Chapter 10 Wolfsbane Blood

[Draven's POV]

When the candle went out, Eric left.

The door closed behind him with almost no sound at all, and still I heard it — the way you hear something when it's the last thing left to listen to. The medical room settled into a silence that had weight and texture, the kind that presses in from all sides and doesn't offer anything back.

The medicine bowl on the table had gone lukewarm, a dark residue drying along the inside of the rim. My bandaged hand lay flat on the wood in front of me, the knuckles still pronounced beneath the wrapping, the fingers still. Anyone in this Pack could have told you what it meant when my hands went that quiet. They'd learned to read it the way you learn to read weather.

But this stillness was different. This hand had disobeyed me.

When it had closed around Kaelan's wrist, the grip had been deliberate — enough force to remind an unruly Omega exactly where she stood, enough that I'd felt the fine bones of her wrist against my palm, a fragile architecture that my hand had no difficulty containing. And then, without my permission, the fingers had begun to open. One at a time. Withdrawing from the warmth of her skin with the slow, terrible patience of something that had already made its decision before I'd made mine.

That hadn't been my choice.

That had been Rune.

The loss of control was worse than the anger. Anger, at least, was mine — it came from somewhere I recognized, and I knew how to use it. But my wolf had moved against me, and what was left afterward was something closer to revulsion. Not at him. At what it meant.

My palm still held the memory of her pulse — that stubborn, uneven rhythm that had pressed into my hand even through her struggle, the particular quality of a thing that refuses to yield even when it has no leverage left. It hadn't faded yet. I didn't understand why it hadn't faded.

I moved my eyes from my hand to the letter at the corner of the table.

I had asked for it to be brought. A reminder. Alaric's handwriting covered the page in strokes that looked exactly like him — precise, cold, carrying the particular confidence of a man who has never once doubted his own judgment. The seal at the bottom was the dark red of old blood. I had read this letter at seventeen, and I had known its contents for every year since. But seeing it written into the body of a business correspondence — pressed between ore prices and boundary disputes, offered as a point of persuasion, a detail to sweeten a negotiation — the rage had come up anyway, fast and specific, tightening my throat until the paper in front of me stopped being paper.

I was seventeen. I had ridden half the length of the territory in the dark, the cold cutting straight through my coat and into my chest, my boots worn through at the sole so that every stride sent a line of fire up through my heel, my throat raw from the wind and from breathing too hard for too long. I had kept telling myself, the whole way, that if I pushed faster I would arrive in time.

I hadn't arrived in time.

My father was on his side in the mud, still in his wolf form, the black fur matted into dark, stiff ridges where the blood had dried. The frozen ground beneath him had been soaked through. His claws were dug into the earth — not the loose grip of a body going slack, but the desperate, purposeful furrow of something still trying to move, still trying to cover the last few feet of distance between himself and my mother. He had been crawling toward her. Even at the end.

She was a few feet away from him. Her dress had gone black from the waist down. Her eyes were open, fixed on him, and her hand was extended toward him with the fingers spread, the joints locked in that position as though even the final failure of her body hadn't been enough to make her stop reaching.

They had almost closed the distance.

I stood between them and could not move. The strength had simply left my legs, not dramatically but completely, and I stood there with both their blood on my hands, cooling against my skin, and I looked at the marks they had left in the ground trying to get to each other, and I understood something that I have never since been able to un-understand: it wasn't the enemy that had killed them. It was the bond. My father had loved my mother with the kind of completeness that left no room for caution, and when she was taken, that love had stripped him of every instinct that might have kept him alive. He had walked into a trap because the alternative was unthinkable. And the trap had taken both of them.

They should not have died. If he had kept his reason — if the bond had not made him into something that could be led by a single thread —

The thought that formed in that moment was the coldest thing I had ever felt, and I have never let go of it since.

I would not have a FateMate. I would not become that.

A weakness, once established, becomes the thing that controls you. The bond doesn't offer you a choice — it simply reaches into your chest and closes its hand around whatever matters most, and from that moment forward, your survival is no longer entirely your own.

I had watched my father die for that lesson. I was not going to need to learn it twice.

Kaelan.

The green eyes surfaced without warning, and my fist closed.

