Healed

The first time it worked, I didn’t celebrate.I didn’t breathe easier.I didn’t even let myself feel relief.Because with something like this, relief was dangerous—it made you careless, it made you believe you had won when in truth you had only managed to hold the line a little longer.But I knew the moment I saw the change in him.Not dramatic.Not obvious.Just… controlled.His pulse didn’t dip the way it had been doing every few hours, his breathing held steady without that subtle drag beneath it, and the faint gray undertone that had been clinging to his skin for days finally began to lift, replaced by something closer to normal, something that wouldn’t draw attention if anyone looked too closely.That was all I needed.Not a cure.Not yet.Just something that kept the poison quiet.Something that made him look alive enough.“You’re staring,” he said, his voice low but steady, as he adjusted the cuff of his sleeve with slow, deliberate movements that told me he was still far from

Clearing

Night was the worst part.Not because the Pack grew quiet, or because the corridors emptied and the world seemed to slow down into something almost peaceful, but because the moment the last of the noise faded, the poison stopped pretending.It moved.Not in a way I could see, not in a way anyone else would understand, but I felt it in the way his body reacted, in the way the control we maintained during the day slipped through our fingers the moment the suppression began to wear thin, like something inside him had been waiting patiently for the chance to take over again.The first time it happened, I thought I had done something wrong.By the third night, I understood.This wasn’t failure.This was the nature of it.“You should be asleep.”His voice came out strained, barely holding together, but still carrying that quiet authority he never seemed to lose, even when his body was clearly betraying him.I didn’t look up from where I sat beside the bed, my fingers already resting against

Feelings

It started as something I tried to ignore.At first, I told myself it was nothing more than proximity, nothing more than the effect of spending too many hours in the same room, breathing the same air, listening to the same uneven rhythm of his heartbeat as I worked tirelessly to keep him alive. I told myself it was exhaustion, that my body was simply reacting to stress, to fear, to the constant pressure sitting on my chest like a weight I couldn’t push off.But the truth had a way of slipping through the cracks of denial.And this truth was loud.It flickered in my chest at the most inconvenient moments—when I leaned over him to check his pulse, when my fingers brushed against his wrist just a second too long, when his voice, rough and low from pain, called my name in the quiet of the night. It wasn’t steady, not yet, but it was there. Alive. Growing.The mate bond.I hated it.I hated how my body recognized him before my mind could catch up, how something deep inside me responded to

Reminiscing

If someone had told me weeks ago that I would be sitting at the edge of Dante’s bed night after night, watching the rise and fall of his chest like it was the only thing keeping me anchored, I would have laughed in their face and gone right back to my work without a second thought, because back then, our lives never overlapped in any real way.We lived under the same roof, yes, but that was where the connection ended.He was always gone.If not physically, then mentally.Dante existed in maps and war strategies, in whispered meetings with commanders, in long rides to territories that either needed to be secured or subdued, and even when he was in the Packhouse, his presence felt distant, like he was already halfway to the next battle before the current one had even settled.And I… I had my laboratory.That was my world.A contained, controlled space where things made sense, where results could be measured, where effort had direction, and where emotions didn’t interfere with outcomes;

Focus

It didn’t happen all at once.It never does.It was gradual, almost unfairly subtle at first, like something shifting in the background of my life without asking for permission, like a sound you only notice after it has already been there for a long time.Dante and I were always together now.Always.Not because we chose it in any romantic sense, not because anything had been spoken or agreed upon between us, but because there was no other option that made sense anymore; his body still needed constant attention, and I was the only one who understood what was happening inside him, the only one who could stabilize what the poison tried to undo every night.So I stayed.And he allowed it.That was the strange part.Not resistance.Not dominance.Just… acceptance.And in that forced closeness, something else began to grow.Something neither of us had control over.At first, I thought I could manage it the same way I managed everything else in my life—by categorizing it, by analyzing it, b

Gradually

The change didn’t announce itself loudly. It came quietly, almost suspiciously so, like something slipping back into place after being broken for too long. At first, I didn’t trust it. Not even a little. Because I had seen what the poison did to him when it was at its worst—the way it twisted through his body at night, the way it stole color from his face, the way even breathing seemed like a negotiation between pain and endurance. So when the nights started getting quieter, when the tension in his body began to ease, when his breathing no longer carried that sharp, broken edge, I kept waiting for it to return. But it didn’t. Instead, something else happened. He began to sleep. Properly. Deeply. Without the constant interruptions of pain dragging him back into consciousness. The first time I noticed it, I stayed seated longer than usual, just watching him, my fingers still hovering over the herbs I had been preparing out of habit. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm,