CHAPTER FIVE

I remained in the corridor until the worst of the shaking passed. Ronan stayed a few steps away, silent, giving me space I did not know how to use. The mate bond still pulled between us, warm and steady, but I could not look at him. Kael’s words kept repeating in my head until they felt carved into bone.

Take her if you want her. She is not worth anything.

A Beta appeared at the end of the corridor and cleared his throat. “The Alpha King requires the servant back in the hall. The wine is unfinished.”

Ronan’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. I wiped my face with the edge of my sleeve, straightened my shoulders as best I could, and walked back through the doors on legs that still felt hollow.

The hall had returned to a tense kind of normal. Conversation had resumed, lower than before. Goblets clinked. Someone laughed too loudly. Kael sat in his chair as if the earlier scene had never happened, golden eyes distant and cold. Selene watched me with open satisfaction, her smile sharp. I picked up a fresh pitcher of wine and moved along the tables again, eyes fixed on the floor, trying to become invisible once more. My hands still trembled. Every step felt heavier than the last.

I had almost reached the far end of the high table when a young kitchen boy, no older than ten, came through the side doors carrying a heavy tray of clean goblets. He was rushing, nervous under the eyes of so many powerful Alphas. His small face was tight with concentration. His foot caught on the edge of a thick rug. The tray tilted violently. Glass and metal crashed to the stone floor in a sharp, glittering explosion that cut through every conversation.

A long, jagged shard sliced deep across the boy’s forearm. Bright arterial blood poured onto the flagstones in a rapid stream. He cried out, high and frightened, and stumbled backward, clutching the wound with his free hand. Blood ran between his fingers and dripped steadily onto the floor. Several wolves nearest to him stepped back with wrinkled noses, their faces twisted in distaste. No one moved to help. The hierarchy of the room held them frozen. A servant child was not worth interrupting a summit for.

I did not think.

I set the pitcher down so hard that wine sloshed over the rim and crossed the space before anyone could speak. My bare feet made no sound on the stone. I dropped to my knees beside the child, the impact jarring my already bruised bones, and pressed both hands hard over the bleeding cut. Warm blood coated my palms instantly.

The moment my skin touched his, a fierce heat flared under my hands. It was stronger and hotter than anything I had ever felt in my life. It roared up from somewhere deep inside me, a place I had never known existed. Silver light flickered across my fingers, bright and impossible, like captured moonlight. Pain lanced up my arms in a burning, tearing wave as something transferred from his small body into mine. I felt the wound leave him. I felt it enter me.

The boy’s bleeding stopped within seconds. The deep, ugly cut sealed before my eyes into a thin pink line that looked days old. The skin knitted itself together under my blood-slicked hands.

He stared at me with wide, stunned eyes, voice trembling. “It… it does not hurt anymore.”

I stared at my own hands. The silver light faded slowly, leaving only the echo of pain that now lived under my skin, sharp and deep and real. My heart hammered so hard I felt it in my throat. I had never done anything like this. I had never known I could. The power had simply risen and acted, and now the cost of it was pouring through my veins like liquid fire.

The hall had gone completely silent.

Every conversation died. Every eye turned toward the small scene on the floor. I heard someone inhale sharply. Someone else whispered a disbelieving curse. The weight of their collective stare pressed down on me until it was hard to breathe.

Ronan reached me first. He moved faster than I had ever seen anyone move. He dropped to one knee on the blood-stained stone and caught my shoulders just as the strength left my body in a sudden, terrifying rush. The full cost of whatever I had just done hit me all at once. My vision darkened at the edges. My arms felt too heavy to lift. My legs refused to hold any weight. I sagged forward, and his arms closed around me before I could collapse fully onto the floor.

“I have you,” he said, voice low and close to my ear, steady in a way nothing else in the world felt. “Breathe. Stay with me.”

I tried. The pain in my arms throbbed in time with my pulse, deep and relentless. I could feel every pair of eyes in the hall locked on us. On me. On the boy’s nearly healed arm. On the way Ronan held me against his chest as if I were something fragile and valuable instead of the worthless servant Kael had named me only minutes earlier.

My body went limp. The last of my strength drained away like water through open fingers. I collapsed fully into Ronan’s arms, head falling against his shoulder, the world tilting and dimming around me.

Kael had risen from his chair. I saw him through the darkening edges of my vision. His golden eyes moved from the healed wound on the boy’s arm to Ronan’s hands supporting my weight to my pale, slack face. Something dark and sharp flickered across his expression, a flash of heat that looked almost like jealousy, gone almost as soon as it appeared. He looked away first, jaw tight, as if the sight of Ronan holding me had irritated him in a way he refused to name. He sat back down slowly, fingers curling once around the arm of his chair before he forced them flat again.

Selene’s voice cut through the quiet, high and disbelieving. “What did she just do?”

No one answered her.

Elder Orion stepped forward from the shadows near the far wall, clouded eyes fixed on my hands with sudden, intense recognition. I saw shock on his weathered face, and something deeper, something that looked like the beginning of understanding.

I turned my face into Ronan’s shoulder because I could not bear the weight of their stares any longer. My body felt too heavy, too painful, too strange. The silver light was gone, but the agony remained, deep and real, and with it came a terror I had no name for.

I had not known.

I had never known I could do this.

And now every Alpha in the room had seen it.

Ronan’s arms tightened around me as my eyes fluttered shut. The last thing I heard before the darkness took me completely was the sound of my own shallow breathing and the steady, protective beat of his heart against my cheek.