Chapter 19

I shook myself, putting on a stern face. I couldn’t know if what she was saying was true, but even if it was that didn’t change the situation I was in with Rita at that moment. I had to handle her first, without letting her know how deeply she’d shaken me.

I looked down at her finger in my chest, unimpressed. “Said by a woman who never got the chance to get ‘lucky’ in the first place,” I said coldly. “You weren’t even good enough to take for one night.”

Rita’s face crumpled in ugly rage, jealousy, and hurt. It seemed I’d hit the nail on the head. She stepped closer to me like she was going to try something, and I raised my eyebrow at her in silent challenge.

You’re not good enough to hit me, I said with my eyes. That’s how far below me you are.

For a long moment Rita stood there, shivering in impotent frustration, unable to come up with a verbal response. She just wordlessly cried out before stomping away.

Once she was gone I slumped against a marble column, my heart beating fast. It wasn’t that I felt she was dangerous, just that her attack had been so sudden. That and, even though I knew I could take much worse hits than whatever she could dish out, I now had my baby to worry about.

I probably shouldn’t have goaded her towards hitting me, but she was too much of a coward in the end anyway.

Damn, I thought to myself, realizing that the social tensions in this pack were going to be a bigger problem than I thought. Obviously I’d known people here wouldn’t just welcome me with open arms, but this kind of open hostility wasn’t what I expected, especially after the whole pack watched me shift into a silver wolf. Most of them had seemed much more amenable to me, even just in the last twenty-four hours.

But it seemed even that wasn’t enough to sway everyone. And if everyone at this party was on Rita’s side, then…Well, I had a few issues.

But that didn’t sit nearly as hard in my stomach as what Rita had said to me. The words of that supposed prophecy kept somersaulting around in my head. Did such a prophecy really exist?

And if it did, what was I going to do?

The fact was, I was pregnant. I was Mated to Elroy, and I had sworn myself to my Luna duties in front of the Moon Goddess Herself. Still, the idea that Elroy had sought me out specifically in the hopes of fulfilling this prophecy made me seriously uneasy.

I had thought Elroy had seen me as a person, at least. He’d certainly acted like he did, but he could just be keeping me happy for the sake of the pup. The idea of being an object to yet another man—of my child being a carefully crafted political tool—made me sick.

Elroy had threatened to lock me up in the dungeon if I tried to leave. I gulped, putting a hand protectively over my stomach.

I was shaken. I wanted to go back to the manor and demand answers, I wanted to collapse and cry over another possible betrayal, and I wanted to hug my mom. I couldn’t do any of those things.

All I could do was put on a happy face and grit my teeth through the rest of this goddamn banquet.

The banquet almost ended without another catastrophe. Almost.

After nearly two hours of forcing myself into conversations that nobody had the balls to tell me to butt out of and eating cheese for lunch, I could finally see the end in sight when there was a loud clanging at a different table. Startled, I whirled around mid-sentence to find a man curled up in pain on the floor.

The people in the group he was with were gasping, one person belatedly starting to crouch down to check on the man, but I had already kicked off my shoes and bolted over. It was something I did without thought, something I’d always done; someone was hurt, and I fixed it.

My mom called me Florence Nightingale because of it.

“Sir,” I said, falling hard on my knees next to him, “what hurts? Can you speak?”

“S—stomach,” he groaned out, voice tight. There was sweat on his face.

“Alright,” I said calmly, worming my hand between his arms where they were clasped around his belly to get a pulse rate. “Has this ever happened to you before, sir?” He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut.

“Okay, I have some questions for you, alright? Do you think you can answer them for me, so I know how to help you?” He nodded. “What’s your name, sir?”

“Barnes,” he forced out.

“Thank you Mr. Barnes. Can you rate the pain for me?”

“Ten!” he gasped, curling in on himself so tightly he was shaking. He just about crushed my hand—his heart rate was seriously elevated. “It’s a ten, it’s a ten—never hurt like this, ohhhh.”

“Towards the front or the back? Right or left?” I asked, carefully feeling his stomach the best I could in his position. His abs were tensed, but there wasn’t any abnormal sloshing in the abdominal cavity. There probably wasn’t an internal bleed, not that I could know for certain without an ultrasound.

“Just—middle!” he grunted, and I mentally ruled out kidneys, liver, and gallbladder. “It’s like something’s trying to eat its way out of me—ahh!”

Someone gasped in the crowd—Rita’s voice. “Isn’t that how people describe oleander poisoning?” A murmur went up all around us.

I barely heard them, too focused on my patient. I felt his forehead—warm, but not burning. No blood vessels bursting in the eyes, and no froth around the mouth. Probably not oleander, but this definitely wasn’t normal food poisoning.

Before I could ask him anything else, someone snatched my purse off the ground next to me. The sudden movement distracted me, and I looked up just in time to see Rita empty my purse all over the ground.

“Look!” she gasped. “This vial says oleander on it!”

I furrowed my brows, my brain a little slow with most of it still focusing on my patient, but I knew I didn’t have any oleander. Why would I? It was highly toxic, there was no good reason to—

Oh.

Oleander could only be found in one place in Lunaris, and that was near the Harp House. Moonshadow was the only pack that knew how to use it medicinally. It was the perfect poison to frame me with.

Fury rose in me, but before I could point out how very convenient this was, or how the symptoms didn’t match, someone snatched the vial out of Rita’s hands. Rita looked affronted, and all eyes moved to the person who’d taken the oleander. My breath caught in my chest.

Apothecary Iris!

I didn’t understand why she’d left her tower, but I also wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. If anyone here could help me figure out what was wrong with this man, it would be her.

She uncapped the vial without hesitation, causing several people to shriek or step away from her, but she was in business mode. She wafted the scent towards her nose, holding the vial safely away, and my heart pounded. Her eyebrows puckered and she tried again, as if she didn’t believe her own conclusion at first.

“This isn’t oleander,” she announced, bringing it closer to her nose for a proper sniff. “Oleander has a distinct smell. This…this is just regular water with a sticker on it.”

My jaw dropped. I’d obviously realized Rita had slipped the vial in my purse when she got close to me, distracting me with her finger in my chest, but had she actually just used water? What was wrong with this man, then?

“You idiot!” Rita hissed, “close it up! I’m not going to risk breathing in fumes just because you don’t know what you’re talking about!” I frowned.

“She’s renowned throughout Lunaris—” I started, but Rita cut me off.

“Don’t lie for her! What could some Omega know about medicine?”

I thought about Jordan, who had to give up on her dream because of her status. I thought about Tyler, a boy from Moonshadow who had been horrendously bullied when he presented as a male Omega, who hung himself from the school balcony. I thought about Iris, standing right in front of me while someone dismissed her life’s work.

Oh, no. This was stopping now.

I sprung up, taking the still-open vial from Iris’s hand. “I trust her,” I said. And then I drank.

And Elroy charged in, fury on his face, roaring, “What the hell is happening here?”