Chapter 309 He didn’t need treatment

Chapter 309: Chapter 309 He didn’t need treatment

Damian’s POV

When Dr. Everett asked about the first time I was lose my mind, the memory rose up the way it always did. But this time it didn’t gut me the way it usually would.

I think it was because Aria was sitting right there, her hand warm and steady over mine.

The first time I lost myself, the first time I let the beast in me off its chain and hurt someone, it was because of my grandmother. Because of Grace.

It happened at a pack banquet.

Grace had gotten into it with some distant cousin of ours, one of those old bloodline relatives who thought their pedigree entitled them to run their mouth. Grace had never been able to bear pups.

That was why she’d married my grandfather already grown, and why she’d taken on the thankless work of raising me, the heir nobody else wanted.

So when the argument sparked, that cousin went straight for the throat, the way our kind always does when we want to draw blood.

"Barren," she’d sneered. "A she-wolf who couldn’t give her Alpha a single heir. Playing stepmother to a whelp that isn’t even hers."

That was Grace’s rawest wound, and she’d never let anyone see it bleed. But that night, even she, gentle as she always was with me, snapped and snarled right back.

I’ve always run cold. Distant. Even with Grace, for years, I kept things polite and nothing more.

But the truth was I’d stopped thinking of her as anything but my grandmother a long time ago, blood or no blood. She was mine. Pack. And when someone bares their teeth at what’s yours, there’s a part of the wolf that doesn’t ask questions.

I threw my drink in the woman’s face before I’d decided to do it.

She was an elder, high-standing, and the second I disrespected her she came at me with a hand already shifting to claws. Grace stepped in front of me. Took the strike meant for me.

Her arm.

I remember the sound more than the sight. The wet crack of it. The scent of my grandmother’s blood hitting the air.

My wolf went wild inside me.

It tried to pull me back, tried to force me to stop, but the rage had already swallowed everything else.

After that, I don’t remember how I nearly killed the woman with my bare hands. There’s just a hole where the memory should be, black and silent.

Not because my wolf took over, but because I did.

I lost control so completely that even my wolf couldn’t pull me back. It fought somewhere beneath the rage, snarling and clawing at the walls of my mind, but it couldn’t stop me.

I only remember one thing from the moment before I went under.

She’d looked at me, blood between her teeth, and said it.

"You’re nothing but a bastard wolf. A worthless pup with no place in any pack. No one wanted you. Not even your own blood."

"That’s when it started," I said. My voice came out level, but I could feel Aria’s fingers tighten around mine.

"When I came back to myself, there was blood on my hands and a room full of people staring at me like I was some dangerous beast that needed to be put down."

Dr. Everett didn’t flinch. He just nodded slowly, pen moving across the pad.

"And every time since," he said quietly, "it’s happened when someone you love was hurt in front of you. Am I right?"

"Yes." I didn’t have to think about it. "Only then. Never for me. Never when it’s my own blood on the floor."

"Then it’s not your wolf taking control, Alpha King. It’s you." His voice remained calm.

"Something in you reacts to the threat before you can stop it, and your wolf follows that instinct. It tries to pull you back, but when the rage takes hold, even your wolf can’t restrain you."

I said nothing.

Beside me, I felt Aria go still. I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at her.

---

Aria’s POV

Listening to Damian lay it all out, I thought my heart might actually crack down the middle. I couldn’t get my brow to smooth out no matter how I tried.

I understood it now. Really understood it.

Every time he lost himself, it traced back to the same root. Childhood. A boy nobody claimed, being told again and again that he was disposable.

And it was too cruel. Just hearing him say a few scattered pieces of it, just those broken shards of a childhood I hadn’t lived through, was enough to make me feel like I couldn’t breathe.

Thank God Dr. Everett didn’t keep pulling that thread. He didn’t dig deeper into the worst of it. Instead he just leaned back and quietly laid out the pattern, the trigger underneath all of it.

Damian’s stress response, his blackouts, all of it fired when someone he loved was hurt. Somewhere down in the marrow of him, he’d always believed the people who mattered would be taken from him, and that he’d be powerless to stop it.

I didn’t need a doctor to spell that part out for me. I could see the shape of it plain as day.

It was Aldric. His grandfather. The old Alpha King who’d raised him on a steady drip of you’re not enough, drilling it into a boy until Damian could never once forgive himself for anything.

The session wound down not long after.

And here was the strange part. Dr. Everett didn’t do a single thing the way the other doctors had. He didn’t lecture Damian. He didn’t hand him some clinical label to wear like a collar. He didn’t tell him what he was.

He just talked to him. Like a friend. Two men trading old stories on a couch.

When the last of it settled, Dr. Everett simply spread his hands. "Alright. I think that’s where we’ll stop today. You’ve got a whole new life ahead of you now, Alpha Blackwood. There’s nothing left to be afraid of."

"Dr. Everett, that’s... it?" I blinked at him. "We’re done?"

Damian didn’t say a word beside me.

The doctor smiled and nodded. "That’s right. It’s been over for a while now, actually."

"Over..." I turned to look at Damian.

His eyes surfaced slowly, like a man coming up from deep water. "You’re saying I don’t need treatment anymore?"

"Of course you don’t." Dr. Everett shrugged, easy as anything. "From here on, whatever’s weighing on you, you talk to your wife about it. That’s all the therapy you need."

I frowned, not following. "But the blackouts. The way he loses himself. This stress response, the shifting, it just... won’t happen again?"

He caught my confusion and there was warmth in the look he gave me, something almost fond. "I didn’t say that."

"Then—"

"But you said something to me earlier, didn’t you? When Alpha Blackwood lost himself, when the wolf couldn’t take him over completely."

He tipped his head toward me. "He didn’t hurt you. Not once. Not even a scratch."

I froze.