🦋ALTHEA
​"No," he said, but his voice was rough, scraped raw as if he'd been screaming. His hands came up to cover mine, pressing them harder against his face as if he needed the contact to believe I was real. "Are you?"
​"I'm fine." The lie came easily, automatic, even though my body still ached from the shift and my mind was still reeling from the memory that had surfaced—the High Alpha's face looming over me as an infant, his voice promising things I didn't understand. "Thal—"
​"Will recover," Thorne finished, his gaze flicking briefly to the boy on the cot before returning to me. "The Crone told me. You stayed with him."
​It wasn't a question, but I nodded anyway.
​His hands tightened on mine, and something passed between us in the silence—gratitude, maybe, or relief, or something heavier that I didn't have a name for.
