The Alphas Broken Mate novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: First Touch

The left leg had healed crooked in the night.

Bryony found it at dawn, running her thumbs down the thigh, and her mouth went flat.

"Wolf bone knits fast," she said. "Yours knit wrong. It has to be broken and set again before noon, or you'll limp for life."

Caius stood at the foot of the cot with his arms crossed so tight the seams of his shirt creaked.

He had slept on the stone floor outside my door.

I knew, because every time I woke in the dark, I could hear him breathing on the other side of the wood.

"I'll do it," he said. "Not her. Tell me how."

"You'll hold her," Bryony said. "That's all you'll do, and you'll do it well."

I had lain awake all night with Bryony's last words in my head.

I took the chalk and wrote the question I had been holding since the passage.

*My mother. You knew her.*

Bryony's thumbs stopped on my knee.

"I saw her once at a river ford," she said. "A whole war band went to their knees in the water."

"That is all you get before noon. The rest I tell you with the bone set and your teeth unclenched."

Caius looked at me and did not ask.

I wiped the slate with my sleeve and wrote again.

*Does it hurt?*

"Yes," Bryony said. "Like nothing you've felt."

I looked at the crooked leg.

I looked at my own hand, which was not shaking, and at his, which was.

Then I reached out and took his wrist.

His whole body went still.

I had said he could touch me only when I reached first, and I had reached.

He sat down on the edge of the cot and wrapped his hand around mine.

"I have you," he said.

Bryony put one hand above my knee and one below and said, "Now."

I do not remember the sound I made.

I remember the white light behind my eyes, and the whole infirmary going silent.

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