Chapter 80: The Only Cure

Azura’s POV

His hands were still around Torin’s throat.

I stood in the doorway, looked at the room, and tried to understand what I was seeing. The desk was on its side. Papers everywhere. A chair in pieces against the far wall. Blood on the stone. Furniture that had not survived whatever happened in here.

And Rhydor on top of Torin with his hands around his throat and his eyes burning red.

Then he turned his head and looked at me.

The red faded. Not all at once. Slowly, like something being pulled back from a very long distance. His chest was still heaving. His jaw was still tight. But his eyes found mine and something in them changed.

He let go.

He stood up slowly. Did not look back at Torin. Did not look at Silas or Axel. Did not look at the destroyed room around him.

He walked past me without a word.

I turned and watched him go down the corridor. His footsteps were steady and even, getting quieter until they disappeared around the corner, and the hall was empty.

Behind me, I felt movements.

I looked at them. Just for a second.

Torin was sitting up slowly, one hand rubbing his throat. His face was swollen, bloody, one eye already darkening. He looked like someone had used him as a wall repeatedly.

But the idiot was still smiling.

Silas reached down. Axel took the other side. They pulled him up and Torin stood, swaying slightly, looking completely unbothered by all of it.

I turned away. My eyes found the corridor again. The empty space where he had gone.

Something pulled at my chest. Not pain exactly. Something else. A tug, quiet and persistent, like a thread that had always been there and had just pulled itself tight.

My feet started moving before I decided to let them.

I did not know where I was going.

I just followed the pull through the corridors, past the guards who bowed their heads as I passed, past the doors and the torches and the cold stone walls of the pack house. The pull got stronger with every turn I took, every corridor I moved through, like something being drawn toward a magnet that did not care whether I was ready or not.

I stopped outside his chambers.

The door was slightly open. Just a crack. Just enough.

I pushed it open and stepped inside.

And froze.

He was on the floor.

Not sitting. Not resting. On the floor, collapsed, one arm bent underneath him at a wrong angle, completely still.

My heart stopped.

"Rhydor?"

Nothing.

I crossed the room in four steps and dropped to my knees beside him. My hands went to his shoulder immediately, shaking him, trying to get something from him.

"Rhydor. Wake up."

Nothing. His face was pale in a way that had nothing to do with the fight. His breathing was there but shallow. Barely moving his chest.

"Oh, Goddess." The words came out before I could stop them.

I tried to lift him. My hands got under his shoulders and I pulled with everything I had.

He did not move. Not even slightly. Like trying to move a wall.

I looked at the door.

"HELP!" My voice came out louder than I expected, bouncing off the stone walls, filling the corridor outside. "SOMEONE HELP!"

Footsteps came fast.

Silas first, already moving at a run when he came through the door. Axel was right behind him. Torin last, limping, one hand still at his throat, blood still on his face.

They took in the scene in a single second, and none of them wasted time on questions.

"Get him on the bed," Silas said. "Now."

The three of them moved together. I stepped back and watched them lift him, all three straining with the weight of him, and carry him to the bed. They laid him down carefully and stepped back; the room went quiet, except for everyone’s breathing.

Axel looked at me. "What happened?"

"I found him like this," I said. "On the floor."

Silas turned to Axel. "Go get Genevieve. Now."

Axel was already moving before Silas finished the sentence. His footsteps disappeared down the corridor at a run.

The waiting was the worst part.

I stood by the bed and looked at Rhydor’s face. Pale and still, his chest rising and falling in those shallow, weak movements that made something in my chest pull tight every time I watched them. The black lines I had seen on his shoulder in the Wraithfen had climbed higher. They were at his collarbone now, creeping upward, dark and wrong against his skin.

Torin leaned against the wall near the window. His eyes were on Rhydor. His smile was completely gone.

Silas paced. Four steps one way. Four steps back. His jaw tight, his hands clasped behind him, not looking at anyone.

Nobody spoke.

The minutes stretched and felt like something much longer.

The door opened.

Genevieve walked in, and her face was the calm, controlled mask she always wore, the one that gave nothing away, right up until the moment her eyes found the bed.

She stopped completely.

One second she was moving and the next she was not, standing completely still in the middle of the room with her eyes locked on her son. Something moved across her face that I had never seen from her before. Something that cracked the mask open from the inside.

Then she moved again. Faster. She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed and reached out and touched his face with both hands, cupping his jaw the way a mother touched a child she was afraid to break.

"Rhydor," she said. Barely a whisper.

He did not respond.

Her eyes moved down. To his neck. To the black lines climbing toward his jaw. Her hands moved with her eyes, fingers going to his collar, pulling it gently aside.

Her breath caught.

