After His Mistress Killed Our Unborn Pup

Antonio knocked on the Luna suite door fifty-three minutes after I walked out of the rejection.

I know because I counted.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my suitcase open in front of me, deciding what was worth carrying out of a life I was leaving behind. The answer, it turned out, was almost nothing. My journal. The voice recorder. The medical file Seraphine had quietly pressed into my hands six months ago with a look that said she knew, and she was sorry, and she couldn't say either of those things out loud.

I zipped the suitcase before he finished knocking.

"Come in."

Antonio Knight was seventy-one years old and had once been the most feared Alpha in the northern territories. He walked into the room now like a man carrying something that had no name. No sympathy on his face. No soft words. He crossed to the bed and set a manila envelope down on the duvet beside my suitcase.

"Travel documents," he said. "Passage arranged with Lycan Prince Wilder Morrison of Silvercrest territory. The border is two hours north." He paused. "He's agreed to shelter you."

I looked at the envelope. Then at him.

"You planned this before the rejection," I said.

It wasn't a question. The documents were too clean, too ready. You don't arrange passage with a Lycan Prince in forty-eight hours.

"Yes," he said.

I picked up the envelope and put it in my suitcase. Then I picked up the suitcase and walked to the door.

I didn't look back at the room. Not at the bed where I had slept alone more nights than not. Not at the window where I used to stand and watch for Ledger's car coming up the drive, still hoping. Not at the mark on my neck in the mirror, now cold and quiet as a scar.

I had already said goodbye to all of it. I just hadn't known it at the time.

---

Antonio drove without speaking, and I let him. The pack house lights disappeared behind us in the side mirror, and then the trees closed in on either side of the road, and there was only the dark and the sound of the engine and the faint, fading smell of Nighthollow territory thinning out around us.

I noticed, somewhere around the first hour, that I couldn't remember what Ledger's voice sounded like when he wasn't angry.

I tried to find it. The way he used to say my name in the morning, before everything turned. Before the Alpha tone became the only register he used with me. I reached for the memory and found—not absence, exactly. More like a shape where something used to be. An outline with nothing inside it.

I pressed my fingers to the mark on my neck. Cold. Hollow. Like pressing your hand to a wall where a door used to be.

I counted the mile markers instead.

We were at thirty-seven when Antonio spoke.

"I arranged your mating to Ledger for an alliance." His voice was even. Deliberate. The voice of a man who had rehearsed this and decided rehearsing didn't make it easier. "Political convenience. I chose it over character. Over judgment." A pause. "The lake was the moment I understood what that choice cost."

I watched the road.

"I'm not asking for your forgiveness," he said. "I'm telling you so you know what I'm doing now, and why. I will make it right. What I can make right."

The distinction mattered to him. I could hear it. What he could make right—not all of it. He knew the difference.

"Okay," I said.

He glanced at me. I think he expected more. Anger, maybe. Or tears.

I had nothing left for either.

"Okay," he repeated quietly, and turned his eyes back to the road.

---

The Silvercrest border marker was a stone post at the edge of a tree line, carved with the Lycan royal crest. Antonio pulled off the road and cut the engine. The headlights died.

In the dark ahead of us, someone was standing.

He was alone. No escort, no guards. Just a man at the edge of his own territory, waiting in the cold like he'd been there long enough that the cold had stopped mattering to him. Tall. Still. The kind of stillness that isn't absence—it's control.

I got out of the car.

The moment my foot touched Silvercrest soil, he moved. Not toward me—just a small shift of his weight, his chin lifting slightly. I watched his chest expand on a slow, deliberate breath.

And then he went completely still.

The kind of still that means something just changed.

His eyes found mine across the dark. I couldn't read his expression. But I saw his jaw tighten once, just once, like a man absorbing a blow he hadn't expected.

Behind me, I heard Antonio's door open. The crunch of gravel under his cane.

I kept my eyes on the man at the border.

Wilder Morrison.

He hadn't said a word yet. But something in the way he was looking at me—careful, almost careful enough to hide it—made the hollow place on my neck feel, for the first time in days, like it was waiting for something rather than mourning something.

I didn't know what to do with that.

So I counted my own heartbeats, and I waited.