Derek paced the hospital corridor like a caged animal. His hair stood in wild disarray, and someone had thrust a pair of jeans and a shirt at him earlier. He had not bothered to button the shirt; it hung open over his chest as he moved. His face was a map of everything he was feeling; worry, guilt, regret, none of it hidden, none of it managed.

Kai leaned against the wall with his ankles crossed and his hands buried in his trouser pockets, his white shirt streaked with dirt from his struggle with his cousin, his blonde hair still dishevelled from the ordeal. He watched Derek pace without comment.

Declan sat on the bench opposite, arms folded, eyes tracking Derek’s every back-and-forth movement.

They had been standing outside the emergency ward for what felt like a very long time.

"This is all my fault," Derek muttered. It was not the first time he had said it. It was closer to the hundredth.

Neither Kai nor Declan responded. They had tried, more than once, to tell him that what Ruby did was Ruby’s doing and not his. He had not heard them any of those times, and he was not going to hear them now. So they let it sit.

The emergency ward door swung open, and Dr Adah stepped out. Derek crossed to her before she had fully cleared the doorway, and she took a small, startled step back.

"Tell me something," he said.

Dr Adah composed herself and offered him a calm, steady look. "You don’t need to worry, Your Grace. She is stable. She suffered a concussion with some bruising and lacerations, but she is not in any danger. She should regain consciousness any time from now."

The breath Derek released was slow and unsteady, like something that had been held too long. He looked at the doctor and waited.

She continued. "She will need a great deal of rest to recover properly. Ideally, I would keep her here for that period, under observation, but we can discuss the details once she is awake."

Derek nodded. Then, because he could not hold it back any longer, he asked the question that had been sitting at the front of his mind since Declan had carried her out of the house.

"What about the pup?"

Dr Adah’s brow creased. "Pup?"

"She was pregnant," Derek said. The certainty in his voice was already faltering. "Wasn’t she?"

The doctor looked at him for a moment with something quiet and careful in her expression. Then she shook her head. "I’m afraid not, Your Grace. That was one of the first things we checked. There is no pregnancy."

The strength seemed to leave him all at once. He pressed both palms over his face and exhaled, long and slow.

He didn’t know what he felt. Relief, maybe, that Kira would not wake up to that particular loss on top of everything else. But underneath it, something else entirely. He had been so certain. He had built so much around that certainty. And none of it had been real.

He stood there with his hands over his face and said nothing.

"Can we go in and see her?" Kai asked quietly.

"Of course," Dr Adah replied, already turning away to give them privacy.

***

The VIP room was very quiet. Just the steady beeping of the machines beside the bed, marking time.

Derek sat in the chair closest to her, his hand wrapped around hers. Her fingers were cold. He held them anyway, his eyes moving over her face, taking in what the fall had left behind.

Discolouration along her temple. A gash cutting through one eyebrow. A split in her lower lip that made something tighten painfully in his chest every time he looked at it. He wished he could take it from her. He would have taken all of it without hesitation.

Kai stood by the window, quiet for once, his hands still in his pockets. Declan had positioned himself by the door, arms folded, saying nothing.

"Has anyone heard anything about Ruby?" Derek asked. He did not look away from Kira’s face.

"Connor says she regained consciousness," Declan said. "The doctor wants to keep her under observation for a few more hours."

"Tell him to keep a strict eye on her. She doesn’t move without my knowledge." 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"Already done."

Just then, the door burst open, and Nana came through it in a hurry. Two gammas stopped at the threshold as she swept past them, her eyes going immediately to the bed.

"Oh, goddess." Her hand came up to her mouth. She crossed to the bed and stood over Kira, taking in every mark on her face, and the pain in her expression was the kind that came from somewhere deep and personal. "What could have possessed Ruby to do something so vile?"

Kai snorted. "Ruby has always been vile. She just graduated to desperate evil."

For once, nobody gave him a look. Nobody told him that was enough.

It had always been easy to dismiss Kai’s feelings about Ruby as the lingering resentment of old childhood arguments. They had fought constantly growing up, bickering and clashing in the way of two strong personalities sharing the same space, and the adults around them had smiled and made jokes about soulbonds and hidden feelings. It had seemed like nothing more than that.

Now, standing in this room looking at Kira’s bruised face, it was very difficult to reconcile the girl they had all known with the woman who had shoved a queen down a flight of stairs.

Nana lowered herself into the chair Derek had quietly vacated for her, her eyes still on Kira.

"I can’t believe it," she said softly. "We were together just a few hours ago. She was so happy. She had just performed the most remarkable act of mercy." She shook her head slowly. "She was glowing."

The pain in Nana’s voice settled over the room like something heavy.

Derek ran a hand through his hair and stared at the floor. He had been turning it over since they came here, the same thought circling without resolution.

If he had never set any of this in motion, if he had not let rage and revenge drive every decision he made in the years before Kira walked into his life, none of them would be standing in this room right now.

He would not be feeling what he was feeling about a woman he had married as a weapon. He would not be losing someone he had trusted for most of his life.

He could not entirely blame Ruby. He had created the conditions for this. He had never stopped to think about what marrying someone else would do to her, had never considered that she had built expectations around him that he had never directly addressed but had also never corrected.

He had been too consumed by his own plans to look properly at the people around him. He had failed Ruby. And in doing so, he had failed Jasper.

"She even set Milo free," Nana murmured, almost to herself, still looking at Kira.

The three men turned to her in unison. "Milo?"

Nana glanced back at them. "Yes. This afternoon, during our visit to the cells. She heard his case and released him." She looked between their faces. "What is the matter?"

Kai exhaled. "Nana, Milo is the mate of the woman who tried to poison her. He has barely served two months. How could she release him?"

"That," Nana said simply, "is precisely why decisions like this belong to queens."

Derek did not wait. He reached for the mind-link and found Connor immediately.

Connor, send men to locate Milo and bring him back into custody immediately.

He kept his voice even as he said it, but his jaw was tight. Kira had meant well. He understood that completely, and under any other circumstances, he might have found it in himself to be moved by it.

But Milo was a Lycan whose soulbond had died inside royal custody, and Lycan soulbonding ran far deeper than anything the werewolf mating bond could compare to. The loss of a soulbond did not fade. It calcified into something else entirely.

Milo was not a repentant man quietly grateful for his freedom.

Milo was a man with a reason. His grief would demand vengeance, and the clearest, most accessible target that vengeance had was lying in this bed right now, unconscious and bruised.