Irina’s POV

I didn’t go back to my room.

I don’t know why I thought I would. My feet just carried me down the corridor, past two guards who straightened when they saw me, past the turn that led to my own door — and straight to his.

Nicholas’s room was dim. Someone had pulled the curtains almost shut, leaving a thin strip of late-afternoon light cutting across the floor. The machines were quiet. His breathing was even. He was still unconscious, still exactly where they’d moved him after the surgery, and nothing about the room had changed since I’d last been here.

I sat down in the chair beside his bed.

And I just... stayed there.

The whole walk back from the medical wing, I’d been waiting to feel something clear. Shock, maybe. Or relief. Or even fear about what I’d just done in front of all those people. But there was nothing clean about it. Everything was tangled up together — the warmth that had come out of my hands, the way Andrei’s breathing had changed, the look on Roman’s face, the old doctor’s voice.

*The healing bloodline.*

I turned the words over again, the same way I’d been turning them since he’d said them. They didn’t fit right. They didn’t fit over me like something that belonged there.

I looked at Nicholas.

His face was still. No tension in his jaw, no command in the set of his shoulders. Like this — unconscious, quiet, just breathing — he looked almost like someone different. Someone who hadn’t spent his whole life being exactly what everyone feared.

I reached out.

I pressed my palm, carefully, to the back of his hand.

And I waited.

Nothing.

No warmth. No light. No slow pulse of something moving up through my arm. My hand was just a hand — cold fingers against his skin, nothing more.

I pressed a little harder, like that would help. Like maybe it needed more contact, more intention, something I wasn’t doing right.

Still nothing.

I sat back.

I turned my hand over and looked at my palm. The same palm that had glowed white and healed a room full of wounded men an hour ago. It looked completely ordinary now. No trace of anything. No glow, no warmth, not even a faint hint of what it had done.

*Of course.*

I didn’t know why that hit me harder than I expected. I hadn’t gone in there thinking I could fix him. I hadn’t even let myself believe it was possible. But somewhere between the walk down the hall and sitting in that chair, some small part of me had clearly decided to hope anyway. And now it was gone, and what was left behind felt embarrassingly like grief.

He was still breathing.

That was what I had.

I told myself it was enough.

It wasn’t, not really, but I told myself anyway.

---

I lost track of how long I sat there. Long enough that the strip of light on the floor moved and faded. Long enough that my back started to ache and I shifted twice in the chair trying to get comfortable, and both times I gave up almost immediately.

I held his hand for a while. Not because I thought it would do anything. Just because it was something to do with my hands.

I looked at his face again.

There was a small scar near his left temple. I’d never noticed it before. It was old — pale and slightly faded, the kind that takes years to settle down that much. I found myself wondering about it, about when and how and whether it had hurt, and then I stopped myself because that was a stupid thing to be thinking about right now.

I let go of his hand.

I stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at nothing in particular.

*What am I?* I thought. *What happened to me?*

The old doctor had said it like it explained everything. Like a name was the same as an answer. But I didn’t know what a healing bloodline was. I didn’t know where it came from, or why I’d never had it before, or why it had worked once and then vanished entirely like a candle blown out. I didn’t know if it was going to come back. I didn’t know if I’d done something wrong.

I didn’t know anything.

That was the honest truth of it. I stood at the window with my useless hands and I knew absolutely nothing.

---

The door opened behind me.

I turned around.

Andrei leaned in the doorframe — upright, walking on his own, color back in his face. Yesterday that would have been impossible. He’d been pale and still and bleeding out onto a medical cot.

Now he looked like himself again. Which still felt slightly unreal, even though I’d been the one to do it.

"You’ve been in here for hours," he said.

"I know."

He came inside, pulled up a second chair from against the wall, and sat down like he planned to stay for a minute. He looked at Nicholas first — the same assessing look he probably used on everything — and then back at me.

"How are you doing?"

"I’m fine."

"Right." He didn’t push it. That was the thing about Andrei — he’d ask the question, hear the deflection, and then let it sit there between you without making it worse. "He’s stable. The doctors are cautiously optimistic, whatever that means."

"It means they don’t know."

"It means they don’t know," he agreed.

Silence for a moment. The machines beeped softly. I moved away from the window and sat back down in my chair.

"The soldiers," I said. "The Iron Stone men. What happened to them?"

Something shifted in his expression. Not much — Andrei was too controlled for much — but enough.

"Some of them didn’t make it out," he said. "Not from the fighting. After." He paused. "A few took their own lives in custody. Others died resisting when we tried to secure them."

My stomach turned. I didn’t say anything.

"It’s not uncommon," Andrei said, and his voice was neutral, careful. "Soldiers who’ve been with a pack their whole lives — loyal to a fault, no concept of anything outside the chain of command. When the chain breaks, some of them..." He trailed off. "It’s not the first time I’ve seen it."

"And Alexei?"

The name came out flat. I hadn’t meant it to sound like anything, and I think it didn’t — it just landed in the room like a stone dropped in still water.

Andrei looked at me.

"He’s in holding," he said. "Locked up. He hasn’t been questioned yet."

"Why not?"

"We’re waiting on the formal process. There’s protocol for prisoners taken from another pack’s forces — especially when it involves a challenge situation like this one. It goes through channels." He tilted his head slightly. "Why?"

I didn’t answer right away.

I looked at Nicholas. At the pale strip of light that had shifted again, barely catching the edge of his shoulder now. At his hands, still, at his sides.

Alexei was down there. In a holding room. Waiting.

Before they put him on trial, I was going to see him first.