Chapter 269 I Want Out – Blackwolf’s Perspective

Chapter 269 I Want Out – Blackwolf’s Perspective
Ten minutes. It had been ten fucking minutes since I stood in the medical bay and watched the Alpha King’s face become something I had never seen before, and my hands still would not stop shaking.
I paced from desk to window and back again. My office was too small for this much fury. White walls and steel cabinets belonged to healing, not the disaster tightening around the palace. My coat hung on the door, crisp and white and suddenly offensive in its innocence. I had torn it off the moment Aleksandr left and thrown it hard enough to rattle the frame.
The burn scars on my hands ached. They always did when anger pulled the damaged tissue tight. I flexed my fingers, watched the pale skin stretch across my knuckles and tried to breathe past the rage that had been building since the toxicology reports arrived.
Not poison. Not assassination. Termination.
Someone had tried to kill the twins.
I stopped at the window. The courtyard lay empty in the pre-dawn grey, and the glass reflected a woman I did not especially want to see. Steel-grey hair slipping from its bun. A face sharpened by three centuries of treating injuries from power struggles she had helped create.
“This wasn’t the deal,” I told the reflection. My voice remained steady, impressive considering my insides felt pulverised.
The phone sat on my desk, analogue and ugly enough to belong in a museum. It was also the only line in the building I trusted. I had installed the encryption and checked it twice after Dominic’s sweep. Paranoia and necessity had become difficult to distinguish.
I grabbed it. Dialled from memory. The number was six digits long and changed weekly, and I’d been changing it myself since before most of the palace staff had been born.
It rang twice. The answering click came with a measured voice and the archaic lilt of someone who treated conversation as academic discourse.
“Blackwolf. This is unexpected.”
“What the fuck did you do?”
The silence on the other end lasted precisely two seconds. I counted them. One. Two. Then the careful inhale of someone recalibrating.
“I assume,” Redwolf said, laying out each word with scholarly care, “that you’re referring to tonight’s unpleasantness at the gala. I did nothing, Blackwolf. I was reviewing texts in the eastern archive when the commotion began. I heard about the Queen’s collapse from three corridors away.”
“Bullshit.” My grip tightened until the receiver creaked. “The poison was botanical, with metallic trace elements. It was designed to trigger uterine contractions and placental separation. That is not random. Someone knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what they wanted.”
Papers shifted at the other end. Someone was consulting notes they should not have needed.
“Termination,” Redwolf said at last, clinical and detached. “Not assassination. Termination.”
“Congratulations. You have passed basic toxicology. Now tell me why you authorised an attempt on the royal pregnancy when the entire point was for those pups to be born.”
The anger in my voice should not have surprised me. I had spent two centuries stitching together victims of power plays I helped orchestrate, telling myself the greater good justified the damage. Even so, there were lines I could still locate after centuries of bending my ethics into shapes they had never been meant to hold.
Children were a line.
“I did not authorise this, Blackwolf.” Redwolf’s voice had shifted, the scholarly detachment giving way to something sharper. “I had no knowledge of it. No involvement. No communication with any operative regarding the Queen’s food or security. This was not part of our arrangement.”
“Then who?” I crossed the office again, the cord drawing taut behind me. “Someone tried to terminate a royal pregnancy with a precision compound that does not grow on trees. That requires planning, knowledge, resources and access.”
“I don’t know.” The admission came reluctantly. “The Kane connection is obvious. Thaddeus has motive, means and a grudge against the Queen that aligns with traditionalist concerns about bloodline purity. But Thaddeus was in custody. Or he was, before the break.”
“The break you arranged.”
“The break I arranged to extract two councillors who serve a purpose larger than their individual crimes. Not to murder unborn children, Blackwolf. Never that.”
I returned to the window and rested my forehead against the cold glass. Outside, dawn lightened the eastern sky while the city woke to a queen unconscious and a king who had turned four conspirators into remains on an obsidian floor.
“They need those pups born,” I said more quietly. “That was always the plan. The prophecy requires the third mark. The third mark requires the pups to remain permanent. Everything we are building collapses if those twins do not reach term.”
“I am aware of the requirements, Blackwolf.” A hint of irritation now, the scholarly patience wearing thin. “I drafted half the research on the Thrice Marked Prophecy. I am perhaps more invested in the Queen’s pregnancy reaching full term than anyone in this kingdom except the Alpha King himself.”
“Then explain how someone just tried to end it with a pastry.”
“I can’t.” The honesty of it rang through the line. “Not yet. But I will. This wasn’t authorised. This wasn’t us. This was either Kane operating through proxies without my knowledge, or...”
She trailed off. The silence stretched, weighted with possibilities neither of us wanted to name.
“Or someone else is playing,” I finished. “Someone with different objectives. Someone who wants the Queen removed but doesn’t care about the prophecy, or who actively wants to prevent it.”
