Part 2
### Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Everyone calls Aldric Thornback a monster.
Eight years ago, silver poisoning left the powerful Alpha scarred, crippled, and broken after an enemy attack took his mate and nearly took his life. Now bitter and isolated, he has given up on ever becoming the wolf he once was.
Until Lucy arrives.
A rogue physiotherapist with a mysterious past, Lucy is the first person in years who can ease Aldric’s pain. But the closer they grow, the more impossible it becomes to hide the truth she has spent years running from.
And when the truth finally comes out, their second-chance mate bond may be the only thing strong enough to heal two wolves who thought they were already beyond saving.
Complete Chapters 26
Rating 4.8 ( 36 reviews ) Age Rating mature
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CHAPTER 1
POV: LUCY
I had learned a long time ago that desperation had a smell.
Sometimes it was the stale smoke clinging to the curtains of our cabin because I had been trying to make the last bundle of firewood last another week. Sometimes it was the faint sourness beneath my own skin after counting the same handful of coins three times and pretending the number might somehow change. Lately, though, desperation smelled like medicine. The bitter scent of crushed herbs and expensive tinctures that had become part of our kitchen, our clothes, our lives.
Today, it smelled like wet earth, pine, and the enormous black gates of the Thornback Pack.
I stopped in front of them and tightened my fingers around the strap of my worn leather bag.
For a moment, I considered turning around.
It was an absurd thought. I couldn’t go back. Not really.
There was barely enough food in the cabin for another few days, and my mother’s medication was almost finished. My sister had been trying to stretch what little we had left, cutting tablets in half when she thought I wasn’t looking, as if that would somehow make the medicine last longer. I had pretended not to notice because I didn’t know what else to do.
I’d taken every job I could find since the old wolf I had been caring for died. I cleaned houses. I washed clothes. I helped in kitchens, carried supplies, watched children when someone needed an extra pair of hands. I had even spent two miserable weeks scrubbing the floors of a tavern until my back hurt so badly I could barely sleep.
My training as a physiotherapist should have given me options. In another life, perhaps it would have. But the packs close enough to our cabin weren’t hiring, and the ones farther away expected me to relocate. I couldn’t. My mother couldn’t travel easily, and my sister was still too young to be left alone with her.
So when I saw the position at Thornback, I applied.
The patient was Aldric Thornback.
Once, Aldric Thornback had been one of the most respected alphas in the region. Strong, fair, intelligent. His pack had prospered under him, and people spoke about the future of Thornback as though it were something inevitable and bright.
And afterward, there was the Monster.
I didn’t know how much of the stories were true. I only knew that every person who had spoken about Aldric seemed to lower their voice when they reached that part.
He had survived injuries that should have killed him, and apparently he had spent the years afterward making everyone around him regret that he had.
I took a breath and walked toward the gate.
The smaller entrance opened after the guard checked my name against the appointment list. His eyes moved over my clothes, my worn boots, and the bag at my side before returning to my face.
His mouth twitched before he caught himself. “Beta Ambrose is expecting you.”
The difference between the Thornback territory and the rogue lands where I lived was immediate. There was order here. Marked paths, well-maintained houses, people moving with purpose. Somewhere deeper inside the territory, children were laughing.
It was almost painfully normal.
I had expected the territory of a monster to look darker.
Instead, it looked like a place where people belonged.
I followed the directions the guard gave me until I reached a large stone-and-timber house overlooking the valley. It wasn’t a castle, despite the way some of the stories had made Thornback sound, but it was impressive enough that I stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up.
I reminded myself why I was there.
Then I climbed the stairs and knocked.
The door opened almost immediately.
The woman standing there looked enough like the photograph I’d seen in the pack records to make me certain she was Ambrose Thornback. She had dark brown hair falling over her shoulders and green eyes, the same striking color I had seen in pictures of Aldric. Her features were similar too, though softer, and there was something warm in her expression that I hadn’t expected.
“Come in. You’ve been standing outside looking like you’re considering running away.”
Warmth surrounded me immediately, along with the smell of coffee, cedar, and something savory cooking somewhere deeper in the house. I tried not to stare as she led me into a sitting room with tall windows overlooking the forest.
There were photographs on the walls.
An older man I assumed had been the previous alpha.
He stood beside his father in the photograph, younger than he was now, his dark hair shorter and neatly styled. His shoulders were straight, his expression calm, and there was something almost startlingly gentle in his eyes.
