The Betrayed Warrior Luna's Second Chance novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Warrior at the Healer's Door

Gwen shelters her, and Joss brings a dying front-line warrior who says the Alpha has not been at the front for three months.

Gwen did not wait for the guards to step aside.

She pulled the infirmary door open and put herself in the gap, small, freckled, and in a stained apron.

"This is a healing house," she told them. "Under the old law, no Alpha's order crosses this step."

"The Alpha said," the first guard began.

"The Alpha can come and tell me himself," Gwen said. "Until then, the woman standing in the cold is my patient."

"She looks fine to me," the guard said.

"She's blue to the lips. Move."

They looked at each other.

Then, slowly, they moved.

Gwen grabbed both my baskets in one hand and my wrist in the other and pulled me in.

She bolted the door and leaned on it.

"I'm going to kill him," she said. "I'm going to put something in his tea that makes him sing in front of the whole pack."

"Gwen."

"I mean it. A little something. It would be a public service."

I sat down on the cot, and my teeth started to chatter.

She wrapped her own wool shawl around my shoulders and put the kettle on.

"Odette," she said, with her back to me. "Odette Appleton. She had a cup of tea in my kitchen every week."

"She had a key to my office."

"I know. I'm going to be sick."

"Not on my cot," I said, and she laughed, a short wet laugh, and then she sat down beside me and held on.

We stayed that way a while.

I did not cry.

I kept seeing Cade's hand come up in the hall, and the command that had stopped against me and gone nowhere.

"Gwen, did you see his face when he tried to make me sit?"

"I saw a man whose voice went flat on him in front of three hundred people," she said. "Wine doesn't do that."

"No."

"Rhi, the wound he came home with in the spring. The one in his ribs."

"It closed overnight."

"It shouldn't have." She said it flatly. "I've been healing wolves for ten years, and a blade that deep doesn't close overnight. I called it a miracle in front of you. I've thought about it every day since."

I had no answer for that, so I held the cup of tea she handed me.

Somebody knocked on the back door, three quick raps and two slow ones.

Gwen was on her feet before the last one.

"That's the scouts' knock," she said.

She opened the door a hand's width, and a man pushed through with a wounded warrior over his shoulder.

It was Joss Merrin, Cade's Beta.

His grey cloak was soaked to the knees, and mud was dried to his boots.

"Put him on the table," Gwen said. "Gently. Is he bleeding?"

"Not anymore. He's past that."

Joss laid the warrior on the table and looked up and saw me.

His mouth tightened.

"Luna," he said. Then he corrected himself, and it plainly hurt him to. "Rhiannon. I heard what happened in the hall. I'm sorry."

"You weren't there."

"I came in the back way an hour ago. I couldn't go in. I'd have said something I'd have to answer for."

He wiped his face with his sleeve.

"I didn't come home for the feast. I came to find the Alpha."

Gwen cut the warrior's shirt off with the shears and sucked in her breath.

He was young, not much older than twenty, and every rib stood out against the skin.

"He's starving," she said. "This isn't a battle wound. This is weeks of no food."

"Yes."

"The levy," I said. "Joss, I sent the supply wagons every week. I signed every one."

"I know you did."

"They went to the front."

"They never reached it."

The room went quiet.

"Not since spring," Joss said. "My men have been eating bark and snared rabbits for three months. We lost eleven to the cold and the hunger, and we couldn't even go out and hunt, because the Blackthorns were watching the treeline."

"That's not possible. I paid for every crate."

"I believe you. I think somebody took them."

The warrior on the table stirred.

His eyes opened, glassy and unfocused, and found my face.

"Luna?" he whispered.

"I'm here."

"They said you cut us off." His cracked lips barely moved. "They said the Luna stopped sending food."

"I didn't. I swear to you, I never did."

"The Alpha said it. In the spring. Before he left us."

"Before he left you?" I said.

Joss closed his eyes.

"Cade rode out of the lines three months ago," he said. "He said he was going to the capital to beg for supplies."

"The Alpha hasn't been at the front since then."

Gwen was working on the warrior's arm with the cold steady hands I had always trusted.

"Then where was he?" she asked.

The warrior turned his head.

He looked at me, and I saw a man who was still angry at his own Luna for something I had not done.

"A hunting lodge," he said. "Up on the ridge, two days from the lines."

"A scout saw him through the window."

"He wasn't alone, Luna."

"He was with her."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend