CHAPTER THREE

Serena's POV

"Oh it's just a marble, I thought it was something else" I said, keeping my voice easy and my face easier.

Lance looked at me for a half second longer than felt comfortable and then nodded and turned back toward the path we had come from. I slipped the ring deeper into my pocket and kept my hand there as we walked, my fingers closing around the cool metal of it.

The Blackthorn symbol.

I had grown up looking at that symbol. It had been on the gates of the pack house and on the official documents and on the ring that Kael wore on his right hand, the one that had been passed down through three generations of Blackthorn Alphas. I had looked at that ring enough times to know every line of the design, the specific way the two wolf heads curved toward each other at the center, the small detail at the base that most people missed unless they were looking very closely.

But how did it get here, all the way from the blackthorn pack to the border lands or was it stolen from Kael.

A quiet flicker of concern tugged at me, making me wonder if he was alright, or if something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe it was just the mate bond acting up. Even though it had been severed years ago, the faint, phantom trace of it refused to die completely.

I said nothing else on the walk back.

Lance ran through his summary of what the patrol had found and when, the timeline of how the man had been discovered and brought in, how long he had been unconscious before the healer got to him. I listened to all of it and asked the right questions and made the right notes in my head and kept my hand in my pocket the entire way back.

The pack house came into view through the trees and I breathed slowly and told myself to be a professional.

I couldn't get the ring out of my head.

The healer's clinic was at the back of the pack house, a low building separate from the main structure that smelled like medicinal herbs and something clean underneath that. I had been here enough times over the years to know the layout without thinking about it, which rooms were for general treatment and which were for the more serious cases that needed monitoring.

Lance stopped at the entrance.

"I'll leave you to it," he said. "I need to get these men back to their rotation."

I nodded. "I'll let you know if I find anything useful."

He left and I stood at the clinic entrance for a moment, my hand still in my pocket, and told myself that whatever I was about to see in there was going to be manageable because everything was manageable. That was the thing I had learned in three years of being on my own with Aria and a position that required me to make difficult calls with a steady face. Everything was manageable if you decided it was before you walked into the room.

I pushed the door open.

The healer, an older woman named Bren, looked up from her workbench when I came in.

"Miss Voss," she said. "I was expecting you. He's in the second room."

"How is he?"

"He's stable now. He was in bad shape when they brought him in, blood loss mostly, some other injuries I'm still working through. He woke up this morning."she paused “I don't know what happened to him but I don't think this man is just any ordinary werewolf"

"Noted," I said.

"He doesn't remember much about his life, he knows his name," she added, and something in her tone made me look at her more carefully. "But beyond that, the picture is incomplete."

I looked at her for a moment.

"Okay," I said.

I walked to the second room.

The door was slightly ajar and I could see the light inside, soft and yellow, the afternoon coming through a small window on the far wall. I stopped outside it with my hand on the door frame and breathed in once through my nose and out through my mouth the way I had taught myself to do before anything that required me to be steady and confident.

Then I pushed it open and walked in, a gasp escaped my lips before I could stop it.

He was sitting up in the bed.

His back was against the headboard and his head was tilted slightly toward the window, the light coming across the left side of his face. There were scars I did not recognize, new ones, crossing his jaw and his cheekbone in a way that told me whatever had happened to him out there in the borderlands had not been a simple fall. His skin was pale in a way it had never been, that specific paleness of someone who had lost more blood than their body had wanted to give and had not yet fully recovered the color.

His hair was the same.

His hands resting on the blanket were the same.

The line of his shoulders, the particular way he held himself even sitting in a clinic bed, was exactly the same.

I stood in the doorway of the Ashveil Pack clinic and looked at Kael Blackthorn and felt every carefully constructed wall I had spent three years building break apart in just four seconds.

He turned his head from the window.

His eyes found me.

Those grey eyes. Exactly the same grey. The grey that Aria had been born with, the grey I looked at every single morning across the breakfast table, the grey I had spent three years telling myself I was not still thinking about.

He looked at me with those eyes, no expression on his face.

He smiled lightly and waved.

“Are you the nurse?”he asked 

He really did lose his memory, I guess he wasn't the same man I knew before.

He was just a man in a bed, pale and scarred, looking at a stranger in his doorway.

The air left my lungs completely.