Foxglove

The Alpha’s quarters smelled like him. Pine resin. Leather. The warm scent underneath that I’d been trying not to name since yesterday. It was everywhere. Soaked into the walls, the air. Like walking into the inside of his skin.

I stood in the doorway with my one bag over my shoulder and my pulse doing something it had no business doing.

A change of clothes. A pouch of dried herbs. My formula journal. I was about to live inside the scent of a man I was supposed to hate.

Luna tradition said I moved in the same day. It also said the Alpha and his mate shared a bed. I’d been preparing for that fight the entire walk from the courtyard.

The fight didn’t come.

Tarn stood by the far wall. He nodded toward a door on the left. “That’s yours. It locks from the inside.”

I looked at the door. Looked at him. At the way his jaw was set like maintaining the distance between us was costing him something.

“You’re giving me my own room.”

“I’m giving you a door you control. Use it however you want.”

Alphas didn’t yield space. The Alpha’s quarters were his territory, and the Luna existed inside it at his permission. That was tradition. That was law.

Tarn had just handed me a lock. And the way he said it, low and careful, made me think it wasn’t just for my protection. It was for his.

I filed that. I didn’t thank him. But I filed it.

My room was small. A bed. A table. A window that faced the greenhouse. I set my bag down and looked at the fogged glass across the yard. My foxglove was in there.

Foxglove. Beautiful in a garden. Lethal in a cup. My mother used to say it was the most honest plant she grew. It never pretended to be harmless.

Neither would I.

I found the small kitchen between our rooms. From my herb pouch I pulled dried chamomile and valerian root. Ground them together in the stone mortar I’d carried from the greenhouse. Together, in precise proportions at the right temperature, the compounds became a diagnostic instrument. Whatever was in his body would react, and if I watched closely enough, I’d be able to read it the way I read soil.

I heated the water by touch. Poured. The liquid went amber, then darker. Sharp and green. Not inviting. Not meant to be.

I carried the cup to Tarn’s room. He was at the table reading maps. Territory lines. He looked up when I entered.

“Drink this,” I said.

“What’s in it?”

“Something that will tell me whether you’re as sick as you smell.”

His jaw tightened. He hadn’t expected me to name it so bluntly.

He took the cup from my hands. Our fingers brushed. A half-second of contact, the edge of his thumb against the inside of my wrist, and the warmth surged through me so hard my vision blurred.

I pulled my hand back. Wrapped it around the edge of the counter behind me and held on.

He noticed. His eyes tracked my hand to the counter, then back to my face. Something flickered in the gray. Not concern. Recognition.

He drank in one swallow. Didn’t ask the dose. Didn’t hesitate. Either he trusted me or he was more desperate than I’d thought.

I watched.

His pupils dilated within thirty seconds. Faster than they should have. His scent shifted. The pine receded. The iron bloomed. Under the leather, under the cold authority, his body was telling me everything his mouth wouldn’t.

His hand on the table trembled. He caught it. Pulled it into a fist.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“I’m not finished.”

I stepped closer. Not for the bond. For the reading. That’s what I told myself.

I leaned in and breathed the way my mother taught me. Slow. Deep. But this close, with my face inches from his throat, every clinical instinct I had was coming apart.

Pine. Leather. Woodsmoke. Those were his. Underneath: iron. Sour. A faint sweetness, like a flower dried improperly. Something botanical that had been altered.

But between the sickness and the poison, the warm scent. The one that made my lips part and my body lean forward when my mind was screaming to lean back. I was close enough to feel the heat rising from his neck. Close enough that if I turned my head, my mouth would be on his pulse.

I heard his breathing change. Slower. Deliberate. Like he was controlling every inhale to keep himself from moving.

I stepped back. My hands were steady. The rest of me wanted to step forward again.

The poison was plant-based. A compound administered in doses small enough to be invisible to anyone who wasn’t trained to smell the difference between medicine and murder. Someone with a healer’s knowledge was poisoning the Alpha.

“Well?” he said.

I looked at him. The gray eyes. The scar. The tremor he thought he could hide. He was watching me the way a man watches someone who just found the trapdoor under his floor.

I could tell him everything. Or I could hold it. Understand what kind of weapon I was carrying before I decided who to aim it at.

“You’re sick,” I said. “I need time to understand how sick. I’ll need my greenhouse every day, and I’ll need to examine you again.”

Not a lie. Not the whole truth. Giving him enough to keep me close without giving him everything.

He studied me. Then he nodded.

I left the room, closed the door between us, and turned the lock.

Then I stood there. Hand flat on the wood. I could feel him on the other side. Not hear him. Feel him. The warmth of his presence through solid oak. The bond was a living thing now, and it didn’t care about locked doors.

I pressed my forehead against the wood and breathed until my pulse settled.

On the other side of the compound, my foxglove was blooming in the dark. The most honest plant I grew. It never pretended to be harmless.

I wasn’t going to either. But I was starting to wonder if the most dangerous thing in Brackenmoor wasn’t the poison in his blood. It was whatever was growing in mine.