When My Alpha Found My Corpse in the Morgue

My name is Scarlett Sullivan. I was born the daughter of an Alpha and a Luna, in a small pack called Sullivan, in a house that smelled like bread and pine. That was a long time ago. My father is dead. My mother is dead. The pack is dead. And tonight, on a metal cot in the Shadowridge healing wing, I am going to join them.

I just don't know it yet.

Savannah swept into the room in a cloud of perfume. Rose. Too much of it. She smiled at me the way people smile at old furniture.

"Take more tonight," she told the on-duty healer. "I want to look my best for the ceremony. My skin has been dull."

The healer didn't ask questions. She never did. She only asked when Graham was on shift, and Graham was not on shift. She tightened the tourniquet around my arm and reached for a bigger bag than usual. I watched the plastic swing from her fingers like a slow, patient balloon.

My wolf whimpered somewhere far away inside me. I felt her—thin as a thread, weaker than she'd been yesterday, weaker than the day before. The bond mark on my neck burned hot, warning me not to speak, not to move, not to make a single sound that might displease the Alpha's chosen mate.

I didn't fight it. I hadn't been able to fight it in five years.

"Bigger needle," Savannah said sweetly. "She won't mind. Will you, Scarlett?"

My mouth opened on its own.

"No, Luna."

My voice sounded like someone else. It always did. Somewhere behind my teeth, the real me screamed—had been screaming since I was seventeen years old—but the enchantment burned white-hot along the bond, and the scream stayed sealed inside my throat like a moth in glass.

The needle went in. I didn't flinch. My arm was already a map of tiny puncture scars, each one a small failed attempt to remember I had a body.

Savannah leaned against the counter and scrolled her phone.

Minutes passed. Maybe more. The room went cold. The ceiling started to swim, soft and slow, like water pulling back from a shore.

My last conscious thought was not of Brantley. It was not of my mother or my father or the pack I lost. It was smaller than that.

It was of Buster.

Buster, the omega pup with the too-long fur and the stubborn little head, who slept in the crook of my knee when I could sneak him in. Buster, who had no one but me.

Who will feed him tomorrow, I thought.

Who will feed him.

The monitor made a long, thin sound. Somewhere, someone said, "Time of death—"

And then the enchantment let me go.

I can't describe it. Five years of a hand pressed over my mouth, and then suddenly, no hand. Five years of a chain around my chest, and then suddenly, no chain. Silence. Real silence. My own silence.

I stepped out of my body like stepping out of a wet coat.

I looked down at her—at me—at the girl on the cot with the gray lips and the needle still in her arm, and I felt nothing yet. Just the vast, ringing quiet where the compulsion used to live.

The healer clicked a button. She set down her clipboard. She glanced at Savannah, who was already halfway out the door, and murmured, "It's done."

Savannah didn't look back at me. Not once.

"Don't announce it tonight," she said. "It's a bad omen before a ceremony. She's just an omega. It can wait."

The door closed.

The healer left too, flicking off the overhead light on her way out, as if I were a lamp.

I stood in the corner of my own death room and watched my body go cold on the cot. Alone. Uncovered. The needle still in me. Nobody thought I was worth the trouble of a sheet.

I thought I might cry. I didn't. The silence in me was too new. Too loud in its own way.

And then the door opened.

Graham.

He stopped in the doorway. Just stopped. The kind of still I had only ever seen in wild animals when they smell something wrong on the wind. His eyes moved from my face on the cot, to the needle in my arm, to the empty extraction bag hanging fat and full on the pole.

He didn't speak. He didn't call for anyone.

He walked to the cot the way you walk toward something sacred. He pulled a clean pair of gloves from the drawer. He removed the needle from my arm with the softest, steadiest hands I had ever seen touch me. He pressed a cotton square over the puncture, as if the bleeding still mattered. As if I still mattered.

Then he took a folded white cloth from the shelf and laid it over me, all the way up to my chin, and smoothed it flat.

He closed the door.

And he sat down beside me.

He didn't leave. He didn't summon a Beta. He didn't run to tell an Alpha. He just sat, one hand resting near my shoulder, not touching, only near—like a guard at a temple. His scent filled the small cold room, and I noticed it for the first time without any bond telling me what to feel.

Cedar. Honey. Something warm.

Something that did not ask me for anything.

I drifted closer, invisible, curious in the way the dead are allowed to be curious. And I stood there in the corner of my own funeral, watching a man I barely knew guard my body from a pack that had already forgotten me, and I felt—slowly, quietly—the very first thing I had ever felt on my own.

I felt safe.

Above us, three floors up in the pack house, I could sense him. Brantley. My Alpha. My mate. My murderer, though he didn't know it yet.

He was holding my mother's crown in his hands.