Chapter 30 30
Lena’s POV
I sat down in the corner of our bedroom and my fists balled up so hard on my lap, the first two knuckles had gone white. The seat I’d been thrust onto felt like a jail as I listened to Selena ease her way over Lucien’s poisoned body with the kind of practiced comfort that told me they were accustomed to it.
“His pulse is evening out,” Selena murmured, her fingers locating the strongest point of his heart beat in his neck. “This fever is going to break in an hour.”
Her hands were deft, precise, knowing just where to push and how hard to press. I'd attempted to assist when we first brought him in, trying anything and everything I possibly could to save the man that I loved. But Selena had dismissed me with thinly veiled impatience.
“I need some space to function,” she’d said, without bothering to turn my way. “This is the kind of healing you have to concentrate on.”
All of which was to say that I had been relegated to watching. Witnessing another woman's hands roam across my mate's exposed chest with such nonchalant familiarity. And watching her prepare poultices and potions from ingredients I had never heard of. Seeing her save his life while I sat there useless and terrified.
"How can you tell me so much abut Lycan biology?" I inquired, attempting to not sound jealous.
Selena’s mouth was a small smile and her eyes never left Lucien’s face. "Experience," she replied simply. “I’ve been mending him years before you were born.”
The flippant deflation of my importance stung physically. Longer than I'd been alive. The reminder of how long their history stretched made my throat tight with feelings I couldn’t identify.
“The poison he was using,” Selena interjected, giving something that reeked of herbs and old magic a good stir, “is specifically formulated to affect the faster healing that makes my Lycans so indestructible. Left untreated, it would have killed him within hours.”
“But you knew what to do,” I said, unable to stop the accusation from creeping into my voice.
"I've seen him poisoned before." Her voice was matter-of-fact as though they were discussing the weather. "Lucien knows how to make an enemy that would rather go without being punched in the face."
She rubbed the mixture of cocoa butter and other ingredients on his chest in smooth, round strokes, her hands working with someone who had done this hundreds of times before. Everything was purposeful, professional to the sound of a wooden stick on skin — but there was something else there too. A tenderness that meant something more.
"You need to eat something," Selena said, without glancing in my direction. “The baby needs her to feed, even if you’re stressed.”
The reference to my pregnancy made me feel even more of a failure. Here I was, supposed to be his mate, the mother of his child, and I couldn’t even save his life. I was just one more problem for everyone to worry about.
"I'm not hungry," I replied.
"Hunger isn't relevant." Her voice took on a tone of command that caused me to sit up straight without even thinking about it. “You are bearing his next heir. The health of that baby outweighs your comfort."
Her clinical way of making my pregnancy about nothing more than bloodline preservation made my chest constrict with hurt. As though I were no more than vessel by which his heir was produced.
“I’ll be all right,” I whispered.
This time Selena glanced in my direction, her expression inscrutable. "Can you? Because as far as I'm sitting, it seems you've succeeded in allowing yourself to get captured, your mate poisoned and while you were about chewing the fat… your pack’s protection threatened. That’s hardly a sterling record for someone who says he is able to take care of himself.”
Those words felt like a slap, and were all the more painful because part of me wondered if she was right. None of this would have occurred if I’d just saved him and stayed like I'd swore in the pack house. Marcus would still be alive. Lucien wouldn’t be lying here, fighting for his life.
Maybe I was nothing but a liability after all.
As the moon rose and Lucien was poisoned, the fever dreams began. He twisted in his sheets, and sweat rolled down his forehead as he fought battles inside his head.
"The eastern b-border," he muttered in his delirium. “They’re crossing the eastern border.”
I began to stand up, to go try and console him, but Selena was already on her way. Her cold hand rested on his forehead, and her voice was warm and gentle.
"Shh, it's alright," she whispered. "You're safe. The borders are secure."
Her hand gentled him, and he stilled as she murmured soft reassurances. It was as if she had a magic touch, that could make him feel at peace when he was in her presence, while mine always agitated him.
“Selena,” he whispered, and I had to swallow the relief in his tone.
“I’m here,” she murmured, fingers carding easily through his dark hair. "I'm here, love. Rest now."
Love. I felt a physical jolt from the endearment, even though I knew it was likely just habit, residue of an earlier relationship. But to hear it from his own mouth, to see the way his face softened at the sound of her voice, something collapsed in my chest.
“Don’t go,” he said hoarsely, fumbling for her hand. "Please don't leave me again."
"I shan't," she promised, and snatched his questing fingers in hers. "I'll stay right here."
