***Aldrik***
Four days.
Four days of telling myself to leave, and instead finding myself in different corners of the same small town, watching a healer's shop with clean windows and herbs in the doorway.
Four days of cataloguing evidence I didn't want to have.
It had started with the neck.
The second day, I'd been sitting at the far end of the harbor wall when a patient left the shop looking considerably better than when they'd entered. Caelan had followed them to the door, said something that made the old man laugh, and then stood in the doorway watching him go.
And touched his neck.
Just briefly, automatically, the way you touch something without realizing you're doing it, two fingers pressed against the left side of his neck, exactly where an alpha's bond mark would sit.
Checking for something that wasn't there.
I'd gripped the harbor wall and told myself it was a coincidence.
Then there was the healing.
