Chapter 75 The wound That Won’t Heal
The doctors say the bite healed cleanly.
Too cleanly.
They say it with relief, with professional calm, with the kind of tone that suggests the matter is settled. As if flesh knitting itself back together means the danger has passed. As if healing is a finish line instead of a door that swings shut behind you, locking something else inside.
My shoulder doesn’t ache. My pulse doesn’t stutter. My strength returns faster than it should.
Physically, there is nothing wrong with me.
Mentally, everything feels… wrong.
The moment won’t leave me.
It replays when I close my eyes, uninvited and vivid. The sound of teeth snapping shut. The sudden, violent pressure. The way the world narrowed to instinct and fear and the certainty that something had gone terribly wrong in a single heartbeat.
I tell myself I survived.
I tell myself I’m fine.
But my mind doesn’t listen.
It rewinds and plays it again.
And again.
Sometimes it’s the look in Darius’s eyes right before it happened,sharp, focused, unaware of what was coming. Sometimes it’s the split second where I knew I was too far away. Sometimes it’s the sound I made when I realized I couldn’t stop it.
Those are the moments that wake me up at night.
I jolt upright in bed, breath ragged, heart racing like I’m still running. The room is quiet, dimly lit, safe. But my body doesn’t believe it.
My beast certainly doesn’t.
It snaps awake with me, pacing inside my skin like a caged thing. I can feel it,restless, coiled tight, claws scraping against the inside of my ribs. It doesn’t sleep the way it used to. It doesn’t settle.
It’s always listening.
Always ready to take control of us.
just before dawn, deep into the night, I feel it stir suddenly, sharp and alert, as if something invisible has brushed past us. I’ll be standing still one moment and braced the next, muscles tense, senses flaring for a threat that isn’t there.
I decided to keep the lights on. It was like it couldn’t handle the fact that we got hurt during the attack after all it was an apex predator and not prey.
I tell myself it’s temporary.
Healing takes time, like my therapist Dr Voss said. Shock lingers. Trauma echoes.
But no one talks about what it feels like to live with something inside you that no longer trusts the world.
During the day, I try to act normal.
I walk the corridors. I train lightly. I nod when people speak to me. But I hear things.
Whispers carry more than people think they do.
“She was lucky. If she weren’t a hybrid that boy would have taken her out”
I freeze mid-step the first time I hear it. And. Feel my beast stir like it’s who was wounded, I felt the urge to shy and show them what a fatal bite looks like.
Two blood guards stand near the weapons bay, voices low, not realizing how sharp my hearing still is.
“Real lucky,” one of them says. “That bite should’ve killed her.”
“Yeah,” the other agrees. “Did you hear about the Blood Gate unit last month? One of theirs got bitten. That beat bit a whole chunk of his chest out. Didn’t even last an hour.”
They fall silent when they notice me.
Their faces shift,guilt, discomfort, forced respect.
I walk past them without saying a word.
Lucky.
The word lodges itself under my skin like a splinter.
I hear it again later. And again.
Always said the same way. With awe. With relief. With something unspoken underneath it all.
Not strong. Not skilled. Not prepared.
Lucky.
As if survival was a coin toss.
As if the outcome was random.
As if the people who didn’t make it simply failed to land on the right side of fate.
That night, I sit alone in my room, staring at the wall as the word loops in my head.
Lucky.
The Blood Gate warrior they mentioned had a name. I don’t know it, but I know it existed. I know someone trained beside them, laughed with them, trusted them at their back.
They died.
I didn’t.
And no one seems to know what to do with that difference except shrug and call it luck.
My beast snarls quietly inside me, a low, simmering thing.
It doesn’t feel lucky.
It feels hunted.
I start noticing the way people move around me.
How they position themselves slightly closer. How blood guards step in without thinking when a door opens too suddenly or a noise echoes too loudly. How Darius’s gaze tracks me even when he’s pretending not to watch.
Protection has become automatic.
Instinctive.
And that terrifies me more than the attack did.
Because if I stay like this,if I stay someone who needs watching, shielding, saving,then people will keep putting themselves between me and danger.
They will keep taking the hits meant for me.
I lie awake again, staring at the ceiling, my beast pacing endlessly beneath my skin.
The bite healed.
The scar is gone.
But something else has taken its place.
A quiet, burning certainty settles in my chest, heavy and unignorable.
If I don’t change.
if I don’t become something more than lucky.
then survival won’t always be the ending.
Sometimes, it will just mean someone else didn’t get one at all.