Chapter 3

Lucia's POV

I scrambled backward so fast my elbow cracked against the floorboards.

The man didn't move. He just opened his eyes, slow and unbothered, and looked at me like I was the one who'd done something strange.

Gray morning light leaked through the gaps in my cabin wall. I was still in last night's clothes, the hem torn where I'd ripped strips to bind a wound. A wound that had been on a wolf. A wolf the size of a horse.

There was no wolf now. Just a man on my floor pallet, the blanket slipped to his hips, bandages crossing a chest that had no business on a man who'd nearly died twelve hours ago.

"You—" My voice cracked. "You're the wolf. From last night."

He sat up. The bandages pulled tight over muscle as he moved, and he didn't so much as wince. He gave a short, stiff nod, like it cost him to admit it.

Then his brows drew down. "Who are you?" His voice was low and flat. "A human. You healed me."

It wasn't a question. It landed like an accusation.

I knew that tone. I'd grown up on that tone. Every wolf in Graywind used it on me — the wolfless girl, the waste of rations, the thing that shouldn't be in the room. I'd hoped, stupidly, that a stranger might be different.

"You're welcome," I said. "For the part where I cut the rot out of your leg so you wouldn't bleed out in a ditch."

He said nothing.

"Funny," I went on. "Last night you nuzzled my hand like a big dog begging for scraps. Now you can't look at me without curling your lip."

Something flickered over his face. Annoyance, maybe. "That was my wolf," he said. "Not me."

"Convenient."

"It's the truth." He dragged a hand down his jaw. For a second the cold cracked, and there was only tiredness underneath. "I was ambushed. Rogues. On the border. They had something on their blades. Poison."

I waited for more. It didn't come.

"Marty," he said finally, when the silence stretched too long. A name, and nothing else. No pack, no rank, no reason a wolf that size had been dying alone in my territory. "And you?"

"Lucia."

"Lucia." He pushed himself upright, testing his weight, and reached for the shirt I'd folded by the hearth. "I'll have coin sent to you. For your trouble." He was already turning toward the door.

"You're still bleeding."

He stopped.

I pointed at the dressing on his side, where a thin dark line had begun to seep through the cloth. "The venom isn't out. Not all of it. You walk out that door and you'll be face-down in the woods by midday."

"I'll manage."

"You won't." I crossed my arms. "I'm responsible for my patient."

His mouth twitched. "Your patient."

"I'm not a healer yet." Heat climbed my neck, because it sounded grander out loud than it had in my head. I lifted my chin anyway. "But I will be. I sit the qualification soon, and I'm going to pass, and then I'm a real one. So no. I'm not letting you drop dead on a road and put a black mark on my record before I even have one."

For a long moment he just looked at me. I couldn't read him at all. That bothered me more than the sneering had.

Then he sat back down. Like it was his idea.

"Fine," he said. "Change it."

I knelt to peel back the dressing, and that was a mistake, because up close he was all warm skin and hard muscle and a heartbeat thudding steady under my fingers. My own heart picked that exact moment to start hammering. I kept my eyes on the wound. Only on the wound. Not on the chest I'd apparently spent half the night sleeping against.

"Hold still," I muttered, mostly to myself.

His skin was hot under my hands. He smelled like rain and pine and something darker underneath, something that turned my stomach over in a slow, unfamiliar way. I pressed the fresh poultice down harder than I needed to.

The link hit me mid-motion.

A cold thread of the pack mind-link, the steward's voice, flat and bored. Back to the border. Now. The graves don't dig themselves.

I closed my eyes. Of course.

"I have to go." I sat back on my heels and wiped my hands on a rag. "Cleanup duty. They'll dock my rations if I'm late." I stopped before the rest of it could spill out. "Just — stay here."

His brows rose.

"I mean it." I gathered the salve, the rags, my one good blade. "Rogues have been hitting the border every few nights. You're half-healed and you reek of blood. You go wandering out there, you'll finish the job they started." I lifted the blade to make the point, then thought better of it and lowered it. "Stay. Rest. You leave when I say you're well enough to leave. Understand?"

He stared at me like no one had handed him an order in his entire life.

I didn't wait to find out. I shouldered the door open and stepped into the gray, and behind me, I could have sworn I heard him let out something that was almost a laugh.

Marcus's POV：

The girl was barely out of sight before I reached for my Beta.

"Marcus." His voice flooded the link the second I opened it, ragged with panic. "Goddess. You're alive. Where are you? Give me a location and I'll have a team there within the hour."

"No team," I told him. "Not yet."

"My prince—"

"Wait for my word. Take this chance to observe the palace. Perhaps someone will slip up. And see if there are more ambushers."

The poison had been no rogue's lucky strike. I'd known that before I hit the ground. Someone had wanted me dead, and they'd taken their time arranging it. They knew my full travel itinerary, and the ambush was timed perfectly. I already had a suspect in mind.

I decided to extend my "disappearance" a while longer and have my Beta investigate quietly in the palace to confirm my suspicions. Someone had wanted me dead, and they'd taken their time arranging it.

"...Understood. We're ready the moment you call."

I cut the link.

"So," my wolf drawled, stretching somewhere behind my ribs. "We'll lie here and do exactly what the little healer tells us. But you snarled at her. Make that make sense."

"She's a stranger," I said. "She pulled me out of a ditch. That makes her useful. It doesn't make her safe."

"She held your head and called you a good wolf," he said, far too pleased with himself. "You liked it."

"You liked it. You begged for it. Like a dog. In front of a human." I shut my eyes. "We will never speak of it again."

"I like her," my wolf said simply. "I want to be near her. Be kinder."

I didn't answer that.

But I thought about her hands. Small, sure, steadier than half the trained healers in my father's court. The way she'd whispered big guy, hold on in the dark when she thought I was too far gone to hear it. The way she'd just lifted her chin and ordered the future Lycan King to sit down and stay.

Cute. The word surfaced before I could kill it, and I scowled at the ceiling.

There was no wolf on her. No scent, no pull, none of the things the bond was supposed to feel like. The Goddess didn't tie her sons to wolfless human girls. I told myself that, firmly.

But my wolf had gone quiet. Not sullen-quiet. Content. He hadn't settled like this in years, not since before the crown, before the knives, before I learned to sleep with one eye open.

I told myself it meant nothing.

Curled up somewhere behind my ribs, warmer than he had any right to be, my wolf disagreed.