Chapter 2

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Ouch.

Marquise slowly began to come around as he felt something digging into his damaged side.

"Ah, there you are."

Who...?

There was no way he was going to be able to open his eyes or move much, so Marquise tried to focus on other things. Mainly, there was something stabbing into his side that hurt terribly.

"Ah, I'm sorry. I thought I had used enough numbing agent. Give me just a moment," the unfamiliar voice said as the pain in his side lessoned a good bit with the withdrawal of the tool the man had been using.

A few moments later he felt something cold press against the injured area, then, blissfully, it went completely numb. His tired body relaxed the slightest bit in response, making the other person respond calmly.

"There we go. Sorry about that, I honestly thought that I'd used enough but it seems like the rot has begun to eat away at your ribs," the man said as he started scraping away the damaged flesh again.

"I honestly thought that you would never wake up again. You surprised me."

He had surprised himself, too. Waking up had not been part of his plan.

"I can sense some of your emotions, but for some reason I can't hear what you're thinking. I've never not been able to hear the thoughts of another living person," the man stated.

It was no surprise to Marquise that he couldn't get into his head. Having been an alpha, he had years of practice restricting access to his thoughts. Not even his most-trusted subordinates had been able to just search his mind for thoughts.

I suppose my inner defenses are still solid, though for what reason, I'm unsure.

"This is the first time I have ever disobeyed my master in my one hundred and twelve years, too," the man said quietly as he continued working.

Marquise could just-barely feel a slight tickling sensation as a knife scraped against his left ribs, but thankfully he felt little else.

"I've already cleaned up your left leg and bandaged it. Your foot was thankfully spared, so that's good."

Was it? Marquise wasn't a fool. Yes, he'd managed to wake up, but that didn't mean much in the long run. His body was still dying, and no matter how much rot the man scraped out, it couldn't remove the multitude of silver from his bloodstream.

"Do you want to know why I actually went against my master to save you?" he asked, though clearly didn't expect any sort of response from him.

"Well, while you definitely smell like a wolf, or really, you have several of their scents on you, I realized that not a single one of those scents was as strong as it should be. A werewolf that's close to dying will usually smell more like its animal form, or even shift for its remaining days."

He wasn't wrong. Considering the terrible condition his body was currently in, he should have shifted back to his wolf form long ago to ready itself to die.

"I'm still ninety-nine percent sure that you're a werewolf, because I've never met one nice enough to let a human live amongst them, but at the same time, there's that one percent that has me curious. Perhaps you are that one human that had been granted some sort of leniency and yet, your blood is heavy with silver and your body is rotting away from within. There are some very rare diseases that can cause such issues, but the silver in your bloodstream makes it nearly impossibly for me to consider you human," the man said, then continued to mumble to himself as he worked for a long while on Marquise's left side.

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