I had put her in that cabin. I had made it clear that she was to stay out of my sight, and she had not stayed out of my sight, and the problem was that I could not identify a single moment where I had genuinely wanted her to. Why had she been the one who could sense the moonshade root? Why had she been the one who brought my pack members back from the edge? Why did she keep placing herself in front of me, again and again, in ways I could not dismiss or ignore or file away as irrelevant?

I should have been able to hate her cleanly. She was Alaric's daughter. The logic was simple and the justification was complete.

Rune didn't care about the logic. My body didn't care about the logic.

I wanted to get close to her. I wanted to take her somewhere the world couldn't reach her and keep her there. I wanted to press her back against the whitewashed stone of the cabin wall and feel her fight it — that particular, teeth-clenched resistance she brought to everything, those green eyes cutting into me the way they did when she was cornered and refusing to show it. I thought about what it would look like if I pushed her legs apart and drove her into the wall until she had no footing, until her chest was heaving and her clothes were twisted and she had nowhere to look but at me — whether she'd still be able to hold that expression, or whether something underneath it would finally surface.

The thought hadn't finished forming before my body responded to it. The pressure was immediate and specific, the fabric of my trousers suddenly too close, the friction of it almost unbearable. I breathed through it, jaw set.

Alpha instinct. That was what it was. She had a spine that had never once bent, and the animal part of me had decided, without my input, that it wanted to be the thing that found the limit of that. I wanted to take her apart until she was breathing in time with me, until her knuckles were white and her voice had gone rough and she was calling my name because there was nothing else left in her mouth to say.

From somewhere deeper than thought, Rune's voice: She's in the cabin. She's right there. Go now.

I went still.

Not just the desire to have her. The desire to go to her. To move toward the cabin, close the distance, put myself between her and whatever might come through the door.

To protect her.

That realization arrived with a force that was worse than the arousal, because it meant something the arousal didn't. Wanting her body was instinct — her scent, the particular quality of her breathing, the way her pulse had felt against my palm, these were things that operated below the level of decision and could be managed as such. But wanting to keep her safe was something else entirely. That was a direction. That was a choice the wolf was trying to make on behalf of the man, and the man was not going to allow it.

Rune slammed against my ribs, claws dragging at something that felt like the lining of my stomach, and the sound he made inside my chest was not a growl so much as a demand — mine, she is mine, no one else, I will destroy anyone who comes near her — and I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and held it there while he raged, while the pressure built until my breathing came apart and I had to reconstruct it consciously, one breath at a time.

I already knew what he wanted me to admit. He had been trying to get me there for days.

Not just possession. Protection. The two together, which was the version that couldn't be contained or managed or redirected, the version that had driven my father across half a frozen field toward an ambush he must have known was waiting for him, because the alternative was leaving her.

I would not become my father.

I fixed my eyes on the seal at the bottom of Alaric's letter and I took everything — her face, the line of her back, the look she'd had at the creek with water running down her collarbone and mud on her jaw, the particular set of her eyes when she refused to lower them — and I pressed it down. All of it. Pressed it into the deepest place I could find and held it there until the edges stopped burning. The harder I pushed, the more clearly each image held its shape, illuminated against the dark like something that generates its own light, and I understood that this was not going to work the way I needed it to work.

From tomorrow, she was a prisoner. Only that. I had to be able to think of her name without my body answering it. I had to scrape her scent out from somewhere it had apparently taken up residence, and I had to kill every impulse that moved toward her before it could finish forming.

Rune's response to this was not subtle. I won't let you. I will tear apart anything you put in the way. She is mine and you are going to destroy us both and I will not —

I stood up and took my coat from the back of the chair.

He howled. The sound went through my nervous system like a current, every nerve ending registering the protest at once, and I pulled the coat on and did not stop moving.

The air outside the door was cold and carrying snow, the smell of frost and damp timber coming up from the ground where it had started to freeze again overnight. I went down the steps, my boots finding the hard, uneven surface of the iced path, and I walked.

Rune's voice fell behind me as I moved — not quieter, but more distant, the way sound changes when you put walls between yourself and its source. He was still there. He would keep being there.

I kept walking. Toward the row of buildings on the far side of the compound. Toward Nyx's door.

I needed a body. A scent. Something that could go over the top of what was currently living in my head and replace it, layer by layer, until Kaelan's trace had been buried deep enough that Rune couldn't find it and use it against me.

The frost cracked under my boots with each step, sharp and clean in the dark.

I did not look back toward the cabin.