Chapter 56: A New Experience

The first thing Levi registered was the smell. It wasn’t like anything he was used to. The smell felt odd, and he found it difficult to describe what he really sensed. Under it ran a current of dominant scent he knew too well, Dexter and Aaron, they were close by.

He opened his eyes slowly, and slowly began to take in his surroundings.

The ceiling was plain white plaster, not the cracked surface he had been staring at for weeks. Soft light came from a high window to his left. The mattress under him was firmer than the one in his room, and when he tried to shift his weight, his body answered with a deep, leaden refusal. Even the effort of turning his head sent a slow wave of nausea rolling up from his stomach.

His memory was still foggy, but he was slowly recalling how he ended up here.

He had been in his room, the book he was pretending to read still open on the bed. He remembered standing—perhaps to reach the water pitcher, perhaps only to stretch—and then a sudden, profound wrongness in his gut, as if something cold had been poured directly into his blood. Nausea so violent it had doubled him over. The taste of copper. Blood hitting the floorboards in bright, shocking spatters. More of it was running from his nose, and from the corners of his eyes. He had tried to call out. He was not sure whether any sound had left his mouth before the floor tilted and the dark closed over him.

And now he was here. Alive. Which meant someone had heard and found him in time.

He tried to push himself up onto his elbows. His arms trembled and failed. The simple act of lifting his head made the room tilt, and a thin sound escaped his throat before he could stop it.

Dexter’s face appeared above him almost at once.

The third prince looked uncharacteristically worn. Silver hair slightly disordered, pale eyes tight at the corners. He had been sitting close enough that Levi’s small movement had brought him to his feet in a single motion.

"He’s awake."

Aaron reached the other side of the bed in three long strides. The restless energy that usually rolled off him was still present, but it had been compressed into a hard, pacing tension that had clearly been running for some time. His gaze raked over Levi’s face, and he suddenly felt even worse than he did a second ago.

Levi looked from one to the other. He was surprised to see either of them here. Regardless, he was happy, at least someone was worried about him.

"What..." His voice came out scraped and thin. He had to swallow and try again. "What happened to me?"

Dexter and Aaron exchanged a glance over the bed. Some silent argument passed between them—who would speak, how much would be said. Dexter won it by simple proximity. He sat back down on the edge of the chair beside the bed, forearms braced on his knees, and looked at Levi with a directness that left no room for soft framing.

"You were poisoned," he said. "Wolfsbane. Enough of it that if the servants had found you ten minutes later, we would not be having this conversation. The physicians flushed what they could. But you will remain here until the rest of it is out of your system."

Levi stared at the ceiling and tried to make sense of everything he had just heard. Poison. Someone had poisoned him with wolfsbane, but how and when?

Stunned was too mild a word. The emotion that moved through him was colder and more precise. He had been threatened, confined, claimed, bargained over, and punched. He had not, until now, been quietly scheduled for death. This was new to him, and it wasn’t an experience he ever hoped to relive ever again.

Merrick.

The name arrived with complete, immediate certainty. The raw hatred in the servant’s voice. The tears, the demand that Levi stay away from Aaron, it had to be the servant. But when had he even gotten the chance to pull this off, and how?

Levi was not in the habit of accusing people without evidence. But the certainty sat in his gut alongside the residual nausea and refused to move. This had Merrick’s fingerprints on it. The only question that remained was the practical one, the one that made the whole sequence feel slightly unreal even as he lay in a hospital bed tasting the ghost of copper:

Where had a household servant gotten wolfsbane?

His eyes were already drifting shut again. The effort of holding them open, of sorting the conversation and the memory and the accusation he needed to make, had drained what little strength the physicians had left him. He tried to shape Merrick’s name. His lips moved. No sound followed that was clear enough to use. Aaron said something above him, his name, maybe, or an order to the air, but the words arrived as if through water.

Dexter’s hand closed briefly around his wrist, as if trying to pull him back to consciousness. It wasn’t working.

Levi wanted to tell them. He wanted to say the name, to point the investigation at the servants’ quarters before Merrick could dispose of whatever remained of the evidence. He also wanted to ask how long he had been unconscious, whether the Alpha had been informed, and if the Alpha was back.

None of it made it past his teeth.

The weight in his limbs grew heavier, the faces above him blurred, and darkness steadily grew around him. The last clear thought he managed, before the dark came up again and took the room with it, was not about the princes, he couldn’t afford to think about them now. All he could think was where does a servant get wolfsbane in a house like this?

And who, if not Merrick, would have handed it to him?