I waited for him to say my name. To cry for me in his fever, and want to know where I was or how safe. But as the hours went by, it was always Selena. Always it was her name on his lips, her presence that he sought when the poison made him weak.
Never mine.
“The pack,” he murmured in one of his other restiveness nights. "Have to protect the pack."
‘“The pack is safe,” Selena told him, her voice sounding authoritative in a way that made it obvious to hear she was not just taking care of his health. "Everyone is accounted for. Everyone is protected."
And then she started to hum, a gentle tune that sounded vaguely familiar but which I couldn't recognise. It was something, and whatever it was, it worked on Lucien instantly. His breathing grew deeper, his face loosening into something approaching peace.
“I know that song,” I replied softly, wanting to be part of whatever memory they were recalling.
Selena’s hum faltered for a moment before she picked up again but wouldn’t meet my gaze and didn’t explain. It was as if I hadn’t said anything.
It was a subtle, but unambiguous, exclusion. This was their world, their mutual history, what they knew about each other in detail. I was passive, sitting in the wings while the woman who’d known him for hundreds of years consoled my mate in ways that I could never offer.
I touched my hand to my belly without thinking, feeling his child quickening inside me under my heart. This baby was supposed to be the proof of our bond, evidence that I deserved to belong in his life. But here I was watching him respond to another woman’s touch with trust and relief, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether biology would be enough to thwart centuries of shared experience.
It was nearly dawn when Lucien's fever finally broke, his breath slipping into the long deep cycle of natural sleep that would soothe him back to health. Selena leaned back in her chair and gave a contented sigh, her mission accomplished.
“He will be whole again,” she proclaimed, wiping her hands on a cloth which returned soaked with herbs and worse things. “It’s going to be a bit before he returns to full form here.”
I was filled with such a sense of relief that I thought I might get high from it. "Thank you," I managed. “I’m not sure what would’ve happened if you hadn’t been here.”
“He’d be dead,” she said matter of factly, starting to put away her tools. “The poison was too particular, too tailored for general antidotes to work.”
The casualness with which she talked about his near-death made my stomach turn. As though this were just another day, just another crisis to be handled with professional detachment.
“You make it like routine,” I said.
"Because it is." She gave me a look that could have been funny. "You've got to know, making friends is something Lucien's never been taught. Throughout our years of partnership, I was forever cleaning up his messes — attending to the wounds he incurred, negotiating with enemies he provoked, repairing diplomatic rifts and on and on."
Our long relationship. The words formed a challenge in the air between us.
“What are you saying by that, exactly?” I inquired, although there was a part of me that really didn’t want to know.
Selena's smile was knowing, secretive. “There are things that never end,” she said as if that did everything. “He’s always been too proud to ask for help, too stubborn to get out when he should, too ready to make enemies of people who could be allies.”
The intimate knowledge in her voice, the ease with which she ran through his failings with a kind of affectionate exasperation that suggested she’d been dealing with them for centuries, made me feel like an outsider in my own life.
“But you stayed with him anyway,” I said, struggling to comprehend.
“I did not stay because I had hope but I stayed because I could understand him,” she corrected. "Because I believed, under all the conceit and malice he was a man worth redeemin'. Worth protecting."
The way she’d talk about him, that combination of frustration and deep affection, was like how wives talked about husbands they had been married to for decades. The comfortable intimacy of someone who’d witnessed all his faults and decided to love him despite them.
"And now?" I asked. "What are you doing now?"
“Now I’m just making sure he doesn’t die of his own dumbness,” she said, standing and smoothing her dress. "Someone has to."
She strode toward the door, like she was meant to be there, like closing down most of it should never have been her choice to make. She stopped at the door and glanced over her shoulder at me.
“You need to rest,” she said. “The baby needs you strong and I see how tired you are.”
It was sensible advice, maybe even kind. But the manner in which she said it, the fluent taking-for-granted of authority over my well-being, made me want to dismiss her. Another indication that she knew better than I what was good for me.
"Will you stay?" I asked, despising how tiny my voice was. "To watch over him?"
"Of course." And the reply was instant — as if there had ever been any question. “There needs to be somebody who is overseeing his recovery, making sure there are no complications.”
While she went to sort out somewhere to stay for herself, I uneasily realized that her not just settling in for the night or two. She was settling in, staking out a place for herself in our pack house, among our lives, as if she’d never truly left.
There I sat with one hand clutching my comatose mate’s, his child growing inside of me, and I was more alone than I had been the day that I’d left my father’s compound.