He looked like a man who believed the world had given him something worth protecting.
Ambrose noticed where I was looking.
“That was taken shortly after Aldric became alpha.”
Ambrose gestured toward one of the chairs. “Sit.”
I did, placing my bag beside my feet while she sat across from me with the folder containing my application.
“I’ve read your qualifications,” she said. “They’re impressive.”
“You trained as a physiotherapist?”
“Yes. Rehabilitation and mobility injuries were my primary focus. I also worked with nerve damage, chronic pain, post-traumatic recovery, and long-term neurological injuries.”
Her eyes sharpened with interest.
“Most healers don’t know how to treat it.”
“Because they focus on removing the silver.”
“Removing it is only the beginning.” I folded my hands in my lap. “The body can keep reacting long after the poison is gone. The nervous system can remain damaged. Muscles compensate for injuries. The wolf does the same thing. If one side of the body isn’t functioning properly, the other side starts carrying too much of the load. Eventually, everything hurts.”
Ambrose watched me for a moment.
“You really know what you’re talking about.”
“And you understand that my brother is difficult.”
She laughed again, but there was sadness beneath it this time.
“I need him to let me do my job.”
“My brother doesn’t want rehabilitation.”
“He doesn’t want anyone touching him.”
“The silver damaged more than his muscles. One side of his body was affected far worse than the other. His nerves, his balance, his ability to shift properly. He has chronic pain. Some days are better than others. Some days he can’t stand for long at all.”
“Then he needs rehabilitation.”
“No.” I shook my head. “He needs time.”
“And patience,” I added. “Though I’m guessing he doesn’t have much of that.”
I thought of my mother’s medicine waiting in a half-empty bottle at home. I thought of my sister pretending everything was fine. I thought of the old wolf whose house I’d cleaned for months after his health declined, because caring for him had been the only reliable money I’d had.
Then I thought about the salary attached to this position.
It was more than I had made in months.
I could pay for my mother’s medicine.
I could keep my family together.
“No.” I looked at her. “I’m desperate.”
The honesty seemed to catch her off guard.
“My family lives close to the border,” I explained. “I need to stay nearby. My mother isn’t well, and my sister takes care of her when I’m working, but she can’t do everything. I can’t relocate, and I can’t spend hours traveling every day.”
“You could find work somewhere else.”
Ambrose studied me for several seconds before slowly closing the folder.
I wasn’t sure whether she meant it.
“My brother may try to make you leave.”
“He’s angry. He’s in pain. And he doesn’t know what to do with either of those things anymore.”
Something in the way she said it made me look at her.
For the first time, I wondered what Aldric Thornback had been before the war.
The one who had looked like he had a future.
Ambrose walked toward the hallway.
I followed her through the house, past quiet rooms and long windows that overlooked the forest. The farther we walked, the quieter everything became.
Just a strange awareness of pain.
It seemed to hang in the air around the closed double doors ahead of us, heavy enough that I almost felt it beneath my own skin.
I swallowed and adjusted the strap of my bag.
Ambrose stopped beside the doors.
I thought about my mother’s medicine.
I had come too far to turn around now.
Ambrose reached for the handle.
And I stepped inside to meet the Monster.
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### Chapter 2: Chapter 2
The first thing I noticed was his hair.
It was longer than I had expected, dark strands falling around his face and brushing the collar of his black shirt. It looked as though he hadn’t bothered to cut it in months, maybe longer. There was nothing careless about the way it fell, though. Even disheveled, it somehow suited him, making the sharp angles of his face look even more severe.
And I understood why people called him the Monster.
The man in the photograph had been handsome, but the man sitting in front of me was something else entirely. His dark hair framed a face that looked carved rather than born, his jaw covered in several days of stubble, his green eyes so cold that I felt them before he even looked directly at me.
But the photograph had lied about one thing.
It hadn’t shown me what the war had done to him.
Aldric sat in a heavy wooden chair near the windows, his body angled slightly to one side. His left arm rested uselessly against the armrest, his fingers curled in a position that didn’t look natural. One leg was stretched out in front of him, the other bent slightly, as though even sitting required him to compensate for the imbalance between the two sides of his body.
The collar of his shirt was open.
It disappeared beneath the fabric at the base of his neck and continued down the left side of his chest, jagged and pale in some places, darker in others. I could only see part of it, but even that was enough to understand that the injury had been catastrophic.
My mind immediately began cataloguing what I could see.
