Bearing the Ruthless Alpha's Twins novel · Chapter 17 of 32

Chapter 17: The Healer

Torin woke on the lodge sofa with a wet cloth on his forehead and said the first thing he could get out.

"Take me to the healer."

"You can't stand," I said.

"Then I'll sit in the truck."

"Who is she?"

"She was my father's healer when I was a boy.

"She saw me through every shift I ever had.

"The week you left, my chest hurt for days, and she told me it was grief and nothing was wrong."

He pushed himself up on his elbows.

"I don't think it was grief.

"I think she knows what it is."

I looked at his face.

He had never asked me for anything in front of the children, and he was asking now.

"Then she can tell us both," I said.

The healer lived in a stone cottage at the edge of Hollowbrook land, an hour from the lodge by a road that turned to gravel and then to ruts.

I drove Torin's car.

He sat beside me with his head against the window, and the children rode in the back, silent and wide awake.

She opened the door before we knocked.

She was a small, bent woman with white braids and an apron, and she held a tea towel in her hands.

She looked at Torin first, then at the two children, and last of all at me.

"I wondered when you'd come," she said.

I stopped on the step.

"Have we met?" I said.

"I don't believe so."

"Then who did you expect?"

Her hands tightened on the cloth.

I saw it, and I filed it.

"I meant the Alpha's family," she said.

"You said you wondered when you'd come.

"You said it to me."

"I'm an old woman, dear.

"Come in."

I went in, with a hand on each child's back, and I did not stop watching her hands.

The cottage was one warm room full of dried herbs and jars.

She sat Torin on a stool and the children on a bench, gave Hazel a cup of milk, and took a vial of blood from each of them with fingers that did not shake.

Then she took mine.

She held each vial up to the window and the light, one at a time, and stood there so long that the milk went cold.

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