Chapter 8
The alarm on my phone goes off at five-thirty and for three seconds I don’t know where I am.?
The ceiling is too low. The bed is too narrow. The pillow smells wrong — laundry soap, not cedar — and there’s no weight beside me, no arm across my ribs, no warmth radiating from a body that sleeps hotter than mine. My feet are hanging off the end of the mattress and the room is cold and gray and I’m staring at a sloped ceiling I don’t recognize.
Then I remember. I push my hair out of my face, and I get up to get on with my day, because what else can I do?
The shower is so small I bang my elbow on the towel rack turning around. The water takes three minutes to get warm and never gets as hot as I want it, but the water pressure is good at least. I dress in scrubs — the soft ones, washed a hundred times — and I tie my hair back in the low knot and I look at myself in the mirror above the tiny sink and the woman looking back is twenty-one years old and has no title and no mate and no plan and a healer’s shift that starts in forty minutes.
I go to work.
----
The pack clinic is in the westernmost building of the pack offices, on the ground floor. Four treatment rooms, a supply closet, an intake desk, and a small OR in the back that’s mostly used for stabilizing emergencies — anything serious gets referred out, usually to the commune, where visiting healers with surgical training come through on rotation. It’s not a hospital, but it’s solid. I helped build it from a repurposed office and utility closet with a single healer who mostly took care of pack kids with runny noses and referred everything else to the hospital in the city an hour away into a real functioning clinic. I started healer training and was an apprentice before Ronan and I found our bond.
I’ve been pulling clinic shifts since before the Luna training started. Healing was the one thing that was mine — something I chose, something Soleil never wanted. She picked combat. I picked medicine. For a while it felt like enough to build a life on, and then Ronan’s wolf recognized mine across a room and suddenly I was the next Luna and the healing became a side interest, something I fit between diplomatic briefings and Council prep. I finished my basic certification and stopped there because there wasn’t time for more. I built the clinic up because as the future Luna, I was supposed to be interested in charitable actions and administration, not dirtying my hands personally with blood or vomit.
Now there’s time. Now it might be the only thing I have that’s actually useful, and the thought sits in my chest with a weight I can’t quite name — grief, maybe, or something closer to relief. The other healers know me. They’ve worked beside me. They know I’m competent.
What they don’t know is how to treat me now.
Emerson Hartman is the senior healer on shift. Late thirties, calm hands, twelve years in the corps. He was one of the first healers I worked with when I took over the rotation scheduling, and he told me once, over a late-night supply inventory, that my reorganization saved the clinic. That he could actually treat patients instead of fighting logistics. I liked Emerson and I trusted him.
He meets me at the intake desk and his face does a complicated series of adjustments. Warmth — he’s glad to see me. Uncertainty — he doesn’t know my standing. Caution — someone between yesterday and this morning told him to be careful.
“Sasha. Good to see you.” His voice is a degree too measured. “I’ve got you on intake and wound care today. Routine stuff.”
Intake and wound care — bandage changes, splint checks, filing paperwork. The work they give new apprentices in their first week to see if they can handle the sight of blood.
“I was on surgical assist last week,” I say, keeping my voice level. I was, and he knows I was, because he’s the one who put me there after watching me close a laceration faster than his second-year resident.
“I know.” He doesn’t look away, which I respect, but his jaw tightens. “It’s just — things are a little in flux right now. Staffing-wise. I want to keep the schedule simple until everything... settles.”
Settles. There’s that word again. Margot’s word. Everyone in this pack reaches for it when they mean until we figure out what to do with you.
“Understood,” I say. I take the intake clipboard and I go to Treatment Room B and I don’t argue because arguing would confirm every story the pack is telling about me right now.
----
The morning is long and quiet. Two bandage changes — a kitchen wolf with a burn that’s healing well, a patrol guard with stitches from a fence repair that went wrong. I change the dressings, check the margins, note the progress. My hands know this work. They’ve always known it — before the diplomacy, before the Luna training, before any of it, I was a healer’s apprentice with steady fingers and a stomach that didn’t turn.
The patrol guard is young — nineteen, maybe twenty. He watches me work and he’s trying not to stare and finally he says, “You’re Sasha Addison, right? The — I mean, you were —”
“I’m one of the healers,” I say. “Hold still, I need to check these stitches.”
He holds still and doesn’t finish the sentence. I’m grateful for that, though the unfinished shape of it hangs in the air between us — you were the future Luna — and I can feel him recalculating what he thinks he knows about me.
At eleven, an older guard comes in with a deep laceration on his forearm from a training exercise that got out of hand. The wound is ragged but clean. I irrigate it, check for tendon involvement — none, just muscle and skin — and close it in twelve stitches, evenly spaced, the tension right on each one. My hands are steady. They’re always steady for this. Whatever else is falling apart, my hands know what to do with a wound.
The guard watches me work. “You’re fast,” he says.
“I’ve had practice.”
“Hartman usually does the sutures.”
“Hartman put me on intake today.” I tie off the last stitch and reach for the dressing. “But a laceration is a laceration. You’ll want to keep this dry for forty-eight hours and come back for a check on Thursday.”
He flexes his hand, testing the stitches. Nods. “Thanks, healer.”
Healer. Not Luna. Not Ms. Addison. Just healer. It should sting and it doesn’t. It fits. It fits better than the titles did, and that realization is so quiet I almost miss it.
