To heal a Rogue

Chapter 7: Murder in the library 1

BONNIE

Clarity crashed in the way it always did after disaster. Not creeping, but sudden and shocking, like a bucket of ice water hurled straight into your face.

I lay in a stranger’s bed, in a room I had forced my way into, with an Alpha in rut whose teeth had just pierced the skin at the back of my neck. My body still buzzed with what we’d done, the bite pulsing with a heat my biology insisted on twisting into significance.

My mate.

The word hit my chest like a stone plummeting from a great height.

Alpha Lysander Asker.

I stared at the ceiling and let the enormity of it press down on me. The Alpha of Lily of the Valley. The man newly crowned heir to the Alpha King’s throne before a room of witnesses. The man whose uncle had just confessed to infertility and dynastic fraud in the very library where I’d stood. The man whose pack I had spent years avoiding with careful dread, because packs like his remembered everything and reached even further, and I carried something in my blood that packs like his had historically treated as either a weapon or a threat.

My hand went to the back of my neck.

I pulled it away and looked at my fingers.

Right. So that had happened.

Lysander lay beside me, his chest moving with the slow, heavy rhythm of someone whose rut had finally given way to exhaustion. The devastation had faded from his face. Half-asleep, he looked human again. Composed. Strikingly handsome in that particular way powerful men sometimes were, as if even their features had been assembled with the same meticulous care as everything else they possessed.

I looked at him for exactly three seconds.

Then I got up.

The uniform was on the floor where I had left it, and I pulled the pieces back on in the dark, moving fast and quietly. Trousers went first. Then my shirt. Then my jacket. I looked around for the wig and found it near the door, the cap beside it. I put them back on with fingers steadier than they had any right to be, tucking every strand of platinum-white back under the cap, pressing the wig down until the edges sat flat.

I looked at the door.

I looked at him.

He would wake and remember. The scent, the bite, whatever his wolf had chosen in the heat of it. He would come searching, because that was what Alphas did, and he would find me, because men like him had resources I could never outrun for long. And when he found me, he would know. The hair had already given him half the answer. The rest he would piece together soon enough.

I could not be his mate. The idea was so fundamentally impossible that I could not even shape it into a full thought. My life had no space for a mate. Especially not this one, with his throne entanglements, his uncle’s secrets, his pack, his name, and the blinding visibility that clung to every part of him. I survived by being invisible. He lived at the heart of everything.

The math did not work.

I crossed the room, already sorry for what I was about to do.

I found the pressure points the way I had been taught to. The neck, the specific junction beneath the jaw, where the right applied force produced unconsciousness faster than argument. He stirred when I touched him, some animal instinct surfacing even through sleep, and his eyes opened halfway, unfocused and slow.

"Sorry," I said quietly. "I guess it is a good thing that I thought this far ahead, though."

Then I pressed.

He went under.

I held my breath for a moment after, watching his chest to make sure it kept moving. It did. I let the breath out.

"I really am sorry," I said, to the room more than to him, and then I picked up my shoes from the floor and went to the door.

The corridor was dim and deserted. Whatever the hour, the gathering had to have vanished, and the estate had sunk into that deep, breath-held silence that only came after midnight. My feet made no sound on the runner. I moved quickly, one hand brushing the wall, shoes clutched in the other, because stopping to put them on was not an option.

The money was gone. I knew it before the thought finished forming. Whatever I was owed tonight, whatever sum I’d calculated over weeks, it was now out of reach. Collecting it meant being seen. Being seen meant being found. Being found meant a conversation I was neither ready for nor willing to have.

I passed the landing at the top of the stairs.

That was when my hand started.

It started as warmth blooming in the center of my palm, and I stopped, because that kind of heat was impossible to ignore by will alone. It spoke its own language. I had learned it young, learned it the hard way, and it always said the same thing.

Someone nearby was badly hurt.

My hand glowed a soft blue in the dim corridor, faint enough to hide with a fist, but insistent. I closed my fingers over it and kept moving. I was leaving. The money was gone, and whatever else was unraveling in this estate was not my concern.

But when I passed by it, the library door was slightly open.

It was so dumb, but for some reason, I just couldn’t help myself and stopped.

The glow in my palm brightened, and I stood in the corridor, shoes in hand, platinum hair hidden beneath a wig, telling myself with every ounce of resolve that I would keep walking.

I pushed the door open.

The scene revealed itself in jagged pieces. A chair lay on its side. Books littered the floor, their spines broken, pages torn free and scattered across the carpet like wounded birds. One of the towering shelves leaned at an angle, several volumes still tumbling from the upper tiers. The desk had been shoved askew, papers strewn everywhere. Beyond it stood two masked figures. One loomed over the King, where he had slumped sideways in some chair. The figure was pressed against him in a way that felt wrong, so wrong that my mind recoiled from it before I understood what I was seeing.

The King’s hand was locked around the attacker’s wrist, his muscles straining as he fought to keep a blade from plunging into his chest. The knife hovered inches from its target, trembling violently between them. The masked figure leaned his full weight into the strike while the King pushed back with everything he had left.

I panicked, gripped the door, and at that moment, they heard it.

Both heads turned.

The one standing over the King moved first, and the sound of the shot was enormous in the enclosed space of the library. King Cornelius’s body jerked with the impact and went still.