Not Broken

I run.

I don't remember deciding to run. One moment I'm standing in front of the whole gathered court, humiliated, shaking, and the next my feet are carrying me through the crowd, past the stone pillars, out through the temple gates and into the dark trees beyond.

Branches claw at my arms. My lungs burn. I don't care. I just need to be anywhere but there.

"Aurelia! Wait!"

Nyssa's voice chases after me, but I don't stop. I can't stop. If I stop, I'll have to feel this, and I don't know how to feel this and still keep breathing.

She catches up anyway. She always does. Her hand grabs my wrist and yanks me to a stop under a tree so old its roots crack the ground like broken bones.

"Let go of me," I say. My voice comes out cracked and small.

"No." Her golden-brown eyes are wet. "I am not letting go of you. Not tonight."

"Nyssa—"

"He humiliated you in front of everyone." Her hands are shaking now, or maybe mine are. "In front of every pack. And then that mark—Aurelia, what was that mark?"

"I don't know." I press my hand against my collarbone, where the burn has settled into something duller, something that pulses in time with my heart. "I don't know what I am anymore."

"You are my friend," she says, fierce and immediate, like there's no other answer worth considering. "That is what you are. Whatever else is happening, that does not change."

I want to believe her. I want it so badly it hurts worse than the rejection did. But I saw Malric's face. I saw how carefully he watched me, like a man finally finding something he lost a long time ago.

"We have to keep moving," I say instead. "If the Council wants me, they will send someone. I won't wait around to find out what happens next."

"Then we go together."

"Nyssa, no. You have a life. A family. You cannot just—"

"Watch me," she says, and there is no arguing with that voice. I have known her since we were children. I know when Nyssa has already made up her mind. This is one of those times.

So we run together. Through the black trees, away from Brightmane territory, away from the temple and the throne and the man who looked at me like I mattered and then said I was nothing. We run until the moons dip low and my legs feel like they belong to someone else.

We don't get far enough.

The first scout drops from the trees without warning, landing in a crouch that makes no sound at all. Nyssa yelps and stumbles back into me. I catch her, and that's when I see the others—four, five, maybe more, closing in from every side, their eyes glowing pale gold in the dark.

"Well," says the one who dropped from the trees. He's tall, scarred along one cheek, and he's smiling like this is the best part of his night. "Look what wandered into Shadowfang land."

"We don't want trouble," I say. My voice shakes. I hate that it shakes.

"Of course you don't." He circles us slowly. "Nobody ever wants trouble. And yet here you are."

"Please," Nyssa says, gripping my arm. "We're just passing through."

"Through Shadowfang territory. At night. Two lone wolves." He clicks his tongue. "That's not passing through. That's trespassing."

"We didn't know—"

"Doesn't matter what you know." His grin widens. "Matters what the Alpha wants to do with you. And he does love new faces."

I don't get a chance to argue. Rough hands grab my arms. I fight, twisting hard, but there are too many of them and I am tired down to my bones. Nyssa screams beside me, and I scream her name, and then something hits the back of my skull and the trees tilt sideways and go dark.

I wake up on my knees on a cold stone floor.

My head throbs. My wrists are bound behind me with rope that bites into the skin. I blink hard, trying to make the room stop spinning, and slowly it comes into focus—a wide hall lit by torches, its walls carved from raw black rock, its ceiling lost somewhere in shadow.

"Nyssa," I whisper.

"Here." Her voice comes from beside me, tight with fear. "I'm here."

Good. She's here. She's alive. I let that thought hold me together.

At the far end of the hall, on a throne made of twisted, blackened wood, sits a wolf who looks like he was built for war and never told it ended. Scars crisscross his face and neck, pale against dark skin. One eye is clouded, blind. The other watches me like I'm something he intends to use.

"Alpha Voss," one of the scouts says, bowing. "Found these two crossing our border."

