After My Alpha Murdered Our Unborn Daughter

The mark on my neck went cold at 7:42, right in the middle of my own Mate Ceremony renewal.

I felt it before I understood it. Elias had just stepped down from my side on the ceremonial dais. His hand left the small of my back, and the warmth of three years went with it. I had my palm flat over my stomach, over the four-month curve I had only just started to show under the ivory silk. Our pup kicked once. A small, blind flutter, like she knew something was wrong before I did.

Elias did not turn back to me. He walked to Daphne.

She was in red. She had been standing near the front of the pack, half a step behind Beta Jamari, and now she came forward like she had been waiting for the cue her whole life. Her hand slid into Elias's, and the scent on his shirt sharpened all at once, not floral, not the vanilla that had ghosted his collar for weeks. It was her, layered thick in every fold of the fabric, in the hollow of his throat, at his wrists. Not a trace. A saturation. He had come to the dais already carrying her.

"I, Elias Kane, Alpha of the Nightshade Pack," he said, and his voice did the thing it did when he wanted a room to hold still, "reject you, Camilla Bennett, as my mate."

My neck burned cold.

It was not like ice on skin. It was like a door closing inside a room that had been mine, and then the room becoming somebody else's. The mark, the small silver crescent of his teeth over my pulse, went from warm to nothing to a hollow ache in the space of one breath.

"I name Daphne Howell," he went on, his eyes on her, not me, "my true fated mate, as the Moon Goddess intended."

The bond snapped.

My knee hit the stone before I had decided to kneel. My hand went to my throat, to the mark, two fingers pressing the way I had pressed it a thousand times when I was thinking, and there was nothing under my fingers but cold. The pack was silent. Two hundred faces, and not one of them moved. I looked for the Betas' wives, the pups I had rocked to sleep, the old wolves I had fed through the winter when the pack coffers ran thin. Every gaze slid off me like water off oil.

My wolf whimpered inside me, once, quiet and confused, and I had one moment to think, get up, Camilla, get up, get up—

Elias moved.

He did not shout. That was the part I remember most clearly, later, in the hours when I remembered anything. He came down on me with both hands, one flat on my sternum, one at my jaw, and he was gentle the way a butcher is gentle with the animal already on the block. The small glass vial was in his palm before I saw it. Amber liquid, thick, the smell of it curling up into my sinuses—wolfsbane, concentrated, not the diluted trace we used to burn out infections. Enough to kill.

"She's hysterical," he told the pack, calm, reasonable, his knee on my ribs. "She has been faking the bond. She is a danger to herself and to the pup she claims exists. As your Alpha, I am restraining her for her own safety."

He pressed his thumb into the joint of my jaw, and my mouth opened.

"No one moves," he said, and the Alpha tone rolled out over the pack like a lid coming down on a jar. "No one approaches. No one aids her. By my command."

I heard someone in the back row make a sound like a sob cut in half. Then nothing.

The wolfsbane hit the back of my throat. I did not scream. I do not know why. Maybe because I could feel my pup already, feel her small heartbeat stuttering under my palm as the poison hit my blood, and I did not want her last sensation to be the sound of my terror. I fixed my eyes on Elias's face. I memorized it. The small mole under his left ear. The place where his beard did not grow in fully. The exact color of the pupil dilating as he watched me swallow.

Warmth spread down the inside of my thighs. Red on ivory. I heard someone whisper, oh Goddess, and then Elias's tone locked them silent again.

My wolf did not retreat. She drowned. I felt her go under, one long note bending into black water, and then even that was gone.

Hands on my arms. Warriors. Two of them, I think, though I could not lift my head to see. The medallion at my throat clicked open, and I felt it lift away. Through my lashes I saw a red hem step forward, saw pale fingers close around the silver disc where it had fallen on the stone.

"Careful with it," Daphne said softly. "It's mine now."

They dragged me. Down the dais steps, past the wet place on the stone that had been my daughter, out through the pack that parted like grass. Cold air. Gravel. The truck bed. Miles of it, and I could not tell how many, only that when they stopped, the engine cut out and the door slammed and the world was black pines and no lights, and they rolled me out of the bed and onto frozen dirt like something already dead.

A boot near my face. "Sorry, Luna," one of them said, and his voice broke on the word, and then they were gone.

I lay on my side. The blood kept coming. My mark was so cold it did not feel like part of me anymore. I pressed two fingers to it out of habit and felt only the smooth skin over the place where he had bitten me at sixteen, and the emptiness under it went so deep I thought for a moment I could fall into it.

Then my spine cracked.

Not my wolf. I knew my wolf. This was lower, deeper, a sound inside my bones like something enormous rolling over in its sleep. My hip snapped out of joint and did not hurt the way it should have hurt. My fingers, curled in the dirt, lengthened. My jaw ached. My vision, which had been contracting to a pinhole, blew open, and the pines came at me in colors I did not have names for.

I tried to say no. Not because I did not want it. Because I did not know what it was.

Something inside me answered. Not a voice, not yet. A weight. A presence the size of the space Elias had emptied and larger, larger, rising up out of a floor I had not known was under me, unfolding like it had been folded my whole life waiting for exactly this much room.

My fingers pressed the cold burn on my neck one last time.

Then the bloodline took me, and somewhere out beyond the trees, on a wind moving down from the northern ridge, a stranger stopped mid-step and lifted his head to scent the air.