nodded for him to continue.


He worked faster now, his hands trembling as he applied the medicine. She kept striking me, her fists weak but persistent, her breathing coming in sharp gasps. When her teeth found the base of my thumb and sank in hard enough to draw blood—black, as always—I didn't pull away.


Instead, I reached out with my other hand and brushed the damp hair from her forehead.


My touch was light, steady, giving her nothing to fight against, nothing to fear. I kept my fingers there, tracing slow patterns against her temple, while she bit down harder and thrashed against the physician's hands.


She was fighting for her life. Even unconscious, even broken, she was fighting.


Good.


When the physician finished, he packed his tools with shaking hands and left without another word, not daring to look at me. The door closed softly behind him.


I stayed.


Afternoon light shifted across the stone floor, turning gold, then amber, then gray. Night settled over the palace, and still I didn't leave the chair beside her bed. I watched her breathing even out, watched the fever break in a sheen of sweat that I wiped away with my own handkerchief. I watched her dreams take her—watched her face twist with fear, then soften, then twist again.


I was still there when Kael returned near midnight.


He stopped just inside the door, his eyes scanning the room—the narrow walls, the single window, the plain furniture—as though the very space offended him. As though its inadequacy was a personal insult.


"My Lord," he said carefully, "it is unfit for you to remain in an Omega's chambers this long. It is... unworthy of your station."


I didn't look at him. My eyes were fixed on her face, on the way her eyelids fluttered with dreams she wouldn't remember.


"Make it known to the household," I said, my voice quiet in the dark room, "that this Omega is now under my protection. She is promoted to Honored Lady. Assign her more servants—trained ones, not kitchen scraps. Give her guards from my personal detail. Move her into the Inner Residence, east wing, the chambers overlooking the garden."


Kael was silent for a moment. I could feel his surprise, though his face showed nothing.


"Yes, Alpha," he said finally, bowing.


I kept my eyes on Evelina's face. "And Kael—the Matron. Has she been dealt with?"


"Eighty lashes, my Lord. Administered in the courtyard as you ordered. She collapsed after sixty. The physician says she will not survive the night without treatment."


"Good." I finally looked at him, and whatever he saw in my face made him take a step back. "Ensure she receives none. Let her die knowing that her cruelty bought her nothing."


"Yes, Alpha."


He left, and I returned my attention to the girl on the bed. Her hand was still in mine, her fingers now curled trustingly around my palm. The gesture meant nothing. She was unconscious, clinging to warmth, to presence, to life itself. It wasn't me she held onto.


It didn't matter.


I sat there until the first light of dawn began to creep through the high window, until her breathing was steady and deep, until I was certain she would live. Then I stood, extracted my hand from hers, and left without looking back.


I returned to the Inner Residence as the morning dew was still settling on the marble steps. The eastern wing was already in motion—servants carrying furniture, guards taking positions, the machinery of my will grinding into action.


But I didn't go to the east wing.


I went to my private study, and there, in the center of the room, I found her.


Morgana.


She was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by scattered pages—hundreds of them, covered in cramped handwriting. Her head had fallen forward in exhaustion, her hair a tangled mess around her shoulders, her hands...


Her hands were ruined.


Blood had dried in dark streaks across her palms, beneath her fingernails, smeared across the pages where she had collapsed. She had written until she could write no more, until her body gave out, and then she had stayed—kneeling, waiting, her forehead nearly touching the floor in a posture of absolute submission.


She had fallen asleep while kneeling.


I stood in the doorway and looked at her for a long moment, saying nothing. Letting the silence stretch. Letting her remain in that limbo between punishment and whatever came next.


I stepped into the room.


The sound of my boots on marble was soft, deliberate. She didn't stir. I walked around her, looking down at the pages scattered across the floor like fallen leaves. The Household Rules, copied in her own blood—some of the handwriting still elegant, still controlled, the early pages. But as I moved closer to where she knelt, the script deteriorated. Shaking. Desperate. The letters sprawling as her hands failed her.


Two hundred times.


She had done it.


I stopped directly in front of her and looked down at the crown of her head, at the way her shoulders trembled even in sleep.


"What are you doing here?" My voice was quiet, conversational. "I haven't summoned you. Have I?"


Her eyes flew open immediately.


She jerked upright, her body spasming with cramp and exhaustion, and then she collapsed forward, her forehead hitting the floor with a sound that should have hurt. She didn't seem to feel it.


"Alpha." The word came out as a sob, cracked and broken. "Alpha, I'm sorry—I didn't mean to—I wasn't trying to offend you, I swear, I swear I wasn't—"


She tried to push herself up, but her arms gave out. Her ruined hands scraped against the marble, leaving faint smears of dried blood, and she cried out—a sound of genuine pain, physical and desperate.


"I thought—" She was crying now, ugly, desperate tears that made her face blotchy and red. "I thought she had stolen it, I thought she was presumptuous, I thought I was protecting your honor, Alpha, please, please believe me—"