Free Web NovelChapter 58: Chapter 58 Keeping Quiet
_Author’s POV_
Kasper was not a man who asked for help.
He had spent the better part of his life being the person other people came to when things went wrong.
He handled problems.
He found solutions.
He stayed calm when everything around him wasn’t.
Needing something from someone else, especially something he couldn’t obtain through his own resources, sat uncomfortably on him in a way he had never fully gotten used to.
But Rowena was losing too much blood and the supplies inside the Ashthorne residence were not enough.
Werewolf healing was specific. It required compounds and herbs that came from knowledge older than any modern pharmacy and couldn’t be found on a shelf at midnight. The injuries Rowena had taken were serious enough that if they weren’t treated correctly within the next few hours, the healing would set wrong and cause permanent damage.
He had seen it happen before. He was not going to let it happen to her.
He knew of exactly one person who would have what he needed and who he could reach at this hour.
He drove across the city with his hands tight on the wheel and his jaw equally tight, going over the story he had prepared and already knowing, somewhere underneath the rehearsal, that it wasn’t going to hold.
Nana Seraphine answered the door in her housecoat before he had finished knocking. She was a small woman with calm eyes and the particular stillness of someone who had learned a long time ago that watching carefully was more useful than reacting quickly. She looked at Kasper on her doorstep and waited.
He gave her the story. A pure lie though. Telling Nana Seraphine the truth was going to mess things up entirely.
He spoke about a child from the Ashthorne orphanage. A sleepover that had gone wrong. An accident, nothing too serious, but the right supplies were needed quickly and he hadn’t known where else to turn at this hour. He kept his voice even and his face calm and delivered it with the same steadiness he brought to everything.
Nana Seraphine listened to all of it without interrupting.
When he finished she was quiet for a moment. Her eyes moved across his face with an attention that was uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of.
“How bad is the wound on her arm?” she asked.
Kasper opened his mouth.
“I’m not asking about a child,” she said simply. “How bad is Rowena’s arm.”
He closed his mouth. Looked at the ground briefly. Then looked back up.
Then he told her the truth.
He told her about the fight, about Dickson and his men, about the injuries Rowena had taken to her left arm and her ribs. He kept it factual and didn’t soften it because Nana Seraphine was not a woman you softened things for. She would see through it immediately and it would waste time they didn’t have.
When he finished she stood very still for a moment. Something moved through her face that was painful to witness, a grief that was controlled very quickly and pressed back down beneath the surface. She blinked once. Then she stepped back from the door.
“Come inside,” she said.
She moved through her home with complete certainty, opening cabinets and pulling items without hesitation, a woman who knew exactly where everything lived and had never needed to search for anything. She assembled the supplies, wrapping certain items carefully, labeling the two small dark bottles in her precise handwriting before placing them in the bag.
She held the bag out and then stopped before releasing it.
“The first bottle,” she said, her voice even and instructional, “goes directly onto the wound. All of it, don’t ration it. The second one she drinks completely. Every drop, not most of it, all of it. She will sleep for several hours after she takes it and when she wakes up the healing will have progressed significantly.” She paused. “Make sure she drinks all of it. My granddaughter has a long history of deciding halfway through something that she knows better than the instructions.” Nana Seraphine was Rowena’s maternal grandmother.
The one with her grandfather at Ashthorne mansion was her step.
“Yes ma’am,” Kasper said.
She released the bag.
He was almost at the door when she spoke again.
“Kasper.”
He turned back.
“Tell her that her grandmother says hello,” Nana Seraphine said quietly. “And that when she is well enough, I would like her to come for tea. Not a formal visit. Just tea. Just the two of us.” She paused. “She doesn’t need to bring anything. Just herself.”
Kasper looked at the small woman standing in her lit doorway in her housecoat in the middle of the night, who had seen straight through his story in under a minute and had chosen to hand over everything he needed without making him ask twice.
“I’ll tell her,” he said.
He drove back through the empty streets and was relieved to find Rowena still conscious, though only barely. She argued about drinking the second bottle for four full minutes, just as her grandmother had predicted, before Kasper put it in her hand and said the words that finally moved her.
“Your grandmother made it herself and said every drop.”
Rowena drank every drop.
She was asleep within the hour.
Kasper sat nearby and let out a slow breath. Then he turned his attention to Rita, who had been sitting in the corner of the room since they’d come inside, quiet and small and hollow-eyed.
He knew traditional medicine. The old kind, passed down through his family line the way certain knowledge survived in werewolf bloodlines when people were careful enough to preserve it. He found the pressure points along Rita’s wrists and at the base of her neck, the ones that had been deliberately pressed to keep her foggy and manageable, and released them one by one with careful deliberate pressure.
Rita blinked. Her eyes cleared slowly, like a fog burning off in the morning. She looked around the room like she was seeing it properly for the first time in weeks.
Then she started talking and she didn’t stop for a long time.
Alice had not been working alone. She had never worked alone. There was a man named Marcel, a rogue leader connected to one of the exiled packs, who had been meeting Alice privately and regularly for months. There was Manager Corby, whom everyone in the mansion knew and nobody had ever looked at twice, who had been the quiet organized middle point between Alice and everyone she paid or pressured.
And she had paid many people.
The mansion staff had been approached systematically. Not everyone had accepted, but enough had. Enough to give Alice eyes in every room, ears in every conversation, advance warning of every plan that took shape inside those walls. People who had smiled and served and reported back everything they saw.
Rita gave names. She gave dates. She gave specific details that could be verified and followed and built into something solid.
Kasper sat in the room and listened to all of it while Rowena slept deeply in the chair nearby, her color slowly returning, her breathing evening out into something steady and calm.
He didn’t write anything down. He didn’t need to. He had a very good memory and Rowena would need to hear everything directly from Rita when she woke up.
He looked over at her.
She had killed a man tonight with power she hadn’t known she fully had yet. She had taken serious injuries and stayed on her feet long enough to give clear instructions and make sure everyone around her was safe before she allowed herself to stop. She had built this entire plan from nothing and it had worked, at great personal cost, and now the information they needed was finally in the open.
He shook his head slowly. freewebnovёl.ƈom
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