Weakness on the left side. Possible nerve damage. Abnormal resting position. Compensatory posture. Muscle wasting.
Not his specific injury, but the way a body learned to live around damage. The tiny adjustments people made without realizing they were making them. The way the shoulders tightened when movement hurt. The way the jaw clenched before shifting position.
His expression said he didn’t care.
Apparently that was going to be a recurring theme.
Ambrose stepped forward. “Aldric, this is Lucy Beckett. She’s taking over your rehabilitation.”
His voice was low, rough, and completely final.
Ambrose didn’t even blink. “We discussed this.”
Something dark flashed through his eyes.
“You need someone to help you.”
“I need everyone to stop deciding what I need.”
I stood there with my bag hanging from my hand, suddenly aware that I had walked into a family argument that had probably happened a hundred times before.
His eyes finally returned to me.
I had seen that emptiness before too.
In people who had stopped believing there was anything waiting for them on the other side of tomorrow.
It made something in my chest tighten.
“I was told you don’t want treatment.”
“Because my sister has apparently decided that destroying my patience wasn’t enough. Now she wants to destroy yours too.”
“She has excellent qualifications.”
“The last physiotherapist. The doctors before her. The specialists before them.” His mouth twisted. “They all had excellent qualifications.”
“None of them could do anything.”
His gaze dropped briefly toward his left hand.
There was something in his expression then.
“I don’t need another person telling me to try harder.”
I realized that was the first thing I’d said that had actually caught his attention.
“What were you going to tell me?”
“That trying harder isn’t always the answer.”
I continued before I could lose my nerve.
“If the damage is neurological, forcing movement without understanding the pattern of nerve involvement can make compensation worse. If you’re having chronic pain, your treatment needs to account for that. If your wolf is responding differently to the physical damage, then we need to account for that too.”
“Then you know I’ve already tried all of that.”
“And I don’t think they treated the right problem.”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it.”
“Do you know how many specialists have told me that?”
He leaned back slightly, and I noticed the movement cost him. The muscles along his jaw tightened, and his left shoulder shifted involuntarily.
“Seven specialists. Four physiotherapists. Two healers who claimed they could work with silver injuries. Three experimental treatments. And all of them eventually admitted that my body was too damaged.”
“You were exposed to silver for how long?”
That was clearly the end of that conversation.
“Then I’ll need to examine you.”
“I can’t treat you without assessing your mobility.”
“But if you want me to help you, I need to examine you.”
That seemed to irritate him even more.
Ambrose made a quiet sound that might have been a laugh.
For a moment, I thought he might actually throw me out himself.
Instead, he looked at me again.
“You think you’re going to fix me?”
“I don’t think you’re something that needs fixing.”
Something about that made the room feel different.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t know what it feels like to wake up every morning and discover another part of your body doesn’t work.”
“You don’t know what it feels like to lose the person who was supposed to grow old beside you.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to survive when the person who should have survived with you didn’t.”
There wasn’t an answer I could give.
For the first time, something almost like anger flashed across his face.
Ambrose made a choking sound behind me.
Aldric stared at me for several seconds.
Then, unexpectedly, he laughed.
It was short and humorless, almost disbelieving.
“You’re either very brave or very stupid.”
He wanted me to become offended.
“I’ve read your brother’s file. I know his previous treatments. I know the prognosis he was given.”
“And I also know that some of the research used to develop the medications he received was based on work I contributed to while I was studying.”
“Silver-related nerve damage. Rehabilitation protocols. Neuromuscular response after prolonged exposure.”
“Then why have I never heard your name?”
I looked down at my hands for a moment.
Because there had been no university after that.
Just a cabin, a mother who needed medication, a sister who needed me, and years spent making sure we had enough food to survive another winter.
Instead, I said, “Life took me somewhere else.”
I could tell he didn’t believe the answer.
He didn’t need to know everything about me.
“Even if what you say is true,” he said, “the research didn’t save me.”
“Then why should I believe you can?”
“You should let me examine you,” I said. “Then you can decide whether I’m worth keeping.”
Pain crossed his face this time before he could hide it.
It was there for barely a second.
And I knew something then that none of the stories had prepared me for.
The Monster wasn’t angry because he didn’t feel pain.
He was angry because he felt it all the time.
“But don’t mistake that for cooperation.”
“And don’t expect me to thank you.”
But when I thought about my mother’s medicine waiting in that little cabin, I knew one thing with absolute certainty.
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Readers can read all books for free, without any ads and give the authors feedback.
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