by Peyton Bogue
“How’s your shoulder?” Rhys asks him a couple of minutes later, and Sage shrugs in response, but the motion pulls at his wound and he exhales sharply at the burst of pain he feels.
It doesn’t hurt as much as it had last night, but there is still some residual pain from the graze of the bullet. With the bullet moving that fast and strong, it’s no wonder Sage is still feeling a deep ache around the wound from where his skin is pulled taut around his shoulder blade.
Rhys runs the fingers of his right hand through Sage’s hair, and a second later Sage can see the veins of his left arm turn oily black from its place in front of Sage’s eyeline. Relief floods Sage's system, making him immediately relaxed, and he gasps softly as the residual pain is quickly drawn from his wound.
Sage breathes deeply, wrapping his arms further around Rhys, and makes a pleased sound, placing a soft kiss on Rhys’s sternum.
“It’s better now that you’ve done that,” he replies, smiling against Rhys’s skin. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Rhys replies, and Sage feels him press a kiss to the top of his head, and Sage relaxes further against him, not holding back the weight of his body as his upper torso curls against Rhys’s. He knows that Rhys is content to take his weight.
“Why are you up so early, Ree?” Sage asks, moving his head so they can look at each other. He knows he probably still looks rumpled and sleepy from just waking up, but he hopes he’s able to convey that he is listening and cognizant of Rhys’s words, even though his body still aches from exhaustion.
Rhys looks down at him fondly, his affectionate gaze causing Sage’s heart to flutter, but he sighs softly, running his fingers through Sage’s hair again. “I didn’t sleep very well last night. I’ve been up for almost two hours.”
“What?” Sage asks, shifting so he can look at Rhys head on. “Did you have another nightmare?” He’s suddenly hit with a wave of guilt. He’d been so tired last night that as soon as his head had hit the pillow, he’d been out like a light. He’d slept so deeply that he didn’t even register that Rhys had left their bed at some point in the early morning. And if Rhys has had another nightmare, Sage wouldn’t have even known because he’d been asleep, and wouldn’t have been able to help Rhys and comfort him, which is awful. “Rhys, I’m sorry—” Sage starts, concerned and guilty, but Rhys quickly shakes his head.
“I didn’t have a nightmare, baby,” he says, stroking the back of Sage’s neck soothingly to stop him from panicking. “I was tossing and turning all night, and I didn’t want to risk waking you up, so I went and moved to the couch. I slept for about three hours last night.”
Sage frowns. He doesn’t like that Rhys hadn’t been in bed with him last night. “What was keeping you up?”
Rhys sighs again, squeezing Sage’s neck. “The thought of this other werewolf that’s roaming around in my territory. He’s making my wolf defensive and anxious.”
“You should have woken me up, Ree,” Sage says, placing another kiss on Rhys’s chest. “We could have talked about it.”
Rhys shakes his head, but he smiles softly. “You needed to sleep. You still need to sleep.”
Sage huffs slightly, overcome with the urge to roll his eyes even as a feeling of fondness swells in his chest from Rhys’s overprotectiveness.
“You need to sleep. Three hours is not enough,” he tells Rhys disapprovingly. “Do you want to talk about it? About what we should do to try to get him to leave?”
Rhys shakes his head again, moving his hand down so that he can rub lightly over Sage’s clothed back. “We can talk about it once you’ve woken up again.”
“But you need to sleep, too,” Sage counters, pushing himself up so he can give Rhys a stern look. “If you’re feeling anxious, we should talk about it so that you can relax enough to fall back asleep.”
“I’m alright, Sage,” Rhys tells him gently, his hand resting between Sage’s shoulder blades. “You’re already helping me relax just by letting me hold you.”
Sage knows Rhys also means that Sage’s soothing scent is calming him down, so Sage relaxes against Rhys’s chest again, pressing his cheek to Rhys’s sternum.
“We’ll talk once you're more rested,” Rhys continues, trailing his fingers down Sage’s spine. When he gets to the hem of the long sleeve he had brought Sage to change into last night at the truck stop, he pulls it up gently, working his fingertips up underneath the cotton so he can stroke softly against the bare skin of Sage’s lower back. The heat from his hand has Sage grinning appreciatively as Rhys says, “Why don’t you go back to sleep? We’ve got all day today, and I meant what I said about not letting you leave this bed. You still smell too tired for my liking.”
