Chapter 283 Pain - Blackwolf's POV

Chapter 283 Pain - Blackwolf's POV
My bedroom had the sparse functionality of somewhere designed by a woman who regarded sleep as biological maintenance. Single bed. Steel desk. One east-facing window, chosen two centuries ago because sunrise was marginally less depressing than the west wall’s view of the service corridor and yesterday’s laundry.
The journal lay open on my lap, leather cracked along the spine and pages yellowed by decades of use. I wrote with a fountain pen because it demanded care, and care remained something I could provide when everything else felt unstable. The nib scratched across the paper, carrying thoughts I trusted nowhere else.
Fourteen weeks. Queen Amelia Brecc. Both pups measuring perfectly. Twin A heart rate: 160. Twin B: 164. Placental attachment secure. No evidence of residual toxicity.
My handwriting had not changed in two centuries: precise, angular and controlled. It belonged on medical charts rather than in a private journal, fitting for someone who had never learned where one ended and the other began.
She had come alone. No Aleksandr filling half the corridor, no quiet coordination between them, no shared glance over the monitor. Only Amelia, escorted by guards, carrying two sleepless nights in her posture and holding herself together through spite and discipline.
I had not asked. Healers learned early that some questions harmed more than they helped, especially when the answer was already visible in a patient’s measured breathing and the tremor she pretended not to notice.
Kaela remains stable. Her protective instinct continues to exceed the vocabulary of conventional medicine. Four days of induced unconsciousness allowed the Queen’s body to process the toxin without lasting cognitive or physical deficit. Historical texts mention comparable responses under severe metabolic stress, but none are this well documented.
That was the official entry, suitable for charts and filing systems. It was factual, useful and incomplete. It did not record how Amelia had cried when she heard both heartbeats, or how I had looked away because relief on her face hurt more than accusation would have.
I lowered the pen. Beneath the clinical notes, a blank space waited. I had left it deliberately, though I had been pretending otherwise since the gala. The truth had spent days gathering pressure, and there was nowhere left to put it.
I have been complicit in many things.
The sentence waited on the page as if it had been gathering patience for years. I watched the ink dry and did not move.
Two centuries of collaboration with Redwolf. Regime changes. Selective poisonings. Carefully timed leaks. Patients treated for injuries I helped cause and suffering I helped design. I insisted each action served a larger purpose, that the greater good waited beyond the next necessary compromise. The argument sounded thinner every time I used it.
The greater good. Redwolf had built kingdoms with that phrase, and I had helped her while insisting my role remained clinical. I sat in rooms where strategies were designed, asked questions disguised as concern, then stitched together the people damaged by the answers. Each suture became part of my private defence: if I repaired the wound, perhaps I stood apart from the hand that caused it.
It did not.
The burn scars across my hands pulled tight. Damaged tissue remembered fire more faithfully than I remembered the healer I had intended to become. I flexed my fingers and continued. Stopping meant feeling, and I had rationed feeling for longer than most countries had existed.
Children have always been the line. Not a guideline or boundary adjusted for context. The line. Drawn in stone, blood and whatever remains of the conscience I began with.
I had watched infants die. Held them while warmth left their skin. Pronounced the time, signed the forms and returned to rooms altered by absence. I told myself those deaths were not mine because I arrived afterwards, because my hands touched only the consequences. That distinction had carried me through nights when sleep felt like surrender. Now it sounded like cowardice written in medical language.
These pups came closer to that line than anything in two centuries.
The poison was precise. Botanical compounds with metallic catalysts, designed for uterine contraction and placental separation. Not amateur work. Not the product of distant cousins following an old grievance. It required a healer’s knowledge, or a healer’s consultation, and the list of people in this kingdom both capable and willing was shorter than I wanted to admit.
Redwolf denied knowledge and involvement. During the call, her voice carried every note of sincerity she could produce, and I wanted to believe her. I still did. But precision spoke louder than denial. The pastry revealed someone who understood pregnancy, dosage and exactly how much suffering could be caused without killing the mother.
The pen lurched across the page and left a black streak. I did not correct it. Neater handwriting would not make the confession cleaner.
I am to blame. Not solely, perhaps not even primarily, but I sit in the rooms where these plans are made. I have sat in them for centuries, nodded at the right moments and asked questions that sounded like concern while serving as intelligence gathering. I stitched together victims of plots I helped design and treated the stitching as absolution.
It was not.
A tear struck the page and spread the word trust into a grey cloud. I watched the letters lose their edges. The symbolism was almost offensively neat.
Amelia had trusted me that morning. She believed me when I said the pups were healthy and the danger had passed. She did not know that the healer monitoring her pregnancy had spent two centuries beside the architect of the machinery that nearly took her children. My diagnosis was honest. Its context was a lie, and honesty delivered inside a lie remained betrayal.
The ultrasound images sat beside the journal. Twin A and Twin B, curled in greyscale, their rapid heartbeats reduced to neat numbers beneath each frame. Perfect. Measuring and developing as they should, unaware that the world contained people who saw a political threat instead of children. I had printed extra copies because protocol allowed it. The truth was less clinical: I needed proof they still existed.
I could not walk away. Redwolf was right about that, which made the trap more cruel. Leaving would expose Amelia and the pups. As her healer, I remained the best defence against another attempt, the person most likely to recognise the danger and know how to counter it. Staying protected them, but it also required accepting their trust while withholding the reason they needed me.
So I stayed. I monitored. Every diagnosis I delivered was medically honest and morally incomplete. That gap was where my ethics used to live.
Pain sat behind my breastbone, dull and persistent. Not the clean agony of injury, but the older ache of knowing repentance could not restore innocence. I could confess into leather-bound pages until the ink ran dry and still wake tomorrow as the woman who had chosen silence when speaking might have changed the outcome.
The worst part was not the possibility that Amelia would hate me if she learned the truth. Hatred was clean; I could survive it. The worst part was imagining her trying to understand, offering compassion she did not owe because compassion had survived everything the world had done to her. 
For two centuries, I had hidden behind competence. Redwolf planned; I refined. Councillors ordered; I treated. Kings broke; I repaired. The verbs made responsibility look divided, as though each person owned only the action nearest their hands. But the chain existed because every link agreed to remain connected.
I was one of those links, perhaps the strongest. My knowledge had made plans possible even when I never mixed the final poison or named the final target. Restraint had never been innocence. It was only distance measured in other people’s bodies.
I capped the pen and set it down. The journal remained open while the tear stain dried. I did not blot it. I had spent enough centuries attempting to undo permanent things.
Outside the window, evening gathered over the city. Merchants closed stalls, lights appeared in windows and people chose sides based on statements delivered by escaped men from anonymous rooms. The greater good Redwolf had promised now felt stretched across too many compromises, too many graves and one poison designed for children whose only offence was existing in the wrong womb.
I closed the journal. The leather was warm beneath my palms, worn smooth by decades of recording the same compromises in different ink. Closing the cover did not silence them.
The white coat hung on the door, crisp and pristine, symbol of a profession I had honoured in every way except those that mattered most. Reaching for it hurt. Wearing it hurt more. I put it on anyway, fastening each button over the ache as if neatness could hold me together.
Time to check on my patients, protect the pups and continue living inside the consequence of every choice that had brought me here.