RHEA’S POV As I stepped inside the room, I froze.
The air inside was thick with the suffocating, foul smell of fresh blood.
The heavy oak doors clicked shut behind me, sealing out the noise of the hallway.
Firelight flickered across dark stone walls, casting long, dancing shadows over the massive chamber.
My gaze immediately fell on the large bed in the center.
Lying there was a man.
His broad chest was wrapped in thick, torn bandages that were completely soaked through with blood.
Deep red blood dripped steadily onto the sheets, pooling on the mattress below.
His breathing was a shallow, agonizing rasp, shaking with every tiny, painful rise and fall of his chest.
His skin was deathly pale, shiny with cold sweat.
My professional training kicked in, momentarily overriding the terrifying anxiety gripping my throat.
I set my medical bag on a side table and rushed to the edge of the bed.
“I need fresh water, clean clothes, and silver shears,” I called out over my shoulder.
“Garrett is outside,” a deep, rough rasp tore through the quiet room.
I froze.
The man on the bed stirred.
His heavy eyelids fluttered open, dark with agonizing pain.
Slowly, painfully, he turned his head toward me.
The moment his eyes locked onto mine, my breath hitched in my throat.
His eyes were gray.
Piercing, stormy gray eyes that held the raw, terrifying force of a storm.
A sudden, violent jolt shot straight down my spine, vibrating through every bone in my body.
The same strange heat I had felt in my apartment flared to life, burning like lava behind my ribs.
I knew those eyes.
Five years ago.
The drug.
The dark room.
A wild, passionate night that neither of us had chosen to be in, but had rewritten the course of my entire life.
No.
No, no, no.
As he shifted painfully against the pillows, his head turned slightly toward the firelight.
That was when I saw it.
Curled small and faint against his left ear was a distinct, birthmark in the shape of a crescent moon.
The floor seemed to tilt violently beneath my feet.
My knees went weak, and I had to grab the wooden bedpost to keep from collapsing onto the cold stone floor.
Elias.
My son had been born with that exact same crescent mark behind his left ear.
I had spent five long years believing it was just some meaningless birth mark, a silly little mark passed down from a nameless stranger.
Instead, it was staring back at me right now on the face of a dying Alpha.
A stranger who was not a stranger at all.
His gray eyes narrowed slightly, hazy with blood loss and excruciating pain.
His brow furrowed as he stared up at me, searching my face through the fog in his mind.
“Do I…
know you?” he rasped, his voice strained as he fought to keep his lungs steady.
He didn’t recognize me.
With his mind clouded by the pain of the poison, I was just a figure in the dim room.
But as I reached out with trembling hands, something deep within him reacted anyway.
The moment my fingers hovered near his chest, a low, instinctual rumble echoed in his throat, some ancient wolf instinct pulling toward me the exact same way it had five years ago.
“No,” I lied, my voice shaking as I locked my mother’s terror behind a wall of cold determination.
“You don’t know me.” I pulled my medical shears from my bag, sliced away the blood-drenched bandages, and gasped.
Four massive, jagged slashes stretched diagonally across his broad chest, laying his ribs bare.
His wolf’s natural regeneration had completely failed against the catastrophic trauma.
He was dying.
“Stay still,” I whispered, pressing my bare palms directly over his shattered chest wall.
I frantically tried applying pressure to stop him from bleeding out.
Please.
Just hold on.
Then, the terrifying heat returned.again.
It slammed into my chest with the force of a freight train, far more intense than it had been with Garrett on my living room floor.
A blinding, brilliant white light exploded from my hands, illuminating the dark stone chamber in a golden light.
“No—” I choked out, my heart dropping into my stomach.
I pulled with all my strength to get my hands away, but the force locked my wrists in place once again.
It hadn’t been a hallucination in my apartment.
It was happening again.
The Alpha gasped, his back arching off the mattress as the warmth flooded his broken body.
His skin knit back together slowly, and his broken bones reconnected beneath my glowing palms.
He locked his gray eyes onto mine, wild with shock and quiet wonder, before the sheer weight of his body’s exhaustion finally dragged him into a deep sleep.
His eyes closed and his breathing steadied into a deep sleep as the light slowly faded away.
I stumbled back, clutching my trembling hands against my ribs, staring at him in complete disbelief and horror.
What am I?
I pulled my hands back, wiping the cold sweat from my forehead, and walked stiffly to the heavy wooden doors.
I pushed them open slowly , finding Garrett standing guard in the hallway, his face tight with hope and fear .
“How is he?” Garrett asked instantly, stepping forward with desperate eyes.
“He is stable for now,” I said softly, my voice weak but steady.
“The bleeding has stopped and his Dee wounds are healing but his body has undergone severe damage.
His treatment is going to take time.
He needs rest, and I will need to work on him continuously over the next couple of days to make sure his body doesn’t reject the healing process.” Garrett let out a long, shaky breath, a tear cutting through the dirt on his cheek as he nodded in profound relief.
“Thank you…
thank you.” I closed the door, walked back to the chair beside the bed, and sank into it.
As I watched the smooth, steady rise and fall of the Alpha’s chest, I knew the worst of his danger had passed.
My mind was spinning in absolute terror.
Aside from the fact that the Alpha that Garrett desperately begged me to save was lying unconscious, another thing plagued my mind.
How in the world did I do that?