Sage chuckles, but he raises an eyebrow and asks, “Will you go back to sleep, too?”
Rhys nods, grinning at the exhaustion in Sage’s voice. Sage smiles against Rhys’s chest, relaxing into his embrace and sighing contentedly again when Rhys continues to rub slow circles into his skin.
He’s asleep only minutes later.
When he wakes up again, Rhys’s side of their bed is empty. Sage rolls onto his back, blinking the sleep from his eyes, and runs a hand through his unruly hair.
He reaches for his phone on the nightstand, grabbing it. He doesn’t have any messages or notifications when he turns it on, which he’s grateful for, and he checks the time to see it’s very much later in the day, but still just a little past ten o’clock.
Their bedroom door is closed, but Sage can hear the soft sounds of Rhys moving around in the kitchen, and when he glances out of the window again, all he sees is gray clouds, and the soft sound of rainfall lulls a contented sigh out from deep within his chest.
He sits up and gets out of bed, neglecting to make it because he’s not sure if they actually plan to climb back into it again, and opens their door, leaving it wide open as he walks towards the kitchen.
Rhys is leaning against the counter when Sage walks in, sipping at a cup of coffee. He grins at Sage, moving to hand him another mug.
“Thanks,” Sage says, smiling as he takes a sip.
“You look better,” Rhys replies, inhaling. “And you don’t smell like death anymore.”
Sage laughs at him, bringing his hand up to wipe the lingering exhaustion from his eyes. “Did you actually go back to sleep with me, or did you wait until I was knocked out to leave?”
“I fell back asleep,” Rhys tells him. “I woke up about an hour ago. I was actually waiting for you to get up so I could show you something.”
Sage takes another sip to hide his frown, because Rhys has technically still only gotten a total of four hours of sleep, but he gives Rhys a curious glance over the brim of his mug and asks, “Show me what?”
Rhys sets his own mug down, gently taking Sage’s hand and pulling him around the island. Sage continues to look at him confusedly, but Rhys just nods to the marble countertop.
In front of him, sitting in the middle of the countertop, is a wooden box with intricate marks on its sides. The box is obviously old and frayed, and the top and sides of it are worn down and graying in certain spots. The entire thing is probably no bigger than the size of Sage’s forearm, and the top of the box has an engraving carved into it that Sage has to strain his eyes to make out.
The words read Lupus Vitae when Sage finally reads them, and carved underneath it in simple script is Becker.
“Rhys,” Sage says, tracing his fingers over the letters, “is this—”
“My family’s, yeah,” Rhys says, nodding. His voice is strained as he speaks, and the melancholic edge to his words tugs painfully at Sage’s heart. He has a pinched look on his face as he stares down at the box, as if just the sight of the small object in front of him brings him pain. “This is the only thing, besides a few pictures, and my ma’s journals, that I have left here.”
“Rhys,” Sage repeats quietly, setting his mug down so he can rub his hand in between Rhys’s shoulder blades comfortingly.
Rhy
s rarely ever goes through his family’s belongings. He has a storage unit down in Manhattan full of old clothes, his first baby cradle, his brother’s stuffed animals and a wooden table he crafted himself when he was in middle school, more of his ma’s journals and her favorite pieces of jewelry, and his dad’s collection of baseball cards. There are even more family photo albums full of smiling pictures of his family away on vacations, or his ma in front of the Trocadero, or his dad teaching him how to ride a bike, and pictures of him kissing his ma’s swollen belly when she was pregnant with his baby brother. He and his brother’s baby quilts that his ma had knitted for them when they were infants are hidden in the back of the unit, stored away and out of sight.
Rhys can’t bring himself to actually go into the unit. He’d put the down payment on it himself, moved all of the personal belongings from their burnt out house into the unit, only grabbing a few photos, some of his ma’s journals, and apparently this wooden box that sits in front of him and Sage before he’d permanently closed the door.