After he leaves, I clean the treatment room and restock the suture tray and check the supply cabinet while I’m at it. Antiseptic is running low — I make a note. Surgical thread order from last month still hasn’t come in. Gauze stock is fine because I set up an auto-replenishment system eighteen months ago and it’s still working. The whole cabinet is still organized to my original specs — the labeling system, the rotation schedule, the color-coded expiry tracking. Nobody has changed it, and even without me doing anything, it’s running properly, at least for now.
I close the cabinet and stand in the treatment room with the afternoon light coming through the window. Antiseptic running low, surgical thread late. Small gaps, the kind I’d normally catch and fix before anyone noticed. The kind I’ve been catching for three years.
I make the notes and file them. It’s the only thing I know how to do right now, so I do it.
----
Lunch. The staff eats in the tiny kitchen behind the clinic, not the main dining hall. I’m not ready for the dining hall and I don’t know when I will be. But there’s a table and a microwave and a sad selection of leftovers here and I eat reheated soup standing up because sitting feels like committing to a social situation I don’t have the energy for.
Vera comes in. Vera Tanner, second-year healer, good with stitches, bad with paperwork. She likes me — or she did, before yesterday. She heats up something in a container and leans against the counter and looks at me with an expression I’m learning to recognize: sympathy she doesn’t know what to do with.
“How are you doing?” she asks carefully.
“I’m fine.”
“I just — I heard about the Council, and I wanted to say, I think it’s really brave what you did. Taking space for yourself.” She stirs her food. “And Soleil was in the clinic this morning — she stopped by to check on the scheduling, I think? She asked about you. She seemed really concerned.”
My spoon pauses in the soup.
Soleil was in the clinic. My clinic. The healer corps I built and ran and staffed. Checking on the scheduling — the scheduling I designed, the system I created, the rotation I organized from nothing. She’s already here. Already filling this space too, the same slow absorption — briefings, correspondence, the fitting room, the Stone Run dinner, and now my clinic.
“That’s kind of her,” I say. My voice sounds far away.
“She’s such a good sister,” Vera says. No malice, total sincerity — she believes it, and everyone believes it. “Not everyone would check in like that, you know? After everything.”
After everything. As though everything is a thing I did to Ronan, rather than a thing Ronan did to me. As though walking out of a Council chamber where my mate was describing my replacement is taking space for myself. As though my twin showing up at my clinic the morning after I withdrew from my own succession so she could take my place is concern and not something else, something I’m not even ready to name even in my own head.
I can’t correct this. I can’t say she was wearing my dress because that sounds deranged. I can’t say he was describing her to a room full of Elders because from the outside, the modernization proposal looks like governance and Vera won’t care about that. I can’t say they’ve been rerouting my correspondence and attending my briefings and absorbing my work for weeks because Soleil did all of it with a smile and a shrug and I didn’t mean to overstep and nobody — nobody — saw anything except a capable sister stepping up while the Moon Twin struggled.
“She really is,” I say. I finish the soup. I rinse the bowl. I go back to work.
----
The afternoon shift is quieter — a sprained wrist, a follow-up on a healing fracture. I document everything with the same thoroughness I’ve always brought — specific, every detail noted. The filing system I helped design last year still works, even though nobody else has maintained it, and I’m stopping now.
At five, Emerson stops me on my way out.
“Sasha.” He leans against the doorframe of Treatment Room B. The caution from this morning is still there, but underneath it there’s something else. Something that looks like the Emerson I used to work with — the one who told me my reorganization saved the clinic. “Those sutures this morning. On the guard’s arm.”
“What about them?”
“They were good. Better than good.” He crosses his arms. “I shouldn’t have put you on intake. That was — I was being cautious, and I should have just let you work.”
I don’t say anything. He takes a breath.
“Things are going to change around here. With the Ascension. With — everything.” His voice drops. “I don’t know what that’s going to look like for the clinic. For our budget, our staffing, our relationship with the commune. The healer corps has been functioning well because you’ve been running the logistics behind it, and I don’t know if anyone upstairs understands that.” He looks at me steadily. “You don’t have the protection you used to have, Sasha. Just — be aware of that.”
I know. I’m standing in a clinic hallway in healer scrubs with a brass key to a twin bed under the eaves and no title and no mate and no institutional standing whatsoever. I know exactly how unprotected I am.
“Thank you, Emerson,” I say. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I walk back through the central building toward the east wing. Up the stairs. Past the proper guest rooms. Down the narrowing corridor to Room 14.
There’s a note under my door.
A folded note in Ronan’s handwriting — I know it on sight, the precise slant, the way he forms his letters with the same economy he brings to everything.
We should talk. Tomorrow evening. I’ll come to you.
I pick up the note and sit on the twin bed and read it three times.
He found out where I am. He’s coming tomorrow. And I know, with the certainty of three years studying this man, that he will arrive with a plan. He will be calm. He will be reasonable. He will have already decided what happens next, and he will present it to me as a calm, rational solution that I’m expected to nod and accept, because it’s in my own best interest. In the best interest of the pack. In not making a fuss, or worrying anyone during the transition.
I take my scrubs off, shower, and get into bed without eating dinner, even though it’s barely seven.
I lie in the dark and I don’t sleep and I don’t have a plan and tomorrow he’s going to walk into this room and be the most reasonable man alive and I am going to have to find a way to say no to a person I spent three years saying yes to.