Chapter 41
LEANDER
Isat on the floor with my back to the wall beside the fireplace, staring across at where Sadie slept on the sofa, as comfortable as we could make her.
We couldn’t take her upstairs, with the risk that the chill would take her from us.
She would fade soon, I could sense it. The thin sliver of life that she clung to was fading.
It had been hours, and it was a miracle that she held on this long at all.
But I didn’t know how much longer it would take for my sister to get here.
Lucira was the healer of our pack, and the only person we knew who could treat silver burns this extensive.
Poison that reached far beyond skin into heart and soul and blood.
It had been hours, but it would only be minutes until she was gone forever.
My mate, ripped away by a killer before I could even get to know her.
All I knew was her favourite colour. I didn’t know her favourite food.
I didn’t know if she hated summer, or loathed the chill of winter.
I didn’t know what she was like when she first woke in the morning, or if she liked to be held while she fell asleep at night.
I didn’t know anything about her, only that she was brave and strong and resilient.
Only that she was so beautiful it hurt, and she’d been treated so badly in the past that she couldn’t bear to trust her mates.
I scraped my hands down my face, hating that I couldn’t pretend everything was alright, hating that my emotions were so clear, pouring down my cheeks.
Verne was better at hiding it, bustling around the cottage from bedroom to the kitchen to the living room, making sure she had a dozen different blankets, water that we could drip past her lips, and clean bandages and rags to change her wound dressings.
I pressed my lips together and didn’t say anything, even if I thought it was pointless.
Even if I knew she was lost, and there was no hope.
That was why I couldn’t take my eyes away.
I had a limited time to look at her. My beautiful, brave mate who had been stolen from another world but conquered this one with such grace and courage and sarcasm.
I jumped when the door flew open, banging against the wall.
It wasn’t just Lucira who poured through the open door; my mother and father were there too.
At the sight of them, the tears that I’d managed to keep to a trickle burst like a dam.
Sobs ripped my chest apart. My mate was dying. My mate was dying.
“How long has it been?” Lucira demanded, already in healer mode as she strode across the floor and knelt beside where Sadie lay on the sofa.
“Four hours,” Lainsz snapped. He’d been sitting next to Sadie all this time, pelting her with a mix of insults and challenges and remarks that would’ve made anyone else fade away faster.
But what did I know, because Sadie was still here, still clinging to the faint thread of life. “What took you so fucking long?”
“Language,” my mum said on reflex, and then realised these were extenuating circumstances.
She crouched beside me, and pushed tear-slick hair from my face.
Since the moment I was born, everyone had said I had Eirlys Erenhard’s face.
The same straight nose, the same quick smile, the same mischievous glint in our green eyes.
But where I had grown with muscle in training, my mother was as graceful and slender as a Redwood tree.
“Two wounds?“ My dad asked, sighing as he looked down at Sadie. Lainsz pushed her shirt up her midriff to show where she had been stabbed. “Poor thing.”
While my dad may have been the muscular, physically intimidating half of my parents, he was all careful, gentle care. The moon to my mother’s wrathful sun.
“Who did this?” she demanded, brushing tears off my face. “We’ll shred their bodies to ribbons, and place their heads on spikes around the packlands, I promise.”
“He’s dead, “Lainsz spat.
“Good,” my mother replied fiercely. “When was the last time you ate, all of you?”
I shrugged. Lainsz did the same.
“Verne?” Dad asked, noticing our alpha had been silent all this time.
Verne startled, as if he’d only just noticed they were here. “I don’t want to eat.” His stare fixed on Lucira, her hands fixed to Sadie’s wounds. “Is there any chance…?“
“Just. Let me work,” my sister replied shortly.
We fell silent, watching Sadie as we had for hours. But this time Lainsz was silent, too, his voice not punctuating the suffocating quiet.
I couldn’t handle it. More tears flowed.
I wanted to slam my fist through the floorboards, but that was my wolf speaking.
If I let him out now in such a destructive emotional state, I might unleash myself on everyone in this room.
All the people I loved. And the mate I hadn’t even had the chance to love, because we had too little time together.
What seemed like hours later, Lucira sat back, Sadie’s blood on her hands. “I’ve done all I can, but she might not make it through the night.”
I screwed my eyes shut. She was supposed to say Sadie was healed, that she would survive.
“What can we do?” Mum asked, squeezing my shoulder before she stood. I was colder without her. I wanted to cross the room and clasp Sadie’s hand, wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with Verne, to try and pierce his empty silence, but I couldn’t summon the energy.
Sadie was going to die. All these hours fighting to keep even a thread of her here, and it was for nothing. She was going to die.
“Can you feel her through the bond?” Lucira asked me, glancing at Lainsz and Verne too, answering Mum’s question.
“She’s like ice,” I replied hoarsely.
“Hold onto that ice,” Lucira ordered, striding into the kitchen to wash her hands. “Even when it burns. Even when you go numb. Hold onto that ice.”
So I did. For hours. For days.