My Alpha Told Me to Stop Needing Him. So I Disappeared novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Healer

Anneliese collapses two miles into Ember Creek land and Alpha Ewan MacIver carries her in. The healer pulls six silver slivers, hears the baby's heartbeat, and finds the silver was filed to cut along her mate bond.

I made it two miles past the stone marker before my right shoulder caught fire.

It started under the blade and spread down my arm until I couldn't hold the duffel.

I sat down in the ferns beside the road and tried to breathe through my nose.

The silver had never done this before.

My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket, and it kept buzzing.

Corbin, the screen said. Then Corbin again. Then Corbin.

I turned it face down in the dirt.

Somewhere above me, a truck door slammed.

"Ma'am." A man's boots came down the bank. "Ma'am, you're on Ember Creek land. Are you hurt?"

"My shoulder," I said. "It's silver."

He crouched, and I smelled pine smoke and horse and clean cotton, and then a second man came down the slope behind him.

This one was broad and tall, in a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed up.

He had a pale scar across his chin and grey eyes that went from my face to my duffel to the ring-shaped dent on my left hand.

"Anneliese Larkin," he said.

I hadn't been called that in four years.

"It's MacCulloch," I said, and then I stopped. "No. It isn't."

"Ewan MacIver." He took my good elbow. "We met at the trade summit. You told me you couldn't dance because your mate was waiting."

I remembered the grey eyes and the borrowed suit with sleeves that stopped above his wrists.

"You wore a suit that didn't fit," I said.

"I did." He almost smiled. "Can you stand?"

"No."

"Then I'll carry you. Tell me if I touch the wrong side."

He lifted me with one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, well clear of the shoulder.

The man with the boots grabbed my duffel.

Ewan carried me up the bank and put me in the truck's front seat himself.

"Does your Alpha know you're out here?" he asked.

"My Alpha knows exactly where I am," I said. "He just doesn't know where I am."

Ewan looked at me for a second.

Then he shut the door and took the wheel and didn't ask again.

The healer at Ember Creek was a woman in her sixties, with white braids and bifocals on a beaded chain.

She had me face down on a cot in a room that smelled of lavender and iodine in under ten minutes.

Ewan stood in the doorway with his back to us, looking at the hall.

"You can go," I told him.

"It's my pack house." He didn't turn. "I'm just facing the wall."

I laughed into the pillow, and it hurt.

The healer cut my shirt up the back and said a word under her breath that wasn't polite.

"How long?"

"Two years."

"And nobody has taken these out?"

"I booked it for this morning," I said. "It got moved."

"By whom?"

I looked at the wall.

"Never mind," the healer said gently. "I'll numb it, and you'll feel pulling. Squeeze the pillow."

She worked for forty minutes.

Silver chimed into a steel dish, one splinter at a time.

I counted six, and the sixth was the longest.

The ache I had carried for two years came out of me in pieces, and I cried quietly into the pillow and let Ewan pretend he couldn't hear.

When it was done, the healer wiped her hands and picked up the dish and frowned at it.

Then she picked up her handheld scanner, the kind she kept in her coat pocket, and ran it over my belly to check for infection.

It chirped.

She went still.

"Child," she said, "how long have you known you were carrying?"

Ewan's shoulders went rigid in the doorway.

"Nine days," I said.

"Does the father know?"

"No."

She turned the screen toward me.

There was a flicker on it, small and fast and steady.

"That's the heartbeat," she said. "Seven weeks, give or take. Strong. You were lucky I numbed locally and didn't use the stronger drug."

I put my hand over my mouth.

Ewan turned around then, and for one second I saw something move over his face that he put away at once.

"Congratulations," he said, very quietly. "I'll get you water."

He left.

The healer set the dish on the table, and she didn't look at me.

She was looking at the sixth splinter.

She tipped it under the lamp and turned it between two fingers.

"This isn't a bullet fragment," she said. "Or a rogue's claw tip, whatever they told you. Look at the edges."

I looked.

The silver had been filed flat on one side and tapered on the other, like a tiny wedge.

"Someone shaped this on purpose," the healer said. "And the angle is wrong for a fight. It went in along the line where your mate bond sits."

My mouth had gone dry.

"Whoever cut you," she said, "knew exactly where your bond line runs."

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