Chapter 59: Consequences

Levi was still turning Flora’s name over in his mind when the door opened again.

He expected a physician, a guard, or one of the princes returning with more questions or another round of the argument that never quite ended. He did not expect the particular shape of the man who stepped through.

Elvis closed the door behind him with deliberate care.

The Eastridge Alpha did not look pleased. The polite smile he wore in corridors and walks was absent. In its place sat something tighter, colder, and far more familiar from the years Levi had spent learning the borders of someone else’s patience. He stopped at the foot of the bed and looked down at Levi as if inspecting damaged property he still considered his.

Levi turned his face toward the window.

"Don’t."

Elvis’s voice cut across the small clinical room without raised volume. It did not need it. "Do not look away from me. Not after the mess you have made."

Levi kept his eyes on the light through the high glass for another stubborn second, then let them drift back. He was in no condition for this conversation, and Elvis had chosen the moment with the precision of a man who preferred his audience unable to walk out.

"You’ve done well for yourself," Elvis said. The words were soft and vicious. "First you collect a public claim from the second prince. Then you end up bleeding on the floor with wolfsbane in your blood. Tell me, Levi—when you were getting railed and marked, did you budget for this particular outcome, or is poisoning an innovation you hadn’t planned?"

"If you only came to yell," Levi said, his voice still scraped raw from the earlier hours, "leave."

Elvis laughed. The sound was short and entirely without warmth.

"Listen to you. Courage. Is that the second mark’s doing? Aaron’s teeth in your throat and suddenly you speak to me as if this bed is a throne and I am a petitioner wasting your time." He stepped closer, not touching the mattress, close enough that his scent filled the space between them. "You used to know better."

"What did you come here to do?"

Elvis tilted his head. For a moment the anger in his expression thinned into something almost reflective, almost satisfied.

"I came," he said, "to watch you suffer the consequences of your actions."

Levi’s fingers curled weakly in the sheet. He had heard variations of them before, in locked rooms, in corridors where the doors closed too quickly, in the quiet after he had tested a boundary and found the edge of Elvis’s patience.

"You were warned," Elvis continued. He did not raise his voice. He did not need the performance of rage when the quieter version had always worked better. "You were told what would happen if you continued to ignore the reality of your position. You belong somewhere. You have always belonged somewhere. And instead of accepting the hand that was offered, you let this house put its teeth in you. You let princes use you as a piece in their private competitions. You collected marks as if they were shields. And now you lie in a medical bed with poison still working through your blood, and you want to know what I came here to do."

He leaned in slightly. The smile that touched his mouth did not reach his eyes.

"I came to make certain you understand the lesson. Do not fall for them. They will not keep you safe. They will not choose you when the political cost becomes inconvenient. They will negotiate over you, and leave you when they’re done. This—" He paused, took a good look at Levi, and then continued, "—is what happens when you ignore my warnings. This is a gentle version."

Levi’s pulse had started to hammer hard enough that he felt it in the damaged bridge of his nose. The nausea of the wolfsbane was gone; a colder, clearer sickness had taken its place.

"Explain yourself."

Elvis only chuckled. He straightened, adjusted the cuff of his coat, and turned toward the door as if the conversation had reached its natural conclusion.

"Elvis."

The Alpha paused with his hand on the latch. He did not look back immediately. When he did, the expression on his face was almost mild.

"The next punishment," he said, quiet enough that it would not carry into the corridor, "will be more severe than this."

He opened the door and walked out.

Levi’s voice tore after him—raw, furious, and stronger than anything he had managed since waking in the medical wing.

"Elvis!"

The door closed. Footsteps moved away down the short hall with unhurried certainty. The clinical room returned to its previous quiet, broken only by the sound of Levi’s breathing and the distant, ordinary noise of a house that had not yet been told what had just stood at the foot of this bed.

For a stretched second Levi only stared at the closed door.

Then the pieces rearranged themselves with brutal, silent clarity.

Elvis had poisoned him.

The realization sat in Levi’s chest like a second dose of something cold. He had spent the morning sorting Flora and Merrick into columns of motive and means. He had let the logic of wealth and access point toward the northern Luna. He had watched a terrified servant insist on his own innocence and almost called the guards on him. And the man who had actually done it had walked into the room, called the near-death a lesson, and left with a promise that the next one would be worse.

How?

The question followed immediately, practical and vicious. How had Elvis put wolfsbane into his body inside this house. A tray? A pitcher? A moment of access Levi had not even registered as a threat because the face attached to it was familiar?

Levi’s hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against the mattress and tried to steady his breathing. He needed to speak. He needed a prince in the room, a guard, anyone who could still move freely through the house while he could not. He needed the name Elvis carried out of this room and out of the territory before he had the chance to pull whatever he considered more severe than nearly killing him.