Chapter 33, The Gamma’s Gamble
Rhys
The air in the medical wing was thick enough to choke a human.
I kept my grip firm on Wren’s waist as I lowered her onto the examination table.
She was burning, not just a fever, but a deep, vibrating heat that felt like it was radiating from her very bones.
Her hand, which had been white-knuckled in the fabric of my vest all the way down the hall, finally went limp as she lost consciousness.
“On her back, Rhys. Move,” Saga commanded, her voice snapping like a gunshot. She was already reaching for a scanner, her face a mask of clinical focus.
I did as I was told, but I could feel the back of my neck prickling.
I did not need to look behind me to know that Skarde was vibrating with enough volatile tension to make the medical equipment hum.
The scent of my own musk on the girl, the smell of the man who had held her all night while he was out tearing through the pines, hit his senses with the sharp, stinging clarity of an insult.
“Out. Both of you,” Saga said, not even looking up as she pressed a sensor to Wren’s temple.
“I’m stay...” Skarde started, his voice a low, tectonic rumble.
“You’re leaving,” Saga cut him off, finally pinning him with a glare that could halt a blizzard. “Your proximity is spiking her heart rate. If you want her to get through this, you will take your Gamma and get out of my medical wing. Now.”
Skarde’s jaw tightened so hard I heard the bone creak. For a second, I thought he might actually defy her, but the sight of Wren, pale and shivering, seemed to pull the air out of him.
He turned on his heel and stormed out. I followed, keeping my pace casual, even though every instinct told me to give him room to breathe.
The heavy doors hissed shut behind us, leaving us in the sterile, dimly lit corridor.
Skarde did not stop. He marched toward the observation lounge that overlooked the lights of Ember-Fell, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.
The morning was still just a smudge on the horizon; it was that dead hour where the night refused to end.
“You stayed in her room.”
It was not a question. It was a low frequency growl that made the floor tiles beneath our boots tremble.
I leaned against the wall, crossing my ankles. “I sat on a duvet and watched a girl have a breakdown because her Alpha decided to test the structural integrity of her bedroom door. Varg was not exactly there to sing her a lullaby, Boss.”
Skarde whirled around, his eyes still glowing that bruised, violent violet. He did not look like a leader; he looked like a man haunted by a ghost he could finally touch.
“You think Alaric should have sent someone else,” Skarde said, his voice a low, sandpaper rasp. “One of our cousins? A pure Lycan who does not have a wolf’s blood screaming in his ears. To lead this pack.”
I did not answer. Everyone knew the story.
After the first Queen died, the Lycan King had taken a werewolf female as his second mate.
It was a scandal that nearly broke the Black-Spine, but it produced Skarde.
He was the King’s brother, a hybrid with Lycan strength and the relentless, haunting senses of a wolf.
And he doubted himself, his right to lead and his powers.
“Alaric is the stone that holds this mountain together,” Skarde continued, finally turning. The violet in his eyes was swirling, dark and deep. “But my mother gave me a nose for the things that move in the shadows. Things even the King cannot sense.”
He stepped toward me, the air around him thickening with that oppressive, Lycan-edged heat.
“The night of the Blood Moon, eighteen years ago.I was looking for the reason the wind had gone silent right before the attack. And then I smelled it. In the middle of it all, there was a trace of something that should not exist. It was faint. Like starlight trapped in a rowan thicket.”
He stopped inches from me, his nostrils flaring as he caught the lingering scent of her on my vest.
“I saw Arthur find her. A human-scented nothing in the dirt. The High-Ridge took her because they thought she was a babe left behind. But there is a reason the old tales mention the Ghost-Born.
The wolves born with a power so volatile it masks their scent until they are old enough to survive the shift.”
His hand twitched, his fingers curling into a fist.
“I have watched her from the border for years, wondering if she was the ghost the rumors promised. And then I cornered her in the hall yesterday. The starlight caught fire. It turned into cold rain and mountain honey. My wolf has not been able to settle since that smell hit the air.
It is like a fever, Rhys.”
I did not back down. I stepped into his space, my voice cold and steady.
“You want to talk about your wolf?” I said.
“Varg was the one who nearly took her door off the hinges last night. He was the one who terrified her so badly she was crying in my arms. I was not overstepping, Skarde. I was holding a girl who cried herself to sleep because her possible Alpha was acting like a predator outside her room.”
I looked him dead in the eye, reminding him exactly why I was his gamma and why I was the one with her scent on my clothes.
“I stayed because you could not. You were out in the pines losing your mind while she was in there breaking apart. If you are pissed that she reached for me, remember that you are the one who gave her a reason to be afraid. You have been keeping an eye on her for all these years, but last night,
you were just the monster under her bed.”
Skarde’s jaw tightened so hard I thought his teeth might crack. The heat radiating off him was enough to make the air shimmer, but he stayed silent. He knew I was right.
“She will wake up,” I added, looking toward the medical doors. “And when she does, she is not going to be a ghost or a rumor anymore. She is going to be a wolf. You better decide if you want to be the man she trusts or the one she has to hide from.”
Skarde did not answer. He just turned back to the window, his jaw set in a hard, brutal line.