After His Mistress Killed Our Unborn Pup

Wilder didn't say the word.

I watched him not say it—watched the shape of it sit behind his teeth for one long second before he swallowed it back down. Whatever he'd smelled when I crossed the border, whatever had made his jaw go tight in the dark, he folded it away like a man putting something fragile back in a drawer.

"This way," he said instead, and turned toward the compound.

He walked a half-step ahead of me the whole way, close enough to matter, far enough not to crowd. The guest suite he showed me to had a bed made with hospital corners and a window facing the mountains, and he stood in the doorway just long enough to say, "Rhea will look after you tonight," before he was gone, like he understood that the kindest thing he could give me was an empty room and no questions.

Rhea Solace had soft hands and a softer voice. She didn't ask what happened to my arm. She just took it in both of hers, tilted it toward the lamp, and went very quiet.

"Frostbite," she said finally. "Deep-set."

"I know."

She worked in silence after that, smoothing a warm salve—wolfsbane-antidote, she told me, though I wasn't sure what that meant for a wound that had nothing to do with poison—into the pale, spiraling marks that climbed from my wrist to my elbow. The salve was warm. My skin didn't seem to believe it.

"These won't fade," Rhea said, gentle, like she was breaking news to someone else's body. "The cold set too deep. They're—" She paused, searching for a kinder word than *permanent*, and didn't find one.

I looked down at my own arm like it belonged to a stranger. Six marks. Seven. I counted them the way I used to count breaths on the bad nights, the way I'd once counted rings of a phone that never got answered. Ice-blue, mapped across my skin like a small, useless constellation. A record no one but me would ever read correctly.

"Okay," I said, and Rhea's eyes flicked up to my face, surprised, maybe, that I hadn't cried.

I didn't have anything left to cry with. Not that night.

---

The puzzle appeared on the library table the next evening, like it had always been there. A thousand pieces. Blue hydrangeas on white, the box lid propped against a lamp.

Wilder took the chair across from me without asking permission, the way he seemed to do most things—present, but never presuming.

"You traveled a lot, as Luna," he said, turning a piece over in his fingers. Not a question. An opening.

"Border diplomacy. Mostly small towns. The kind with one diner and everyone's cousin working the counter."

"Favorite?"

"There was a place in the eastern hills that made a ginger tea I still think about." I fit a piece into the frame's corner. "I never got the name of it."

"I'll find it," he said, so simply that I almost laughed.

He didn't mention the bond. He didn't touch me, didn't lean too close, didn't do any of the small territorial things I'd learned to brace for without knowing I was bracing. He just asked about tea, about diners, about nothing that mattered and everything that did, and somewhere in the second hour of the fourth night, I realized I had stopped counting the tiles.

On the fifth night, I slept until morning. All the way through. No numbers, no static hum of unanswered calls behind my eyes. Just dark, and then light.

---

At Nighthollow, Ledger told his Beta she'd be back within the week.

"She's making a point," he said, pacing the length of his office, the floor already worn from three days of this same track. "She wants to be chased. Fine. I'll give her a week."

Caden Holt said nothing. He had learned, over the years, exactly when Ledger's certainty was armor and when it was truth, and this was armor stretched so thin you could see the shape of the fear underneath it.

On the fourth night, Ledger passed the Luna suite and stopped without meaning to.

The door was cracked. Mallory's rose-water bottles sat lined up on Emberly's vanity, catching the lamplight, and the room smelled wrong—sweet where it used to be warm, sharp where it used to be soft. He stood in the doorway a long moment, trying to remember what the right smell had been.

He couldn't.

Something turned over low in his chest, a wolf pressing uneasily against the inside of his ribs, and he shut it down before it could become a thought with words attached to it. He closed the door and walked away.

The next afternoon, with Ledger out on border patrol, Caden let himself into the same suite, against every standing order, and pried the vanity panel loose because a loose board had been bothering him for weeks. Behind it: a journal, spine soft from handling. Beneath a floorboard he checked on instinct: a small silver recorder.

He sat on the floor and pressed play.

He made it sixty seconds before he stopped the recording, stood, and went to find Ledger without a single word to anyone in between.