Chapter 40
Cole lay still, the violent tremors finally eased, peaceful as though the storm had released him.
The witch lay broken on the floor, shaking and fighting for air as though her body no longer knew how to hold itself together.
Rhen was beside her in an instant.
He dropped to one knee and caught her as another convulsion tore through her, pulling her against him before her head could strike the floor. Her skin burned beneath his hands, heat pouring from her in waves while pain twisted her face and every breath scraped raw from her lungs.
“What the fuck did you do?” Rhen growled.
His voice remained low, but something raw moved beneath the fury, an edge he refused to examine.
She dragged in a breath that sounded as though it cut her from the inside.
“He… will live,” she whispered.
Dax and Malakai stood in stunned silence, still trying to understand what they had witnessed. A witch—a stranger, human and breakable—had drawn the power that had nearly killed Cole into her own body and accepted the cost without hesitation.
Rhen’s chest tightened as anger twisted through him. She had been reckless, stupid, and catastrophically out of her depth.
But she had saved his brother.
Now she trembled in his arms while the storm punished her for it.
“You’re not fucking dying now, female,” he said, the words harsh as his hold shifted to support her through another violent spasm. “Not after this.”
Her lashes fluttered. The faintest shadow of a smile touched her mouth and disappeared before exhaustion dragged her under.
Her body surrendered with one final, shaking exhale, but the pain continued to move through her in aftershocks, tightening her face and breaking soft sounds from her lips even in unconsciousness.
Rhen held her still, jaw clenched, tracking every ragged breath.
Malakai crouched beside Cole and pressed two fingers against the scorched place beneath his ribs, reading the old animating force that held their kind together. It had steadied at last, no longer jerking beneath the remnants of the storm.
The storm had left him, but the damage remained.
When Malakai rose, uncertainty and reluctant awe sharpened his expression.
Malakai moved into Dax’s line of sight and signed,
“Let me take him to his chamber. He’s stable, but he’ll need time.”
Rhen gave a curt nod without looking away from the witch. Malakai lifted Cole’s limp body with ease and carried him from the room, his footsteps fading along the corridor.
Dax remained near the wall, his usual irreverence stripped away as his gaze moved between the unconscious female in Rhen’s arms and the doorway through which Malakai had disappeared.
“What the fuck now, Rhen?” he asked, dragging a hand over his face. “She’s not one of us. Her body can’t carry that shit. She’s—”
“Human,” Rhen growled.
His silver eyes dropped to her as another tremor moved through her body. Sweat shone across her skin, and her chest lifted in shallow, uneven pulls. The storm looked obscene inside something so physically unequipped to contain it.
The knowledge that she had chosen to take Cole’s agony made Rhen’s blood burn all over again.
What the hell had she been thinking?
Dax stepped closer, his eyes narrowing. “She’s tougher than she looks, but she’s breaking, brother.”
Rhen’s arms tightened around her before he forced them to ease. Every muscle in his body remained coiled as though there were still an enemy in front of him that he could tear apart.
“I know.”
He looked at the pain carved into her features and the way each aftershock dragged another involuntary sound from her throat. For the first time since she had appeared at their gates, he saw more than an unknown witch carrying too many secrets.
He saw the cost of the decision that had saved Cole.
The debt it placed upon the clan infuriated him almost as much as the helplessness of watching her pay it.
“Fuck,” Rhen muttered.
He wanted to be furious with her. He wanted to drag her awake and demand why she had risked her life for a male she did not know, why she had thrown herself into their war with the kind of self-destructive courage that got people buried.
Instead, she burned in his arms while he stood there unable to kill, threaten, or brutalize the problem into submission.
“She’s going to fucking break,” Dax said, the edge of his voice dulled by something uncomfortably close to concern.
Rhen’s gaze snapped toward him. “You think I don’t know that?”
The witch groaned again, her head tipping back as her lips parted around a thin, fractured breath.
Rhen adjusted his hold by instinct, frustration rising through him because he could not fix this.
He could end threats. He could reduce enemies to blood and bone.
He could carry the condemned across the final threshold without hesitation.
But this was a human body trying to survive power it had never been made to contain.
His jaw ground hard. “I need to get her out of here.”
The words came rough, more to himself than to Dax.
