Chapter 2

By the time I got back to Blackthorn Keep, the rain had settled into my bones. I was burning with fever, shaking badly enough that I barely made it into bed.

Sometime after midnight, the door opened and Kane came in smelling of cedar, wet leather, and winter air. The moment he touched my forehead, his expression changed.

“You have a fever.”

A day earlier, that might have softened me. Now it felt almost obscene.

“How surprising,” I said. “The Alpha does know how to worry.”

His jaw hardened. “Where were you tonight?”

“Near enough to the council hall to hear the truth.” My throat hurt, but I made myself keep going. “Tell me, Kane. What am I to you?”

For a moment he said nothing.

At last he spoke in the calm, controlled tone he used when he believed he was being reasonable. “You are my mate. You are the lawful Luna of the Northlands. Your authority, your place in Blackthorn Keep, your standing before the council—none of that changes.”

I looked at him and felt something inside me harden past grief.

Then he said, “If you can make room for Selena, things between us can remain as they are.”

That was his compromise.

He would leave me the title, the power, the public honor. He would even leave me his name. He simply would not choose me. He spoke as though he were offering fairness, as though asking me to accept another woman in my marriage was no more than a practical arrangement.

Before I could answer, the door flew open.

A guard stepped in, pale and out of breath. “Alpha. Miss Selena was attacked near the southern border. She was stabbed in the chest. They’ve brought her to the medical wing.”

I saw panic hit Kane before he moved. The chair behind him overturned as he turned for the door.

At the threshold he stopped just long enough to pull the blanket higher over me, an old habit his body had not forgotten even if his heart had. “Send a physician,” he said to the guard. “She still has a fever.”

Then he was gone.

I should have stayed where I was. Instead I wrapped a robe around myself and followed.

The medical wing was bright with lamplight and blood. Through the half-open door, I saw Kane carrying Selena in his arms, her dress dark with it, her face drained white.

He laid her down with an open care he had never once shown me.

Healer Hayes examined her, then looked up grimly. “She’s human. The wound is too deep. Ordinary treatment won’t close it.”

“What will?” Kane asked.

“Alpha blood might force healing.” Hayes hesitated. “If we take enough, you’ll be weakened for weeks. It may affect shifting.”

“Will it keep her alive?”

“Yes.”

“Then do it.”

No one could stop him after that. He tore open the collar of his shirt himself. When Hayes said the blood had to come from near the heart, the whole room went silent. Kane did not flinch.

I stood outside and watched the blade break skin.

Blood streamed into the glass bowl. His face went pale, but his eyes never left Selena. Not once. Not when his hands tightened on the arm of the chair. Not when sweat gathered at his temples. Not when the healer warned him to breathe slowly or risk passing out. He endured it all as though none of it mattered beside the woman on the bed.

When the medicine was finally mixed and poured between Selena’s lips, she coughed, shuddered, and opened her eyes.

Kane bent over her at once, brushed the damp hair away from her face, and said in a voice so low and gentle it barely sounded like him, “It’s all right. I’m here.”

That was enough.

For three years I had told myself Kane’s roughness was only another form of love. Watching him beside Selena stripped that lie down to the bone. He knew perfectly well how to be gentle. He had simply never chosen to be that man with me.

I turned and went back to my room before anyone noticed me in the doorway.

The fever was still there, but it no longer felt like the worst pain in my body. The full moon was coming. When it rose, I would no longer be Kane Blackwood’s Luna.

After that, who he bled for would have nothing to do with me.