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13 Chapter 13 Accelerated Healing
13 Chapter 13 Accelerated Healing
Elena’s POV
The water ran hot for once.
I stood under it with my forehead against the cheap plastic wall and I let it hammer down on the back of my neck until my skin went pink. I scrubbed my face twice. The
my collarbone, expensive foundation came off in streaks, running pale brown down down the dip between my breasts, into the drain.
I washed my hair.
I washed it again.
By the time I stepped out, the mirror was fogged to nothing and my fingertips were pruned. I wrapped a towel around myself and I padded back to the front room in bare feet, and I looked at the dress.
It lay across the couch where I had put it. A long dark pool of silk in the lamplight. It had cost more than our tight budget could ever afford, and I had sat in the dirt in it, and a woman had bled on the hem.
I picked it up with care I did not feel.
I folded it back into its box the way it had come. Tissue paper first. Then the ribbon loops. Then the lid. The box went on the top shelf of the closet, behind a stack of old blankets where my mother would not reach without a stool.
Professional cleaning. Pressing. A receipt in an envelope with the return, so nobody could say I had kept so much as a thread of it.
I thought about what that cleaner’s bill was going to cost.
I sat down on the couch that had been my bed since we moved into the trailer, and I pulled the afghan up over my shoulders, and I did not remember closing my eyes.
I woke with the grey light coming in.
For a second I did not move. I lay there and I took inventory the way I had learned to do. Ribs. Wrist. Ankle. Cheek.
I waited for the ache to come.
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It didn’t.
I pushed the afghan off. I sat up slowly. I pressed the flat of my hand along my ribs where the deep bruise had been sitting since the alley. Nothing. I rolled my ankle in a slow circle. Nothing.
I got up.
I walked across the front room and I did not limp.
I stood in front of the small mirror by the door. My cheek was not swollen. The ridge along the bone was gone. There was a faint shadow of color, the barest smudge, nothing a person would look at twice.
I touched it with two fingers.
It did not hurt.
I stared at my own face for a long moment. I did not understand. Werewolf healing was fast, but not this abnormally fast. Not bruises like that. Not ribs like that.
I did not have the energy, this morning, to chase the thought.
I put on what I owned. Grey sweater, soft from too many washes. Black running pants. Thick socks. Running shoes with the soles starting to come loose at the toe.
I tied my hair back.
I stepped out into the cold morning and I ran.
The road was empty. My breath came out in quick white clouds. My feet found their rhythm on the gravel and then on the cracked asphalt at the top of the hill, and for a little while I did not think about anything at all. I ran past the darker places where the trailers stopped and the pack’s nicer houses began. I ran past the line of white fences. I ran along the edge of the packhouse grounds, where the grass turned green and even and somebody was paid to keep it that way.
It was just past six–thirty in the morning, and I was just past the packhouse gate when Beta Hugo stepped out onto the path.
I stopped short.
My shoes skidded a little on the gravel.
He stood with his hands loose at his sides, in his usual dark jacket, his face set in its usual neutral line. He did not look surprised to see me. He had been waiting.
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13 Chapter 13 Accelerated Healing
“Beta,” I said.
“Elena.”
“I’m running.”
“Alpha Marcus would like to see you.”
I wiped the sweat off my upper lip with the back of my wrist.
“I’m busy.”
“It’s not a request.”
I looked past him at the packhouse. The windows on the ground floor were already lit. Of course they were.
“Fine.”
up the He did not smile. He did not frown. He turned on his heel and I followed him path, along the drive, in through a side door that opened for him without anyone touching it. Our footsteps echoed on polished wood. He took me down a hall I had never walked and through a set of heavy double doors.
The bar room.
That was what they called it, apparently. A long dark–paneled room with a counter
carved table in the middle that did not along one wall and bottles behind it and a bi belong at a bar. It was covered in papers this morning. Folders. Stacks. A laptop pushed off to one side.
Marcus sat behind it.
He did not stand when I came in.
“Hugo.”
“Alpha Marcus.”
“Leave us.”
Hugo did not look at me. He stepped back and he pulled the doors shut behind him, and then it was me and Marcus and a long carved table and too much paper.
I stayed where I was, just inside the door.
He looked up.
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His eyes went over me. The sweater. The running pants. The hair, still damp at the ends, pulled back. The cheek.
“Your face.”
“What about it.”
He did not answer.
I waited.
“Viviana,” he said at last. “Why was she at your house.”
“My trailer.”
“Elena.”
“It’s a trailer,” I said. “Not a house. I want to be sure we’re talking about the same address.”
He set his pen down.
“Why was she at your trailer.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should ask her. You seem to see her more than I do.”
His jaw moved.
“She assaulted a pack member,” he said. “I would like to know the details.”
I laughed.
It was not much of a laugh. It was short and dry and it sat badly in the room. “That’s what’s upsetting you this morning. She assaulted a pack member”
“Yes”
“Marcus.” I took one step closer to the table. I kept my hands loose at my sides. “There were five men in an alley a few days ago. They put their hands on a pack member too. Tell me. Are they in the dungeon this morning? Has the Alpha of Peak gathered all that righteous concern about pack members being assaulted, and used it on them.”
He did not answer.
“Because if he had,” I said, “I think I would have heard about it. I think the whole pack would have heard about it. A thing like that, an Alpha defending the honor of one of his own. Word travels.”
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Still nothing.
“So I’ll save you some time,” I said. “I’m not going to give you a report on Viviana. You don’t care that she came at me. You care that she made you look sloppy. Fix your own girlfriend, Marcus. I handled mine.”
He looked at me.
His face did not move. His eyes did, very slightly, and I could not read what was in them.
I did not wait to be dismissed.
I turned. I walked to the door. I put my hand on the handle and I pulled, and nobody stopped me.
I jogged home.
The sun was higher by the time I came up our road. The kitchen light was on in the trailer. I slowed to a walk, caught my breath on the step, and went in.
I pulled my schoolbooks out of the bag by the couch and I sat at the little table under the window. I did not have school anymore, not really, but I still had the last assignments to close out. I opened the book. I clicked my pen.
My mother’s door creaked.
She came out slowly, one hand on the wall. She was dressed for work. She had pinned her hair back with a simple brown clip.
“You were up early.”
“I went for a run.”
She crossed to the counter to pour herself a cup of the coffee I had started. She stopped halfway. Her eyes landed on the elegant box resting on the little kitchen table.
“What’s in the box?” she asked, nodding toward it.
“Wrong address,” I said easily. “I’ve got to drop it at the right place today.”
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