My Alpha Accused Me of Hurting His Mistress

The mind-link punched through my sleep at 11:47 PM.

*Luna. Medical wing. Now.*

It was Rowan, our Beta, his voice tight in a way I had not heard in five years of marking. I sat up in the bed I shared with my mate and reached for him out of habit. The sheets beside me were cold.

I pulled on jeans and a sweater. My Healer's kit was already by the door. I have been the Ironveil Pack's lead Healer since I was nineteen. Five years as Luna. People die when I am slow, so I am never slow.

The pack house was too quiet for an emergency. No lights in the common rooms. No wolves crowding the hall outside the medical wing the way they always did when one of our own was hurt. Just Rowan, standing by the door, his eyes pinned to the floor.

"Who is it?" I asked.

He did not look up. "Luna. Maybe you should let one of the junior medics—"

"Who is it, Rowan?"

His jaw worked. He stepped aside.

I opened the door.

The smell hit me before the sight did.

My mate's scent — pine sap and storm, the bond's anchor, the thing that had defined *home* for me for five years — was tangled with something sweet and synthetic. Lilia's perfume. Underneath that, the rawer scent I had only ever caught on my own skin and his. Sex. Sweat. The chemical signature of two wolves who had been moving inside each other less than an hour ago.

Sable howled. My wolf, who almost never raised her voice. The sound filled the inside of my skull until I could not hear my own breathing.

Declan was on the exam table with his shirt off. His mark — *my* mark, the one I had set in his throat the night he claimed me — was livid red, like he had been scratching at it. Lilia was on the second cot, half-wrapped in a sheet. There was a bite on the curve of her neck. Deep. Fresh. The kind of bite a male wolf only gives when he is too far gone to remember he has a mate.

My hands stayed at my sides. They did not shake.

"Isla," Declan said.

I walked past him.

I set my kit on the rolling tray. I snapped on gloves. I pulled the lamp arm down so the light fell clean across Lilia's neck, and I cleaned the wound with the same antiseptic I would have used on a child. She watched me through her lashes. Her mouth was slightly parted, like she was waiting for something.

"Tilt your head to the left," I said.

She tilted.

"Further."

She tilted.

I closed the bite with three stitches. My fingers moved the way they had moved through ten thousand other wounds. My fingers did not know yet that they had four days left to be fingers.

When I was done I stripped the gloves, dropped them in the bin, and washed my hands. The water was hot. I made it hotter. I scrubbed past the knuckles, up to the elbows, the way I scrubbed before surgery, until my skin was pink and the smell of *them* was off me as much as soap could manage.

Then I turned around.

"Declan."

He stood up. His chest was bare and beautiful, and I hated my body for the way it still recognized him.

"Reject me," I said.

The room went very still.

"Isla—"

"Reject me. Formally. Tonight. The words. The whole sentence." My voice was the voice I used to tell mothers their pups were not going to make it. Steady. Quiet. Final. "I am owed that much."

"It's complicated."

I almost laughed. I am proud of myself that I did not.

"Lilia is bleeding from a mating bite, Alpha. *Your* mating bite. I just stitched it. What part of that is complicated?"

"The bond is sacred, Isla. Wolves don't — we don't just throw away—"

"You threw it away tonight." I kept my eyes on his. I did not look at her. I would not give her that. "I am offering you a clean cut. Reject me with the formal words and I will walk out of this territory by morning. No fight. No pack scandal. You keep your Alpha seat. You keep her." I let one beat pass. "All you have to say is one sentence."

He did not say it.

I watched him not say it, and I understood.

He was not a man torn between two women. He was a man who intended to keep both of us. The Luna for the public ceremonies and the healing gift the pack lived on. The Beta she-wolf for his bed. He thought I would weep, and threaten, and stay — because that was what mates did. Because the bond was supposed to make leaving impossible.

"All right," I said.

I picked up my kit.

On the cot behind him, Lilia made a small sound. Not quite a laugh. Something softer than that, and worse.

I walked out without looking at her.

---

My quarters smelled like him. Like us. I opened every window.

Sable was a heavy, grieving weight at the back of my mind, silent now, all the howl burned out of her. I did not speak to her. I would not have known what to say.

I took down my mother's moonstone from its stand on the dresser — small, cool, paler than ivory, the only thing I had left of the woman who had taught me what my hands could do. I wrapped it in a silk scarf and set it in the bottom of my bag.

My Healer's instruments next. Scalpels in their leather roll. The small mortar she had ground willow bark in when I was seven. A vial of dried moonflower I had harvested myself.

I did not take the Luna jewelry. I did not take the dresses he had bought me. I did not take the photograph of our marking ceremony off the wall. Let him explain it to her when she moved in.

I did not cry. I had been a Healer too long to mistake crying for action.

It was almost two in the morning when I zipped the bag. I crossed to the window to pull it shut and saw, three stories below in the courtyard, a figure standing in the lit square of the east window.

Lilia.

She was watching my window. She had a phone pressed to her ear. Her mouth was moving.

She saw me see her.

She did not move. She did not look away. She just kept talking into the phone, her eyes on mine, and after a moment she smiled — small, polite, the way you smile at someone whose funeral you have already planned.

I closed the curtain.

I did not sleep.

---

The Luna ceremonial fitting was at three the next afternoon, in the mirrored hall on the second floor. I could not cancel it without the entire pack asking why, and I was not ready for that question yet. I needed one more day. I needed to be gone before the talking started.

So I went.

The seamstress, an older she-wolf named Mara who had been fitting Luna gowns for forty years, did not meet my eyes when she pinned the silk at my waist. She had been at the medical wing this morning. Wolves talk. Of course wolves talk.

The chair beside the fitting platform, where Declan should have been sitting, was empty.

Then it was not empty.

Lilia slid into it without being invited, in a soft cream dress that looked nothing like a Beta's uniform, her dark hair loose, the stitches on her neck hidden under a silk scarf the exact shade of mine. She crossed her legs. She smiled at Mara, who looked at the floor, and then she smiled up at me.

"You missed a spot last night," she said, light as conversation, soft enough that Mara could not hear. "The bite on his ribs. He likes that one."

I did not move.

"He makes this sound," Lilia went on, her voice almost dreamy, "right before he loses control. Like a growl, but quieter. You know the one. And the scar on his hip — the one from the rogue raid four years ago — he likes when you bite that, doesn't he?"

I knew the scar. I knew the sound.

"He calls out a name when he's close," she said. "Did you know that?"

My hand was moving before I told it to.

The slap cracked across her face hard enough to snap her head sideways. Mara dropped a pin. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed. The red bloomed on Lilia's cheek in the shape of my palm, and a thin line of blood opened at the corner of her mouth where her teeth had cut the inside of her lip.

She did not raise a hand to her face. She did not stand. She did not call for Declan.

She turned her head back to me, slowly, and touched her tongue to the blood on her lip.

And she smiled.