He hasn’t been back inside of the unit since he’d rented it almost a decade ago, even though he and Sage had driven to Manhattan two and a half years ago because Rhys had wanted to show it to him, having finally opened up to Sage about his family’s murder.
Having something this personal as one of the last remembrances of his family that he’s actually held onto over the years resting here out on the marble countertop has not got to be easy for Rhys to let anyone see, yet here he is, showing it to Sage.
“I’m okay,” Rhys says, pressing a soft kiss to the side of Sage’s head in reassurance. “I needed to dig this out.”
“For what?” Sage asks gently, his fingers tracing over the words again.
Rhys keeps all of the pictures and items he’d taken from the storage unit in the bottom drawer of his nightstand, and Sage has never disrespected Rhys’s space or betrayed his trust by opening the drawer and seeing the items inside. He’s always known that Rhys would tell him why these specific items are important to him, and there is no way Sage will rush that until Rhys is good and ready to show and tell him.
He’s always been curious, though. He’s yearned for years to understand this part of Rhys, to be clued in on his past like no one else has before. He’s seen the photographs Rhys chose to frame intermingle into Sage’s own pictures over various walls, mantles, and tables in their brownstone, but there’s still so many more that he hasn’t seen, and so many more memories that he’s yet to understand.
Rhys moves, and Sage draws his hand away from the wooden box. Rhys opens it slowly, removing the black latch and, careful to remain delicate, he sets the lid onto the top of the table gently.
Inside the box is a few old, folded up pieces of paper. There is, what looks to be, a dried herb and a small, white crystal on a cord. Rhys picks up the papers and sets them on the counter near the lid.
He moves again, picking up one of the leather gloves also sitting on the counter nest to the box that Sage hadn’t seen from where he's standing next to Rhys. Rhys pulls one of the gloves on, then reaches his gloved hand inside of the box, pulling out the herb. His nose wrinkles at, presumably, the smell of the plant, but when he turns back to Sage, all Sage smells is a mixture between rose and lavender.
“This is the only thing, besides another werewolf, that can actually hurt a werewolf,” Rhys says, moving the herb closer to Sage so he can see it.
It looks dried up and dead, but there’s still a pink hue to the tips of the small flowers, though the stem and the petals have long since shriveled up.
“What is this?” Sage asks him.
“Wolfsbane,” Rhys replies. “It’s harmful to us.”
“Harmful?” Sage repeats questioningly, looking down at the herb with disbelief.
Rhys inhales deeply through his nostrils, then moves the herb so that it lightly grazes against his left forearm. The sound of sizzling flesh shocks Sage, and he gasps as he looks down in alarm and sees the place on Rhys’s arm where he’s still holding the herb to his skin is actually burning, his pale skin sweltering and peeling as if acid were poured onto it. Rhys snarls in pain, and the sound of his pained growl fills Sage with panic.
“Rhys—” Sage says, alarmed, but Rhys pulls the herb away from his skin, and the burns begin to immediately heal themselves on his forearm. His pale flesh knits itself back together quickly. In a matter of seconds, the skin on his arm looks completely normal and unscathed, and Sage grabs Rhys's forearm hastily and strokes over the healed skin with his thumbs, his heart racing.
“Why did you do that to yourself?” Sage demands, looking up into Rhys’s eyes sharply.
Rhys sits the herb back into the box and grabs at Sage’s hands soothingly. “Wolfsbane is toxic to werewolves. It hurts us when it makes contact with our skin. If we ingest it, it burns our insides and makes us too weak to use our strength. If it gets into our bloodstream, it can completely incapacitate us.”
“You hurt yourself,” Sage says quietly, rubbing his thumb over the veins of Rhys’s arm. His heart is still beating too fast, but he can't make himself relax.
“I’m okay, baby. It only hurts until it’s away from my skin, or out of my system. I’m all healed up,” Rhys replies softly, stroking his thumb over the inside of Sage’s wrist comfortingly. “I wanted you to see what it does.”
“Why?”
“I want you to carry some of this with you, especially when I’m not around you,” he replies. “I have more, but there’s another werewolf out there, Sage, and I’m not going to leave you unprotected and with no way to defend yourself.”
