"I am going to see her." Sebastian gritted through the pain as his leg made moving anywhere near as fast as he wanted to completely impossible, and he had to limp his way around Matt, who immediately reached out to support him. Sebastian shot him a dark glare that stopped his hands mid reach.

"I am not an invalid. I can walk. Don’t touch me." Sebastian warned, his voice carrying the particular edge it got when his pride was being stepped on. He was furious. Furious at the pain slowing him down and furious at himself for being in a position where his Luna had taken a wolfsbane dagger in her back and nearly bled to death trying to save his life.

Matt stepped back and held both hands up, reading the situation clearly enough to know that touching the Alpha right now would only make things worse.

His ego was hurting just as badly as his leg and there was nothing Matt could do about either of those things. Instead he fell into step beside him and carefully guided him toward the room where Viola had been put, saying nothing and making sure nothing about his posture suggested he thought Sebastian needed the help.

The last thing Matt needed on top of everything else was a moody Sebastian, but that was exactly what he was going to get. Whoever was behind this assassination attempt had not come to play games or make a statement.

They had come to end the Alpha completely and permanently, and they had done it with a level of precision and preparation that Matt found deeply unsettling the more he thought about it.

What bothered him most was the concealment. Sebastian had always been near impossible to follow without him knowing.

His senses were sharp enough to pick up on anything before most people had even made their second move, and yet whoever had orchestrated this had managed to track him all the way to Nightshade and plant people ahead of him without Sebastian catching so much as a hint of it. That was not ordinary planning.

That was someone who knew Sebastian well enough to know exactly how he moved and how to stay ahead of it, and that particular thought narrowed the list of suspects in a way that made Matt’s stomach turn.

His Alpha ego was going to take a hit from this and Matt already knew what a hit to Sebastian’s ego looked like from the inside. He would go cold and difficult, and he would push himself before his body was ready because the idea of being outmaneuvered by anyone was something Sebastian Kade did not know how to sit with peacefully.

And beyond the ego and the moodiness was the grimmer reality underneath it. Whoever was behind this would strike again.

They had invested too much into this attempt to simply walk away from it, and next time they would have learned from what went wrong. If they didn’t find this person and remove them before that next attempt came, Matt wasn’t certain even a supreme Alpha’s blood would be enough to walk away from it a second time. Matt thought grimly as he followed Sebastian down the corridor.

When they reached the room, Doctor Gilbert was in the process of removing the tubes that had been keeping the Luna stable, and upon seeing the Alpha at the door he straightened and bowed his head in greeting.

"Alpha, you should not be out of bed right now. Your body still needs time to finish repairing the internal damage from within, particularly that leg." Gilbert said, but if Sebastian heard a single word of it he gave no indication, his eyes already having found the woman lying on the bed and not moving from her.

She was positioned on her side with a back support keeping her from rolling onto the injured wound, looking pale and very small beneath the covers. An IV drip ran from a stand to the back of her hand and her eyes were closed and still.

Sebastian walked to her and lowered himself carefully onto the edge of the bed, his jaw tightening as the movement pulled at his thigh.

His eyes moved slowly over her face and his chest twisted at what he saw there. Dark circles had formed beneath her sunken eyes and her lips were dry and cracked and colorless. She had lost weight that she hadn’t had to spare in the days she had been lying here, and the stillness of her was deeply unsettling to look at.

But she was breathing on her own now, her chest rising and falling without the tubes Matt had described, which Gilbert must have only just removed.

Sebastian reached out and took the hand resting on top of the covers. The moment his fingers closed around hers the familiar spark of their bond moved through him, and the delight of it was immediately followed by the cold and angry knowledge that she was lying here like this because of him. His fingers tightened around her slender hand.

"How is she?" He asked quietly, not looking away from her face.

"She is improving each day. She regained consciousness briefly this morning before going under again. I have removed the tubes because she no longer needs them to maintain her vitals. The recovery is taking longer than it would for a werewolf because without her wolf to accelerate the healing process we have had to rely entirely on medicine, which works at a considerably slower rate." Gilbert explained.

"If she is improving then why is she still unconscious?" Sebastian asked, his voice carrying the quiet edge that meant he wanted a real answer and not a reassuring one.

"Because her body is healing at a human rate rather than a werewolf one, as I said. She simply needs more time. Based on what I examined this morning I would expect her to wake within the next several hours, possibly sooner." Gilbert replied, swallowing slightly as he felt the Alpha’s aura beginning to push into the air of the room even though the man hadn’t so much as glanced at him since he walked in.

"Do you have a lip balm?" Sebastian asked, and the question was unexpected enough that Gilbert blinked and exchanged a brief look with Matt before answering.

"I don’t have one on me. What do you need it for?"

"Matt." Sebastian said simply, and Matt left the room without needing to be told anything further.

When he returned and held it out, Sebastian took it and then turned to Gilbert. "I want a full written report of every ingredient identified in those bullets. Do you have it?"

"I completed the report yesterday. Many of the components are things we have never encountered before in combination. I will have a copy sent to you before this evening." Gilbert said, watching as Sebastian opened the balm, dipped his index finger into it carefully and then leaned forward and rubbed it slowly across Viola’s cracked lips, working it in gently until the dryness began to soften under his touch.

Gilbert found he had to look away. He had heard what people were saying about this woman, that she was nothing more than a sacrificial pawn placed beside the Alpha until the curse claimed her. Looking at the man sitting on the edge of that bed right now, Gilbert thought those people had gotten things very wrong indeed.