The warrior on the table had a gash across his ribs that wouldn't close. Silver fragment, probably. I could smell it beneath the blood—that sour metallic tang that meant poison spreading faster than the body could fight it.
I pressed a clean cloth against the wound and reached for the silverleaf extract. My hands were steady. They always were when I was working.
"Hold still," I told him. He was young, maybe twenty, and his face had gone grey. "This is going to burn."
He nodded. Didn't speak. Smart.
I poured the extract directly into the wound. He hissed through his teeth but didn't move. Good. Movement would only spread the poison faster.
The air in the clinic shifted.
It wasn't a sound or a scent. It was pressure. The kind that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up and your wolf instinctively bare her throat in submission.
Except I didn't have a wolf anymore.
I kept working. Ground the wolfsbane root into the poultice. Mixed it with yarrow paste. Spread it across the wound in smooth, even strokes. The warrior's breathing steadied. The grey color started to fade from his face.
The pressure didn't move.
I could feel it at the doorway. Watching.
I counted to thirty in my head while I wrapped the bandages. Checked the knots twice. Made sure the poultice was secure. Then I looked up.
A man stood in the doorway.
Tall. Dark hair. Perfectly still in a way that reminded me of predators before they struck. His eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that should have made me look away.
I didn't.
"Do you need treatment or directions?" I asked.
His expression didn't change. "Neither."
"Then you're blocking the door."
A pause. Long enough that I went back to checking the warrior's pulse. Steady now. The extract was working.
When I looked up again, the man was gone.
Sera appeared from the back room, carrying a basket of clean bandages. She glanced at the empty doorway, then at me.
"You all right?"
"Fine," I said. "Check this wound in six hours. If the fragment hasn't started surfacing by tomorrow morning, we'll need to go deeper."
Sera nodded. She didn't ask about the man.
I went back to grinding herbs.
But that night, lying on my cot in the dark, I pressed my thumb against my wrist and tried not to think about the way the hollow space inside me had stirred. Just once. Like something waking up before it remembered it was dead.
I told myself it meant nothing.
He came back the next day.
I was restocking the supply cabinet when the pressure returned. I didn't turn around.
"Sera handles donations," I said. "Her office is in the back."
"I'm not here to see Sera."
I set down the jar of dried silverleaf and turned. He was standing in the same spot as yesterday. Same stillness. Same eyes that saw too much.
"Then what do you want?"
"To discuss the clinic's supply chain. You're running low on wolfsbane extract."
I was. We'd used the last of it two days ago on a rogue attack victim. But I hadn't told anyone outside the clinic.
"How do you know that?"
"I pay attention."
I studied him. Expensive clothes, but not showy. Posture that suggested he'd never had to fight for space in a room because space was given to him automatically. And that aura—leashed, but impossible to fully conceal.
No one with that much power visited a border clinic to discuss herb procurement.
"Who are you?"
"A donor."
"Try again."
His mouth almost curved. Almost. "Someone who would like to help."
I turned back to the cabinet. "We don't need help. We need supplies. If you can provide them, talk to Sera. If you can't, stop wasting my time."
He left.
But he came back the next day. And the day after that.
By the eighth day, I'd had enough.
I set down my mortar and pestle mid-grind and turned to face him. He was leaning against the doorframe, watching me work with that same unreadable expression.
"Tell me who you are and what you actually want," I said. "Or don't come back."
Silence.
Then: "Sullivan Cox. Lycan Prince of the Eastern Realm."
I went very still.
Lycan Prince. Sovereign authority over every Alpha on the continent. The kind of power that could crush a pack with a single word.
The kind of power I'd spent six years serving while it bled me dry.
"And what you want?" My voice came out flat.
He straightened. Took one step into the clinic. The pressure in the air increased, but it wasn't threatening. It was just—there. Undeniable.
"You," he said quietly. "You're my mate."
The hollow space inside me went cold.
I picked up my mortar and pestle and went back to grinding.
Four minutes passed. Maybe five. He didn't move. Didn't speak.
Finally, I set down the pestle. I didn't turn around.
"The last bond the Moon Goddess gave me was used to kill my father."
Silence.
"I will not be a mate again. I will not be a Luna. I will not be used."
More silence. Then, quiet and deliberate:
"What are your terms?"
I turned around.
He was watching me with an expression I couldn't name. Not pity. Not hunger. Something else. Something that looked almost like—respect.
I met his eyes.
"No mark without my explicit consent. No decisions about my life without my participation. No authority deployed against me. Ever."
I waited for the negotiation. The conditions. The fine print that would turn my terms into his.
It didn't come.
"Agreed," Sullivan said.
I studied his face. Looked for the lie. The calculation. The moment when he would take what I'd just given him and use it as leverage.
I didn't find it.
My chest tightened. Not with hope—I'd learned better than that. But with something that felt dangerously close to possibility.
"You can come back tomorrow," I said finally.
His expression didn't change. But something in his eyes shifted. Warmed.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
Then he left.
I stood there for a long time after he was gone, staring at the empty doorway.
Then I pressed my thumb against my wrist and went back to work.
