More than once Sebastian had tried to come awake but failed completely, his body no longer feeling like something that belonged to him.

When he did manage to open his eyes it was only because of the soft coaxing voice of his wife beside him, her hand moving through his hair, and when he looked at her he felt a pain in his chest that had nothing to do with the bullets, because he could see clearly from the state of her that he was going to die and she knew it too.

He would die without ever knowing what a full life with a mate he genuinely liked felt like. Every mate he had known before and every relationship he had carried had always been held together by sexual attraction and the need to let out steam during his heat cycle, nothing more than that.

But not with this one.

With her it was something else entirely. He found peace sleeping beside her. He found something close to calm just from holding her hand, which was not something he had ever looked for or thought he needed from anyone.

She was different in so many ways that Sebastian knew, even without the mate bond pulling him toward her, he would still have found himself drawn to her regardless. Every time he forced his eyes open and found her sitting next to him looking devastated, he felt ashamed at his own inability to even move and tell her not to cry for him, to tell her he wasn’t worth those tears.

His days had always been numbered. He had known that from the moment he took the Alpha seat and made the enemies that came with it. He had known somewhere deep in his chest that a day would eventually come when someone succeeded and he would be gone, the same way his parents had gone, and he had made a kind of peace with that knowledge over the years.

Death no longer fazed him.

His only real regret, lying there unable to move, was that he hadn’t known what it would feel like to be with her. Truly be with her in intimate ways a male and female of their relationship should be together. He had imagined it, had built scenarios in his head the way he had never done with anyone before, but imagination was a poor substitute for the real thing and now he would never know the difference.

He would miss her. Damn, he would miss her stubbornness and the small arguments they fell into so easily and the way she looked at him when she thought he wasn’t paying attention.

He didn’t have a clean name for what he felt for her, couldn’t pin it down to something simple, but Sebastian knew it had crossed into the kind of territory he had always been careful to stay out of with fated mates, the territory where losing someone stopped being something you recovered from.

He had been certain this was the end. Certain he would die in that small dim room and leave behind a a mate he hadn’t had nearly enough time with and a bratty sister he loved more than he usually let on. He had been completely certain of it.

Which was why opening his eyes to the familiar ceiling of his bedroom in his main quarters felt like something his mind had manufactured to comfort him on the way out.

He blinked. The fancy ceiling remained. He looked around slowly and took in the dark themed room, the furniture he knew, and then his eyes found Matt sitting on the couch with a tablet in his hands, working through something with a focused expression. How did he end up here? Sebastian wondered.

When Matt sensed him awake he looked up quickly.

"Un-fucking-believable, man. I genuinely thought you were going to sleep forever. Welcome back to the living sleeping beauty!" Matt said, setting his tablet down and getting to his feet, and Sebastian immediately rewarded him with a dark scowl that Matt chose to ignore entirely because he was glad the Alpha had finally woken up after days.

"What happened?" Sebastian asked, finding his voice coming out hoarse and dry in a way that told him it had not been used in a very long time. When he tried to move, his left leg felt completely immobile and when he attempted to force it the pain that shot up his thigh was immediate and vicious enough to make him groan.

"Don’t try to move that leg." Matt warned quickly, crossing toward him. "It is still going through treatment and healing. Leave it alone."

It was the leg where the bullet Miss Lara had removed had dissolved the surrounding tissue and muscle, and unlike every other wound on his body that had healed cleanly during his unconscious recovery, that one was taking considerably longer to repair the damage done from within. Matt explained this to Sebastian whose expression was darkening by the second as he tested the leg again and felt the pain knife all the way up into his groin.

"Fucking hell." Sebastian cursed, slamming his fist down onto the mattress and lying back against the pillow. "Get me water."

Matt moved to the bedside table and poured from the jug there as he said, "That leg should honestly be the least of your concerns right now, Seb. You are lucky to be breathing. Those bullets were made with a combination of every element and poison known to be lethal to a werewolf, stacked together into one. Gilbert couldn’t even identify some of the components in them. We have never seen anything like it." He clicked his tongue and handed Sebastian the glass.

Sebastian sat up carefully, the movement sending a fresh wave of pain from his thigh that made him grimace, and leaned his back against the headboard. He drained the glass and held it out again and Matt refilled it before he asked, "How did I survive it?"

"Now that," Matt said with a small and somewhat baffled chuckle, "is the interesting question." He settled himself on the edge of the couch. "Nobody is giving me a straight answer. When I went back to get you from the orphanage in Nightshade I asked the woman there, Lara or something, I can never remember her full name, and she told me they used water to extract the bullets from your body. She didn’t go into detail about how and I didn’t have the time to push her on it because you needed to be moved immediately." 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

Sebastian’s eyes narrowed as pieces of memory began drifting back to him in fragments. The attack.

Sebastian clearly recalled killing every single one of those assholes who had come to assassinate him, but by the time the last one fell they had already shot him with countless bullets that made even shifting impossible. He also recalled his mate coming back for him after he had told her to leave...

"Where is she?" He asked, the question coming before anything else. "Did you leave her in Nightshade?"

"Of course we left her there. I couldn’t very well bring back a woman who belongs to Nightshade into our pack. I only brought you back and collected a few of the removed bullets for Gilbert to examine and—"

"Why would you leave my Luna in that godforsaken land?!" Sebastian gritted out, his voice dropping to something dangerous as he pushed himself forward and began to swing his legs off the bed.

Matt, who had entirely misunderstood and thought Sebastian was referring to Miss Lara, caught up quickly and reached forward to push him back down before his leg could take any weight. "We didn’t leave the Luna in Nightshade. She is in the next room right now receiving treatment. I brought her back with us."

The relief that moved through Sebastian at those words lasted exactly as long as it took for the second half of that sentence to reach him, and then his silver eyes, still slightly sunken from days of unconsciousness, fixed on Matt with a dark and heavy intensity that filled the room.

"What happened to her?" He asked quickly.

Matt scratched the back of his neck with the particular expression he only ever wore when he was about to say something Sebastian wasn’t going to take well, and then he began to explain. Everything the Luna had done. The condition she had been in when she reached Kasa Land. All of it, from beginning to end, over the four days since they had returned to Silver.

"...she lost a significant amount of blood and the wound in her back was one step away from a serious infection by the time we got her back here, but Gilbert moved quickly and caught it in time. She is still unconscious and receiving blood. I made the decision to keep her here in the main quarters rather than the healing house because we cannot have anyone in the pack knowing what happened to the two of you in Nightshade. You—what are you doing?" Matt asked, his voice sharpening as Sebastian pulled the sheet away from his legs and moved to get off the bed.