"So I see." His voice is low and rough, like stone grinding against stone. He rises from the throne and walks toward us, slow, unhurried. Whatever fear I have left, it triples with every step he takes. "Healer's cloak," he says, nodding at my ruined robes. "You're a healer."

"An assistant," I say. "Not a full healer."

"Close enough."

"Please," Nyssa says. "Let us go. We haven't done anything—"

"You crossed into my land uninvited." He crouches in front of me, close enough that I can see the scar tissue puckering around his blind eye. "That is not nothing. But I am feeling generous tonight."

"Generous how?" I ask, because it seems safer to keep him talking than to sit in silence and wait for whatever comes next.

"I have wolves in my pack who are dying," he says. "Cursed. Something in their blood is eating them from the inside, and no healer I've brought in has been able to stop it. You're going to look at them."

"I told you, I'm not a full healer. I don't know if I can—"

"Then you'd better hope you can." His hand closes around my chin, tilting my face up to his. His grip isn't gentle, but it isn't cruel either—just absolute, like he's already decided this conversation is over. "Heal my wolves, and you and your friend walk out of here alive. Fail, and I decide you're not worth the food it takes to keep you."

"That's not fair," Nyssa says, straining against the wolves holding her back. "She just told you she's not trained for this!"

"Life isn't fair, little wolf. Ask her." He tips his head toward me without looking away from my face. "Word travels fast. I hear the Lycan King rejected a girl tonight, in front of every pack in Vhalaris. That true?"

Heat rushes to my face. Shame, sharp and sudden, twists in my chest. "Yes."

"And yet here you sit, still breathing, still fighting." Something shifts in his expression—not kindness, exactly, but something close to respect. "Maybe you're tougher than you look."

"Or maybe I don't have a choice."

"Nobody ever does." He releases my chin and stands. "Cut them loose. Bring her to the healing chambers. If she's lying about what she can do, we'll find out soon enough."

The ropes fall away from my wrists. I rub the raw skin, my heart hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat.

"Aurelia," Nyssa whispers, "you don't have to do this. We can run again—"

"And where?" I say quietly. "We have nowhere else, Nyssa. At least here, I might be useful. At least here, I get to choose what happens next."

She doesn't look convinced. Honestly, neither am I. But it's the only plan I have, so I stand, and I let the guards lead me deeper into the fortress, toward whatever is waiting for me in the dark.

The healing chambers smell like sickness and old blood.

Six wolves lie on stone slabs, their skin gray, their breathing shallow and wet. Black veins spread beneath their skin like cracks in ice, branching out from wounds that look far older than they should.

"This started three months ago," Voss says behind me. "One wolf, then another. Whatever's doing this, it spreads."

I kneel beside the nearest wolf—a young man, barely older than me, his eyes glassy and unfocused. My hands are shaking as I reach for him. I have no training for this. I don't know what I'm doing. But I place my palm against his chest anyway, because there is nothing else left to try.

The moment my skin touches his, something happens.

It isn't like healing a cut or setting a bone. It's like falling. Images crash into me—a battle, blood-soaked snow, a blade dipped in something dark and wrong, a voice screaming a name I don't recognize. I gasp and nearly pull away, but something keeps my hand in place, some instinct older than my own fear.

I see the wound as it happened. I see the poison entering his blood, cold and clever, designed to spread slow and kill slower. And underneath all of it, I feel his pain like it's my own—not just his body's pain, but the fear of a boy who thought he was going to die alone in the snow.

I don't decide to heal him. My body does it without asking me first, pulling the poison toward my palm, drawing it out thread by thread like unpicking a knot.

He gasps and opens his eyes. Really opens them, clear for the first time.

"What—" he starts.

"Don't move," I whisper, still shaking. "Just breathe."

Behind me, I hear Voss let out a slow breath.

"Well," he says. "I'll be damned."

I look down at my own hands like they belong to a stranger. Because for the first time in twenty-three years, I finally believe something I never let myself believe before.

I am not broken.

I never was.