Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 16: Wolfsbane

~Author’s POV~

The pain woke her before she understood what was happening.

Lyra sat up in the dark with her hand at her throat, trying to pull air into a passage that felt narrower than it should. The burning had started low, and was spreading upward through her chest with the slow, deliberate heat of something that wasn’t going to stop on its own.

She tried to stand. Her legs held for three steps before her vision doubled, splitting the dark room into two overlapping versions of itself that wouldn’t resolve back into one no matter how hard she blinked.

She moved toward the door anyway. Her shoulder hit the wall once, corrected, hit it again. Her fingers found the door handle and pulled, and then she was in the corridor, the floor was coming up to meet her before she’d made the decision to sit down.

She went down hard onto her hands and knees. She tried to call out and what came out was barely a sound, her throat was too tight, the burning too concentrated.

She made it three feet further on her hands and knees before consciousness decided it was done waiting.

—

Ryland woke to the bond going cold.

Not quiet. Not distant. Cold, the specific, alarming absence of warmth that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with something being wrong on the other end of a connection that had been growing steadily warmer for weeks.

He was already out of his bed and moving before his mind had fully caught up to what his body knew.

He found her in the corridor outside her room, face-down on the stone floor, completely still.

He dropped to his knees beside her and turned her over, and the first thing he registered was the discolouration around her throat, a flush that had no business being there, spreading from her collarbone upward.

"Lyra." His voice came out harder than he meant it to. "Lyra."

She didn’t respond.

He picked her up and ran.

—

The pack healer identified it within minutes of examination. She looked at the discolouration, checked Lyra’s pulse, lifted her eyelids and looked at the whites of her eyes, she then sat back with an expression that was very controlled and very serious.

"Wolfsbane," she said. "Concentrated. Not a trace dose." She was already moving to the supply cabinet. "Someone knew what they were doing."

Ryland’s eyes went wide. He looked at Lyra’s still face on the cot, then back at the healer.

The word wolfsbane landed in the room like something physical.

"Her evening tea," the healer added, without looking up.

"The pattern of onset is consistent. A few hours delay before it hits the bloodstream properly."

Ryland stood very still for one second.

Then he turned to the door and his voice came out in a register none of the guards outside had heard from him before.

"Shut the packhouse down. Nobody leaves. Anyone outside gets brought in immediately.

Every servant, every guest, every person with access to this wing, I want them assembled in the main hall in ten minutes."

The corridor outside the healer’s room became very loud, very fast.

—

The questioning lasted most of the night.

Tyran Thorn was present for it. Composed, cooperative, impeccably calm, he stood at the edge of the proceedings and offered security observations that were, Ryland had to admit, genuinely useful. He spoke to two of the kitchen staff directly, his voice measured and authoritative, asking the right questions in the right order about who had prepared the evening tray and when and whether anyone else had been in the kitchen during that window.

"The girl who brought the tea," Tyran said to Ryland, during a brief pause in the proceedings,

"do we know her connection to the pack? Length of service, who recommended her?"

"Cade is checking," Ryland said.

Tyran nodded thoughtfully. "Good instinct.

Outside placement is the most common vector for this kind of thing." He looked across the hall at the assembled staff.

"You handled this quickly. The lockdown was the right call."

Ryland said nothing. He was watching the hall, watching faces, watching hands.

—

Lyra regained consciousness at dawn.

The healer gave her something bitter to drink and told her she’d been lucky, concentrated wolfsbane in a larger dose, or left untreated another hour, and the conversation would be very different. Lyra listened to this information and said nothing, staring at the ceiling with her jaw set.

On the second day of mandatory bed rest, Eren came to visit her.

He didn’t ask how she was feeling. He pulled the chair to the side of the cot and sat down and waited, which was characteristically him, and after a few minutes Lyra spoke.

"I think it was Tyran," she said.

Eren looked at her. "What makes you say that?"

"No specific evidence," she said. "The smile he had during the questioning. That thin, helpful smile while he was asking the kitchen girl about the tea tray. It was the same smile he had in the garden when he told me Ryland had a duty that his feelings couldn’t override." She paused.

"And I just have a feeling around him. A bad one. The kind that’s been right before."

"Who else have you told?" Eren asked.

"No one. You’re the first."

He was quiet for a moment. "Why me?"

She looked at the ceiling. "I don’t know. I trust you, I guess."

"And Ryland?"

"Ryland..." She stopped. Tried again. "What if I’m right? How does that look? His mate accusing his father of poisoning her with no evidence during the middle of an active investigation." She turned her head to look at Eren. "And even if I have evidence eventually, I don’t want to be the reason that fractures. I don’t want to come between a father and his son."

"Let talk a pause here Lyra, maybe you just overthinking it.

"Perhaps, but...

"Watch him," he said finally. "Say nothing. Let whoever is involved feel safe and comfortable." A pause. "People who feel safe get careless."

Lyra held his gaze. Then she nodded once.

—

Kael found out on the second morning.

He came into the packhouse from the training yard and heard it from Cade, who delivered information the way he delivered everything, directly, without softening. Kael went very still in the way that meant something had landed somewhere important. He asked one question: was she going to be alright. Cade said yes. Kael nodded, turned, and walked straight to Ryland’s study.

He closed the door behind him.

Whatever they said in that room stayed in that room. The guards outside reported later that the conversation had been quiet, not the careful, controlled quiet of two rivals managing themselves, but something different. Something that sounded more like two people who had put down a particular weight for a few minutes.

When they came out forty minutes later, neither of them looked like they’d resolved anything specific. But something had shifted in how they occupied the same space. Still rivals. Still careful around each other. But a half-step closer to something that didn’t have a name yet.

—

On the afternoon of the second day, Lyra was lying on the cot staring at the ceiling and hating every minute of the enforced stillness when she became aware of someone in the doorway.

She didn’t have to look. She recognised the weight of the presence.

"You’re not dead," Kael said.

"Noted," she said, still looking at the ceiling.

He was quiet. She could feel him standing there, not moving, not explaining why he’d come. Just standing in the doorway the way he stood everywhere, like the space accommodated him rather than the other way around.

"Good," he said.

That was all. She heard his footsteps retreat back down the corridor, unhurried, until the sound of them dissolved into the general noise of the packhouse.

Lyra stared at the empty doorway for a long time after.

One word. Offered plainly, without performance or apology or any of the things that word was supposed to come attached to.

"Good??"

She didn’t know what to do with Kael Blackthorn. She suspected she never entirely would. But she lay there in the quiet afternoon light and held that single word carefully, the way she was learning to hold things that arrived simply and meant more than their size suggested.