Chapter 268 Blood – Aleksandr’s POV

Chapter 268 Blood – Aleksandr’s POV
Blood dried tacky against my skin, cracking across my forearms whenever I moved. The corridors were empty. Palace staff had long experience disappearing when their Alpha King walked past wearing another man’s blood, and I could not blame them.
The suite met me with cedar and silence. In the bathroom, I stripped and dropped each ruined garment into the sink. The shower ran hot enough to sting. Water carried blood from my skin in pink streams that faded to clear before circling the drain.
I scrubbed until my skin hurt: shoulders, chest, arms, every place the blood had dried thickest. My knuckles were split. Skoll had been driving, and he registered pain only when it interfered with the hunt. I discovered the damage afterwards, bruise by bruise, like evidence left by a stranger using my body.
Clean clothes: black trousers, white shirt, no jacket. Dressing offered a routine too ordinary for what I had done, but I needed its sequence. Buttons. Fastenings. Laces. If I kept my hands occupied, perhaps my mind would submit to order.
I left the suite. The palace remained hushed, a building attempting to survive the morning by keeping out of my path.
Dominic joined me without announcement. I had not heard him approach, which meant he had been waiting and tracking my movements through the palace. He took his usual place behind my left shoulder, but the familiarity had altered. His lowered head and cautious distance belonged to a beta recalculating the man he had served for four decades.
I stopped in the empty corridor and turned. Dominic met my gaze with the measured attention of someone who had spent years reading my face and had finally found something he wished remained hidden.
“Skoll needed vengeance,” I said. The explanation sounded inadequate before it left my mouth. It was not an excuse, and neither of us pretended otherwise.
Dominic inclined his head, brief and exact. He offered neither forgiveness nor condemnation. His silence was the choice of a man whose loyalty had not vanished but had become heavier to carry.
We continued to the medical wing without speaking. Language would have forced one of us to name what had happened, and neither was ready to decide what followed.
Amelia had not moved. She lay exactly as I had left her: hospital gown, white sheets, dark hair spread across the pillow. The monitors kept their steady rhythm. I returned to the chair beside her and took her cool hand, back at the only bedside that mattered.
Sylvia came in five minutes later looking worse than she had at dawn. Her steel-grey hair had escaped its bun, and fatigue had drained the colour from her face. She carried no clipboard, which frightened me more than any report.
“The Queen’s condition is unchanged,” she said, dispensing with pleasantries. “The pups are still fine. Heart rates strong, measurements consistent. Whatever she ingested did not reach them in sufficient quantity to cause damage.”
She paused and rubbed her eyes with the heel of one hand. The gesture exposed how long she had spent studying toxicology reports for an answer she did not want to give.
“We’ve identified the key compounds.” Clinical precision left her voice. “It wasn’t designed to kill the Queen, Aleksandr.”
My name instead of my title made the warning personal. Sylvia stood with her scarred hands curled loosely at her sides, braced for my reaction.
“If she had finished the pastry, it likely would have triggered a miscarriage. You would have lost the pups. The small amount she swallowed caused the numbness, intestinal distress and collapse, but it did not reach the uterine tissue in a concentration high enough to end the pregnancy.”
The information landed without heat. It passed into the part of me that had already killed four people and suggested the act had been mercy.
“Then why isn’t she awake?” My voice sounded level, detached from the question it carried.
Sylvia’s expression softened. “I believe Kaela is keeping her unconscious, giving her body time to process the poison without the stress of waking. She may be protecting the pups by keeping Amelia still. I’ve never seen it documented, but wolf instinct reaches places medicine cannot measure. If Kaela believes sleep is safer, she’ll keep Amelia there until the danger has passed.”
The silver mating mark showed at Amelia’s wrist where the gown had shifted. I lifted her fingers and pressed my lips to them once, indifferent to the witness in the room.
“Thank you, Sylvia.”
Sylvia nodded and left. The door latched behind her, leaving the steady work of monitors and intravenous fluid to measure time.
Skoll had withdrawn into exhausted silence. Vengeance had not erased his fear. Amelia remained unconscious, the pups remained vulnerable, and all the strength that had destroyed four conspirators could do nothing here.
Dominic remained near the door. He had not followed Sylvia out, nor had I dismissed him. His presence carried no reassurance now, only accountability. Eventually, we would have to discuss the interrogation room, the dead sources and the lie he had chosen to protect the crown. Amelia’s condition made that reckoning feel both immediate and impossibly far away.
“The investigation continues,” he said at last. “We seized their devices and records before the cleanup began. Kane’s network may still be traceable.”
I heard the unspoken remainder: despite what you did. I gave him a single nod. Gratitude would have been dishonest, and apology required more than I could offer while Amelia slept between us.
I kept Amelia’s hand near my face and listened to her pulse beneath my thumb, using the quiet beat as an anchor rather than a promise.
She would wake when Kaela judged it safe. The pups would continue growing. Beyond the medical wing, the kingdom would keep moving while Dominic reconstructed a conspiracy I had damaged in a moment of vengeance. When Amelia opened her eyes, I would have to tell her what the poison was meant to do and what I had done in response.
Until then, there were white lights, steady beeping and the measured rhythm of her breathing. I counted each rise of her chest, waiting for the breath that would bring her back and knowing I would not be the same man she had left.