“Precisely.” The relief in her voice was audible. Scholarly minds loved having their half-formed thoughts completed by competent colleagues. “The timing is wrong for Kane. The prison break was too recent. This was planned longer. Prepared longer. The poison compound suggests a healer’s knowledge, or at minimum, consultation with someone who understands reproductive toxicology.”
The implication sat between us. I looked down at the scarred hands that had spent centuries measuring medicines and balancing substances capable of healing or harm according to dose and intent.
“Not me,” I said. Flat. Final.
“I didn’t suggest it was.”
“You thought it.”
“I considered it as one of several possibilities. As you would have, in my position.”
She wasn’t wrong. That was the worst part. Three centuries of survival had taught both of us to suspect everyone, including each other, and the habit was too deeply ingrained to unlearn in a phone call while the Queen lay unconscious down the hall.
I sank into my desk chair. The worn leather creaked, and fatigue arrived all at once. Not physical exhaustion, but the weight of a woman who had justified compromises for too long and was running out of space to make another.
“I want out.”
The words came out before I’d fully decided to say them. Redwolf went very quiet on the other end. The kind of quiet that preceded something calculated rather than something emotional.
“Elaborate,” she said.
“This is not what I agreed to. The pups were never to be harmed. Whatever happens with the King or the prophecy, they were off limits. You drew that line, and I accepted it. Now a pregnant woman may lose her pups because of a plan I helped build, and I...” I dragged a hand through my hair, scattering the remaining pins. “I don’t have the stomach for this anymore, Redwolf. Not this part.”
The silence lasted long enough that I checked the connection was still live. It was. I could hear her breathing, the measured inhale-exhale of a scholar considering variables.
“This wasn’t part of the plan, Blackwolf.” Her voice dropped into the register she used when she wanted belief rather than agreement. “Someone acted outside the framework. Possibly Kane. Possibly another player we have not identified. Choosing termination instead of assassination suggests they understood the prophecy and wanted to prevent it.”
“Or they just wanted her humiliated. A public miscarriage at her first official appearance about the heirs. Psychological warfare with a side of political messaging.”
“Also possible.” The concession came reluctantly. Redwolf hated conceding points almost as much as she hated admitting ignorance. “The point, Blackwolf, is that walking away now serves no one. Least of all the Queen, or those pups. If someone is targeting the pregnancy, she needs a healer she can trust. She needs you. Walking away leaves her vulnerable to the next attempt, and the next, and we both know the King’s security apparatus, while thorough, has just demonstrated a catastrophic failure in the one area that matters most.”
The manipulation was elegant. Redwolf had spent four centuries learning which levers to pull, and she had found mine without hesitation.
“I stay as her healer,” I said. Not a question.
“You remain her healer. Monitor the pregnancy and make certain the pups reach term. Outwardly, nothing changes. Internally, you adjust to the fact that the threat may come from outside our own design.”
“And you find whoever did this. Before they try again.”
“I will.” The certainty in her voice was genuine. Redwolf treated knowledge as currency and threats to her research as personal insults. Someone had targeted the centre of her centuries-long study, and concern was hardening into something considerably more dangerous. “I have networks and historical context you do not. If this connects to any prophecy faction, I will find it.”
I believed her. That was the problem. Four centuries of collaboration had taught me that Redwolf’s loyalty to her research was absolute, and right now, her research required those twins alive. Whatever else she was capable of, whatever lines she had crossed or would cross, on this specific point, her interests and mine aligned perfectly.
“Fine.” The word tasted like surrender and sounded like pragmatism. “I stay. But the moment I suspect you knew about this, or worse, authorised it—”
“You’ll do what?” The question was mild, almost academic, from someone who had known me long enough to predict the shape of my threats.
I looked at the burn scars on my hands. Old wounds. Constant reminders.
“Something creative,” I said. “With the full pharmacological expertise of a healer who’s been poisoning people selectively for two centuries and has never once been suspected.”
She laughed. The sound was dry, genuine, carrying the warmth of a scholar appreciating a well-constructed threat from a colleague she respected. “Noted. I’ll ensure my tea is prepared exclusively by staff I’ve vouched for personally.”
The call ended. I replaced the receiver carefully and sat alone while dawn turned the courtyard from grey to pale gold.
Four people dead. A queen unconscious. Two pups who had survived their first assassination attempt at twelve weeks and five days gestation, unaware that they were the most valuable political assets in a kingdom where such assets rarely enjoyed long lives.
And me in the middle, wearing a white coat that had never been as clean as it pretended to be, with burn scars on my hands and another compromise taking root where certainty used to live.
I reached for the coat and put it on. The fabric carried two centuries of choices, but when I fastened the buttons, my hands had steadied.
Time to check on my patient.