Bergamot

I didn’t sleep. He was on the other side of the door and the bond wouldn’t let me forget it.

Every time I closed my eyes, I felt him. The warmth through the wood. Twice I caught myself reaching for the lock. Twice I pulled my hand back.

I sat on the bed with the herb journal open and worked the problem with my mind. Not my hands. Not the hands that still felt the ghost of his pulse.

The poison was botanical. Slow-acting. Targeting the bond between Tarn and his wolf. Not killing him outright. Severing him from the thing that made him Alpha. This wasn’t rage. This was craft.

By dawn I had a choice to make.

I could let him die. It would be justice, if you squinted hard enough.

Or I could trade what I knew for something I wanted more than revenge. The truth about my mother. Tarn had access to records, testimony, the people who were in the room when Maren Briar was sentenced to die.

I chose the truth. I chose her.

I brewed bergamot while the sun came up. Not to drink. To think. By the time the cup went cold, I knew exactly what I was going to say.

I found him in the main room, standing at the window. His back was to me. Shirt untucked. Hair damp. I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way he held his weight like standing was costing him something.

The healer in me catalogued the symptoms. The rest of me catalogued the width of his shoulders and hated myself for it.

“You’re being poisoned,” I said.

He didn’t turn. But his shoulders went still.

“It’s botanical. Someone with a healer’s training is degrading your wolf-bond. You’ve been receiving it for at least eight months.”

Now he turned. His gray eyes found mine.

“Six months before you can’t shift at all,” I said. “An Alpha who can’t shift is dead.”

The mask broke. One second. Fear underneath. Raw and real and swallowed so fast I would have missed it if I hadn’t been watching.

He locked it back down. “How certain are you?”

“Certain enough to stand here and say it to your face.”

The room smelled like woodsmoke and bergamot and the iron that never left his skin.

“What do you want?” he asked.

He knew. He could see it. A healer who withheld information overnight wasn’t offering charity. She was negotiating.

“I want the truth about my mother,” I said. “Records from her trial. Who testified. Who ordered the execution. Why a healer treating your father was sentenced to death for killing him.”

“You think she was innocent.”

“I know she was innocent.”

The silence stretched between us like a held breath. I waited. I’d been waiting five years. I could wait five more seconds.

Then he said something I didn’t expect.

“I think so too.”

My chest cracked. Not the bond this time. Something older. Something sealed shut for five years with silence and discipline and the refusal to hope. Four words and he split it open.

My eyes burned. I would not cry in front of the son of the man who destroyed my family.

“My father was sick before your mother treated him,” he said. Quieter now. Not the Alpha voice. “I was young, but I remember. She was trying to save him. And then she was dead, and no one asked the right questions.”

The look on his face wasn’t political. It was grieving. He’d been carrying this.

I wanted to hate him. But the hate wouldn’t hold its shape anymore. Not with his grief showing through the cracks like light through a broken wall.

“I’ll give you everything I have,” he said. “Records, testimony, access. In exchange, you keep me alive long enough to find whoever is doing this.”

The deal was struck. Not with a handshake. With two people standing on opposite sides of a dead man’s room, both wanting the same enemy for different reasons.

“I need to examine you properly,” I said. “That means hands on.”

He nodded.

I stepped forward. Reached for his wrist to check the pulse at the base of his palm. A healer’s instinct. Diagnostic. Clinical.

My fingers touched his skin.

The bond detonated.

Not a pulse this time. Not a hum. A surge. It went through me like a root breaking through frozen soil. I felt his heartbeat through my fingertips. Beneath it, faint but real, the second heartbeat of his wolf. Drowning. Reaching toward the surface. Reaching toward me.

I couldn’t let go. My fingers tightened around his wrist. My body moved toward him like gravity had shifted and he was the new center.

His free hand came up. His fingers hovered at my jaw, close enough that I could feel the heat without the touch. My whole body strained toward that almost-contact.

“Linden.” My name in his mouth. Low. Rough. Like saying it was the only thing keeping him from closing the distance.

His hand dropped. He stepped back and pulled his wrist from my grip. The loss hit me like a door slamming. My hand hung in empty air. I could still feel the ghost beat. The phantom warmth.

My whole body was shaking.

“What was that?” he asked. His voice was wrecked. Not the Alpha. Not the mask. Just a man who’d been hit by something he didn’t have a name for.

“The bond,” I said. “Reacting to contact.”

“Is it supposed to feel like that?”

I didn’t answer. Because I didn’t know. Nothing I’d ever read described this. The feeling of another person’s heartbeat living inside your hand like it belonged there. The devastation of having it pulled away.

Through the window, across the compound, I could see the greenhouse.

Every hellebore on the north wall had opened at once. Blooms that should have been dormant for weeks. Colors I hadn’t planted. The glass was fogged with warmth that had no source.

Tarn saw it too. He looked from the greenhouse to me. To my shaking hands.

“That was you,” he said.

“That was us,” I said. “And it’s going to be a problem.”