“Rhys,” Sage says, his eyes quickly flickering down to the herb before he resolutely brings them back up to meet Rhys’s, “I don’t want to have anything on me that could hurt you like that. It looked like your skin was going to melt off.”
“Baby, it won’t hurt me unless you bring it into contact with my skin, or if you try to do anything else with it against me,” Rhys assures him, but the obvious desperation in his voice makes Sage sigh. “I want to protect you, Sage. I’m not letting this guy anywhere near you, but if he were to get his hands on you, you could defend yourself against him with this. If you get it on him, or into his system, you could literally incapacitate him, Sage.”
Sage gives him a resolute look, but Rhys stares back into his eyes, pleading. “Why are you telling me about this now?” Sage settles to ask.
“I didn’t see a need for it when I knew there weren’t any other werewolves in New York City and that you were safe with me,” Rhys replies. “But now there’s an omega out there who’s directly challenged me, and he knows that you’re the only weakness I have. I’m not going to try to control anything you do,” he says gently, but he looks at Sage forcefully, “and even though I would like nothing more than for you to stay inside and safe here with me until I’ve found this guy and forced him to leave, I know that’s not going to happen,” Rhys assures him when Sage begins to frown. “I can’t always be with you, especially when you’re at work, and this wolfsbane can help protect you until I’m able to get to you. It’s just a precaution, baby. I’m not going to let that werewolf come anywhere near you, and I’m sure as hell not going to let him hurt you.”
Sage takes another deep breath, glancing down at the wolfsbane again. He nods, though, and looks back up into Rhys’s waiting eyes. “Okay,” he says, still a tad reluctant. “I’ll keep some of it with me.”
“Thank you,” Rhys replies, and Sage can hear the relief in his voice as his fingertips begin to lightly stroke over Sage’s cheekbones. “And I know that you don’t want to do anything to hurt me, but with the way I haven’t been in control of myself lately, I’ll feel better knowing that you have a way to defend yourself against me. I just want to be cautious.”
“You’d never hurt me,” Sage replies, a stubborn set to his jaw, his eyes blazing into Rhys’s. He knows deep in his bones that Rhys would never hurt him.
Rhys nods his head, kissing Sage’s forehea
d again. “No, I wouldn’t. I just want us to be careful.”
“Okay,” Sage says, nodding again. His eyes glance back towards the box, and he nods towards the crystal still nestled inside of it. “What’s that?”
Rhys follows his gaze, then reaches over to pull the crystal out by the cord, holding it up. It glistens even in the cloudy light of the kitchen, and Sage stares at it questioningly, reaching out and touching the cold stone with his fingertips.
“This is a moonstone,” Rhys says, resting the crystal in Sage’s palm. “When you wear it, it interferes with a werewolf’s power of scent, so if you were to wear it, a werewolf wouldn’t be able to track you.”
“You want me to wear this too, don’t you?” Sage asks, quirking an eyebrow up at him.
Rhys grins, but he looks down at the crystal in Sage’s hand, tilting his head. “Yes,” he answers slowly, nodding. “The only downside to it is that this moonstone affects me, too. I won’t be able to track you, either.”
Sage meets Rhys’s eyes at his admission, surprised. “Then I’m not going to wear it.”
“Sage—” Rhys starts, his pleading tone slipping back into his voice again, but Sage shakes his head firmly.
“No, Rhys,” he says, roughly. “If I were to actually be in danger, how would you be able to find me if you can’t track me? I’m capable of handling myself, but you know that it makes me feel better to know that you’d be able to find me anywhere just by my scent. I’m not going to make it so that you can’t track me when something like that could happen.”
“It’s not going to happen,” Rhys growls threateningly. “No one, and especially not some goddamn omega, is going to take you away from me.” He takes a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “I just want you to be safe, Sage. If that means that I’m not able to scent you for a while, just until we get this guy to leave, then so be it.”
“So be it?” Sage repeats, scoffing lightly. He shakes his head, setting the moonstone back into the wooden box. “That’s what you’re going to say?”