“She can’t stay on this floor.”
Dax stepped aside, giving him room without argument. “Do what you’ve got to do, brother.”
Rhen rose with the witch held securely against his chest. She weighed almost nothing, and he hated the precision the realization demanded from him. He carried her into the corridor while her soft, involuntary whimpers followed every step.
He had spent his entire existence hating witches and distrusting them with a venom so old it felt like blood memory. They had threatened Leena, whispered curses into wars, and hidden every intention behind another price.
Now he was carrying one through his halls because she had saved Cole and because some nameless pressure beneath his ribs refused to let him put her down.
Veya’s tether had already made his instincts unreliable. That was the explanation. It was the only one he would accept.
Anything else remained shapeless, and Rhen intended to keep it that way.
The witch groaned as another wave struck. His teeth ground together, and he moved faster.
He shouldered open the door to his chamber. Darkness and cold waited inside, with shadows gathered along the walls and the familiar scents of smoke, leather, and old wood settled into the air. Nothing entered this room without his permission. Nothing remained unless he allowed it.
Rhen crossed to the bed and lowered her onto it with controlled care, refusing to examine why his hands knew exactly how gently to move.
Sweat glistened across her skin. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, ragged pulls while pain continued to catch at her face, drawing her features tight and making her lashes flutter as though she were drowning somewhere he could not reach.
Rhen swore and dragged a hand through his hair.
He needed someone who understood living bodies better than he did.
“Mary!”
The door opened moments later, and Mary stepped inside with concern already written across her face. Her gaze landed on the woman in Rhen’s bed, and one hand rose to her mouth.
“Oh, my heavens. Rhen, what happened?”
“She’s a witch,” he said flatly, as though the word explained both everything and nothing. “She took Cole’s storm into herself to save him. Now her body’s paying for it.”
Mary stared at him before disbelief gave way to horror. “She took it into herself?”
Rhen nodded once.
Mary wasted no more time. She moved to the bedside and pressed careful fingers near the witch’s brow, assessing the heat pouring from her skin. Her expression settled into the calm authority she always carried when someone was bleeding, breaking, or dying.
“Get those wet clothes off her before the cold drives her into shock,” Mary said. “Then we need to bring this fever down without shocking her system.”
Rhen stepped back half a pace, although his gaze never left the witch’s face. “Do it.”
Mary glanced at him, gentle and entirely unafraid. “I need room to work.”
“I gave you room.”
Her mouth twitched, but she wisely left the answer unspoken.
She reached for the soaked fabric at the witch’s shoulder and began easing it away with practiced hands, careful not to pull against muscles already locked by pain.
All the while, she murmured the soft, soothing nonsense humans offered when there was nothing else they could give.
“There, love. You’re safe for now. We’ll get you dry, and we’ll get you through this.”
The witch jerked when cooler air touched her skin, and a broken sound caught in her throat.
Mary frowned. “The storm is still moving through her. It’s too much power for a human body.”
Rhen’s hands flexed at his sides.
He hated the helplessness of it. He hated that there was no throat to crush, no enemy to dismember, and no act of violence capable of forcing the power from her veins. Most of all, he hated that he watched her with the same fixed attention he gave a brother bleeding out on a battlefield.
“Do whatever you can,” he said.
Mary dried the witch quickly, replaced the wet clothing with a loose shift, and laid a cool cloth across her brow before drawing a dry blanket lightly over her. Then she checked her breathing and pulse again, her concentration deepening as another tremor passed through the mattress.
Rhen remained beside the bed in silence.
Mary smoothed the blanket and looked up at him. “Do you want me to stay with her, Master Rhen? She shouldn’t be alone if she wakes.”
He did not answer immediately. His gaze stayed fixed on the witch’s face and the tremor still moving through her limbs as though the storm had not finished feeding.
“No,” he said at last. “I’ll stay.”
Mary’s brows rose, but she did not argue. She only rested a hand briefly against his arm, as though he were still a boy pretending not to be afraid of something.
“You did the right thing bringing her here.”
“She saved Cole,” Rhen replied. “That bought her time.”
Mary’s expression softened with a knowledge he did not invite. “Whatever you need to call it.”
She left before he could answer, closing the door quietly behind her.
Silence settled across the room.