"No," she said. So quiet I almost missed it.

She pressed her palm flat against his chest and closed her eyes. The room was completely still around her. When she opened her eyes they were wet.

Silas stepped forward carefully. "He was bitten. On the way to the Wraithfen. By a rogue."

Genevieve’s voice came out tight and controlled, like she was holding it together with both hands. "Their saliva. It sizzled on the ground when it hit, did it not?"

Silas stared at her. "Yes. How did you..."

"That was not a normal rogue." She looked at the black lines on Rhydor’s neck. "It was made. Created with black magic. The same magic that made the blue pearls. The same magic that aged the boys."

Silas looked at her with complete confusion on his face. He opened his mouth.

"I will explain later," she said before he could speak.

She looked at the lines again. Her jaw was tight.

"Whoever is behind this designed those creatures specifically to wound Alphas. To leave marks that would not heal. To plant something inside them that would grow slowly." She paused. "It has been feeding on his power this entire time. Every time he pushed himself, every time he fought, every time he used his strength, it grew stronger while he grew weaker."

I looked at the black lines reaching toward his jaw and thought about every time I had watched him press his palm against that shoulder and say nothing. Every time I had told him to let someone look at it, he had shut the conversation down. Every time he had kept moving, kept fighting, kept leading, while that thing spread further inside him.

"Maybe the healers can do something," I said. "There has to be something they can try."

Genevieve shook her head slowly. "They cannot. This magic was designed to resist healers. To resist every normal treatment. It was built specifically to be unanswerable." She stopped. "Except for one thing."

The room was very quiet.

"Leave us," Genevieve said.

She was looking at Silas. Axel, who had come back quietly and was standing near the door. At Torin against the wall.

Silas took a small step forward. "Genevieve..."

"Now," she said. "All of you."

Nobody moved for a second. Then Silas nodded once, the small tight nod of someone who did not like something but was going to do it anyway. He walked to the door. Axel followed. Torin pushed off the wall, looked at Rhydor on the bed, looked at me, and walked out last.

The door closed.

Just Genevieve and me.

And Rhydor, pale and still on the bed between us.

Genevieve turned to me.

And the face she turned was not the one I was used to. Not the composed, careful, always-knowing face she showed the world. This face had tears running down it freely, not wiped away, not held back. Her eyes were red at the edges and her mouth was pressed together like she was holding something enormous inside it.

She crossed to where I was standing and took both my hands in hers.

"Azura." Her voice came out unsteady. "I have never asked you for anything."

"Genevieve." I did not know what to say.

"Please." Her hands tightened around mine. "Please save my son."

Something cracked open in my chest.

"I do not know how," I said. "I am not a healer. I do not have magic like you. I cannot just..."

"You have something stronger," she said. "You have the bond."

I went still.

She looked at me steadily through the tears.

"An Alpha’s body fights differently from other wolves," she said. "Their healing comes from their power, from their strength. But this magic feeds on exactly that. Every time he fights it, it eats more of him." She paused. "The mate bond is the one thing this magic cannot touch. It was not designed to fight that. If you open yourself to him, truly open, his wolf will draw from yours. Your strength will become his. It might be enough to slow it. To stop it."

"Might?" I said.

"I do not know for certain," she said quietly. "But it is the only chance he has."

I looked at Rhydor.

At the black lines that had almost reached his jaw now. At his pale face. At his chest, moving in those shallow, weak movements. At the hands that had carried me through a cursed forest on his back with this thing already burning inside him and had never once let me fall.

Genevieve squeezed my hands.

"I know he has hurt you," she said. Her voice broke slightly on the last word. "I know he has given you every reason to walk away. But please." She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Started again. "Please do not let that cost him his life."

I looked at her. At the tears on her face. At the mother standing in front of me begging for her son with every wall she owned pulled completely down.

The Genevieve I knew was always strong, but this one.

This one was broken.

"Okay," I whispered.

She held my gaze for a long moment. Then she nodded. She stood. She walked to the door and her hand rested on the frame for just a second before she looked back at me once.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

The door closed behind her.

The room was completely quiet.

Just him and me.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his face for a long moment. The strong jaw. The closed eyes. The mouth that said so little and always managed to say everything anyway. The black lines climbing his neck that had been growing this entire time while he carried everyone else on his back and said nothing about it.

His chest rose. Fell. Rose again. Shallow and slow.

I reached out and touched his face. His skin was hot under my fingers, burning from the inside, and something in my chest ached at the feeling of it.

"I am still angry at you," I said quietly.

He did not move.

"I might be angry for a long time," I said.

Nothing.

I looked at the black lines. At the pale face. At the chest that was barely moving.

"But I am not ready to lose you."