To heal a Rogue

EDELINA

I dialed the number myself with no preamble, or patience left in me for pleasantries.

”Why,” I demanded the second the line connected, ”are you threatening my son?”

”We were going to call you next, actually,” the man on the other end said, unbothered by my tone in a way that irritated me more than outright defiance would have. ”We’re not the sort of people to be messed with, Luna. If that is of course what you still currently identify as.”

I half scoffed. Was that his excuse of threatening me?

”You’d better keep that useless pride of yours in check,” I said. ”We need each other right now, whether either of us particularly enjoys the arrangement. Act up again, and understand I can play a far crueler game than you’re prepared for.”

”Did you call to threaten us, then?”

He was one to talk after pulling the same exact card.

”No,” I said. ”I called to give you exactly what you wanted. The bite.”

The silence stretched a beat on his end and I could just smell some calculation happening behind it.

”Where can we meet?” He finally caved.

”Where we first met.”

I didn’t need to say the name out loud. He already knew. The name was Bottles; That grimy little human club we’d first arranged this entire alliance inside, chosen precisely because no self-respecting werewolf would ever think to look there.

I ended the call and sat with the phone in my lap for a moment, staring at the needle still taped into the back of my hand, the tube running up toward the bag hanging beside the bed. I pulled it free myself, wincing as the tape tugged at skin gone thin and papery in places it never used to be, and pressed a folded tissue against the small bead of blood that welled up in its place.

Getting dressed took longer than it should have. My hands weren’t as steady as I wanted them to be tonight, and every motion felt like it cost me more than it once had. But I managed it. I wore a black dress, with a dark coat over it, and esmured my hair was pinned back into something presentable. Only then did I make my way out to the reception desk with as much composure as I could still perform.

The nurse on duty rose the second she saw me crossing the floor.

”Luna Edelina, you can’t possibly be thinking of leaving for somewhere tonight. Your levels haven’t stabilized, and the doctor specifically—”

”I am dying,” I said, cutting her off before she could finish whatever rehearsed concern she’d been building toward. ”That does not mean this facility gets to become my hospice before I’ve even finished the business of living in it. I will be back for treatment. Tonight however, I intend to enjoy something entirely vain and entirely mine. Life.”

She hesitated, glancing toward the phone on her desk like she was debating whether to call someone higher up the chain than herself.

”But... where are you going,” she asked instead, ”for your own safety? You’re royal blood, Luna, and given the circumstances with the King—”

”You needn’t trouble yourself over whether I end up dead in some gutter tonight,” I said. ”If the royals genuinely cared what happened to me, I wouldn’t be housed in this backwater excuse for a healer’s shack in the first place.”

I expected that to be enough. But I was wrong. She still didn’t drop it. There seemed to be some stubborn professional instinct keeping her rooted, and something about the persistence of it needled at me harder than it should have. It didn’t feel like concern anymore. It felt like surveillance dressed up in a soft voice and a clipboard.

It was the way she looked at me that finally made the irritation settle into something colder.

Her eyes flicked over me, taking inventory of my clothes, my shoes, the small bag I’d already packed. She wasn’t looking at me like a healer assessing a patient.

She was looking at me like someone trying to determine whether I was about to become a problem.

”You’ve asked me where I’m going three times.”

Her expression tightened. ”I have a responsibility for your safety.”

”No.” I smiled faintly. ”You have a responsibility for my medical condition. Those are two very different things.”

”I don’t think you understand the situation.”

”I understand it perfectly. I believe it is you who should ask yourself,” I said, low, ”why it feels like I’m being watched especially now that I am trying to leave this place. Is there perhaps... something I should know?”

”Oh...”

That finally landed. Her expression shifted, uncertain now, and she slid the sign-out sheet toward me without another word. I signed it with a flourish I didn’t feel and walked out into the cold night air, already dialing for a taxi on my way to the curb.

”Bottles,” I told the driver once I’d settled into the back seat.

”How will you be paying tonight, ma’am?”

”Card,” I said. ”Let’s hope they’re not all frozen.”

He laughed at that. But I partly meant them. With how swift and cruelly Cornelius had moved, I would not be surprised if that was now a fate that had befallen me as well.

I looked down at the back of my hand while we drove, specifically at the vein still faintly dark and throbbing where the needle had been, threaded through with something that hadn’t looked like ordinary blood in longer than I cared to admit. My mind wandered, unbidden, the way it always did on quiet car rides, back to my first wedding.

How foolish I’d been then. Young, dazzled, utterly convinced I was something special to a man who had already buried several wives before me and would bury several more after. The immortal progenitor of the very curse now eating me alive from the inside.

He’d been kind enough at the start. That was the cruel trick of it, the way men like him always managed to be kind enough at the start. My first night as his bride had unfolded exactly the way every young girl is promised her first night should, and somewhere in the soft aftermath of it, I’d told him, breathless and hopeful, that I wanted children.

He’d laughed. Actually laughed, right in my face, and told me the goddess would never allow something like that to happen for people like us.

Not long after, he’d grown thoroughly disillusioned with his own crown and simply left, abandoning me to clean up the wreckage of a throne I hadn’t asked to inherit. I discovered later, from women who should have warned me sooner, that I hadn’t been the first wife handed that exact fate. It had been naive of everyone involved in arranging my marriage to assume my story would somehow end differently from theirs.

But I’d made something useful out of the ruin anyway. I’d taken the Lycan Queen’s seat and every ounce of wealth and access that came attached to it, and I’d used it to work my way, patient and precise, into the werewolf royal bloodline itself. I had come so close to accomplishing what the Lycan King himself, for all his celestial blood, had never managed to finish.

”We’re here,” the driver said, and I blinked myself back into the present.

The neon sign glowed pink and blue against the dark, Bottles spelled out in letters that flickered slightly on the second O. I opened my wallet and reached first for the De’Lune card out of pure habit, then stopped myself before my fingers closed around it. I had no idea yet what Cornelius might have done to that account before he died, and I wasn’t in the mood to discover it mid-transaction, in front of a stranger, at a club I had no business being photographed near.

I pulled my second card instead. The black one under the name Edelina Grivas, the identity I’d spent years quietly building while pretending, to anyone who asked, that I was Alpha Sterling’s own daughter.

The driver swiped it, handed it back without comment which told me that it has worked, and I stepped out into the night.

My phone rang the moment I crossed the threshold of the club, the bass already pulsing through the walls as human bodies swayed beneath lights that had no idea what had just walked into their midst.

”I’m here,” I said, pressing the phone to my ear.

”Someone’s following you,” the voice on the other end said, flat and matter of fact.

”Do you handle him,” I asked, ”or shall I?”

He laughed. ”We assumed you’d brought him along yourself. But if that isn’t the case, you won’t mind if we kill him... Right?”

”As long as you gather whatever information you can about who he answers to first,” I said, ”I couldn’t care less what happens to him afterward.”

”Proceed as you would have anyway,” he said. ”We’ll handle the rest.”