To heal a Rogue

LYSANDER

Nothing happened.

The man floated on, utterly motionless, his eyes closed and his chest rising and falling in a slow, artificial rhythm. The machinery seemed to dictate each breath for him, making it difficult to tell where whatever remained of his own autonomy ended and the contraption keeping him in a mostly alive state began.

I stood there for a long moment, feeling faintly ridiculous.

I wasn’t even sure what I’d expected.

Perhaps a twitch.

A reaction.

Some indication that the thing inside the tube was more aware of me than it appeared.

But there was nothing.

"If it is you," I continued anyway, "know that I intend to stop you. And I intend to make certain it never happens again."

The only response was the low mechanical hum.

Eventually, I turned away.

I locked the vault behind me, watching the magic spread across the steel until the door disappeared beneath the illusion of ordinary wallpaper once more. Only then did I let my attention return to the rest of the study.

Books lined the shelves along the far wall, arranged in uneven rows with little apparent order. Letters and papers covered the desk where my uncle had once sat making decisions that apparently reached far beyond anything I’d understood while he was alive to explain them.

I moved along the shelves, running my fingers over the spines as I searched.

Then one caught my attention.

It was older than the others.

The leather had worn soft with age, cracked deeply around the corners, and there was no title on the spine at all. It looked less like a book meant to be read and more like one meant to disappear among everything else.

I pulled it free.

Dust stirred from the shelf.

When I opened it, I found handwritten pages.

The ink had faded badly in places, but the script itself was remarkably careful and dense, each line written by someone who had taken the time to record every detail rather than rush through the account.

I began turning the pages.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Perhaps something about the demigod I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since Bonnie words about her dream had made me start to connect this to him. Perhaps it was just cope on my end that I needed to be validated badly.

Whatever I expected, I wasn’t prepared for what I found.

The account followed the broad shape of the old nursery rhyme, but where the children’s version had reduced everything to a handful of harmless verses, this went much deeper.

The conflict between the Drakori and the early werewolves had apparently begun over the manner in which Lady Selene claimed and handled her own divinity. The dragon shifters had regarded it as a profound insult, one they carried with them very vocally.

And her firstborn had taken it upon himself to defend his mother’s honor personally.

That decision had ignited what the account called the Sundering of Sun and Moon.

A holy war, it called it.

Lives had been lost on both sides in numbers the nursery rhyme never once mentioned, the bloodshed scrubbed clean from the children’s version in favor of something safer to recite before bed.

Eventually, a truce was struck.

Punishment followed.

Then I reached the line that made my eyes stop moving.

"And the goddess cursed Lycaon, her son and my older brother."

I stopped breathing.

For several seconds, I simply stared at the sentence.

My eyes moved over it again. And again.

I leaned closer, certain the poor light had caused me to misunderstand the handwriting, but the words remained exactly where they had been.

’My older brother?’

My pulse began to pound.

I flipped backward through the pages, searching frantically for the name that would explain what I was reading.

There.

On the first page.

The handwriting was larger there, the ink even more faded, but the name was unmistakable.

The account had been written by one of my own ancestors.

The first Alpha King.

I knew his story. I knew he had been crowned only after Lady Selene permanently ascended beyond this world, abandoning her earthly affairs and leaving her bloodline to govern in her absence.

I read the name beneath the heading.

"Alpha King Lune."

I stared at it.

Then I read the line beneath it. A small acknowledgement to his mate.

Lune had been a demigod himself.

According to the accounts that had been passed since even I was a child, he had deliberately torn the divinity from his own blood so he would never be forced to outlive his beloved wife and their children by the centuries his mother’s blood would otherwise have granted him.

My fingers tightened around the edge of the page.

I took a deep breath and turned back to where I’d stopped and kept reading, my pulse quickening with every line.

"My brother was proud," the account continued, "...and would not bend the knee even when the hearts of both our mother and the people of the sun had softened toward reconciliation in the years following the war’s full end."

"He damned his own followers to a life of darkness and suffering rather than accept the peace that had finally been offered to him. Pride had mattered more to him than the salvation of everyone who had fought and bled beside him."

I turned the page, hungry now for whatever came next.

And found nothing.

The next several pages had been cut out entirely.

The cuts were clean and straight, made deliberately through the binding rather than torn away in haste. Only jagged remnants of paper remained, stubbornly clinging to the spine where the missing pages had once been.

I ran my thumb along one of the edges.

Someone had removed them.

Not recently, either. The exposed binding was old, the leather darkened with age, but the precision of the cuts suggested whoever had done it had known exactly what they were taking.

I stared at the gap for a long moment, my mind racing through every possible explanation.

Why remove those pages?

Why leave everything else intact?

And, more importantly, what had been important enough to erase from a family record that had apparently survived for centuries?

A knock sounded at the study door interrupting my train of thoughts.

"Who is it?" I called, not looking up from the book in my hands.

Someone cleared his throat on the other side, the sound muffled by the heavy wood.

"It’s the Elder Circle, Your Majesty."

I closed my eyes briefly and drew in a slow breath.

"It’s so early on the morning. What could possibly warrant this?"

"Your Majesty," an elder replied, and I recognized this one because his voice carried that particular formal patience elders seemed to cultivate for moments when they intended to insist on something without appearing to do so, "as regent, certain responsibilities now fall to you. Responsibilities the late King was actively attending to before his passing."

I looked down at the book again.

The missing pages seemed to stare back at me.

"And what responsibility," I began, closing the book carefully and slipping a thin ribbon from the desk drawer between the remaining pages to mark my place, "would that be at this particular hour?"

"The matter of the rogues," the elder answered. "The late King was discussing it with Alpha Julius Knight before his death. Given everything that has transpired, the matter now requires your attention."

Of course it did.

There was always something else.

I shut the book properly and returned it to its place on the shelf, my mind still circling everything I’d just read. The missing pages. Lycaon. Even Bonnie’s safety.

I turned toward the door.

Whatever had been written on those missing pages would have to wait.

I unlocked it and pulled it open.

The elder I did recognize, but could not for any reason remember their name, stood waiting in the corridor, wearing the same careful, patient expression he probably used for every crisis, whether it involved a minor dispute between pack members or the collapse of an entire Kingdom while the others were behind him, probably after egging him on.

I stepped past him.

"Well," I murmured, forcing my attention back toward the matter at hand. "Let’s not keep Alpha Julius waiting, then."

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