After His Mistress Returned, I Exposed the Pack

The mark on my neck went cold at 7:41 in the evening, three heartbeats before Cannon opened his mouth.

I knew the exact second because I had been counting — pulse-checking my own wrist the way my mother taught me when I was six years old and locked in a silver cellar and afraid I would forget how to breathe. Two fingers pressed to the vein. Count the beats. Stay inside your body.

The ceremonial hall smelled wrong. Roses and beeswax candles, yes — but underneath that, a wave of Eloise's scent so heavy it coated the back of my throat. Pine and warm apricot. The dead woman's fragrance, poured over a living wolf like paint.

Raven walked to the dais on Cannon's arm. Her dress was white. Her smile was for me.

Cannon turned.

He did not look at Raven. He looked at me — through the crowd, over Buster's enormous shaggy head at my knee, straight into my face — and I felt the bond gather itself the way water gathers before it drops from a cliff.

"I, Cannon Carter, Alpha of the Ironveil Pack, reject you, Saoirse Watkins, as my mate and Luna."

The mark went hollow.

That is the word for it. Not cold — hollow. Like a door closing on an empty room and then the room itself being taken away. My knees went first. The bond tore in a slow, careful line, the way you pull a splinter out of a living palm when you want it to hurt. My aura — the small light I had spent three years protecting behind my ribs — dimmed, and I felt the pack around me feel it. Someone stepped back. Another. A ripple of retreat, as though I had suddenly become something contagious.

Buster's growl started low in his chest. I caught his scruff with a hand I could not feel and used him to stand.

Cannon did not flinch.

Raven smiled wider.

I did not open my mouth. I did not have to. My silence walked out of that hall louder than any scream, Buster's shoulder against my thigh the only thing keeping me upright, and the double doors closed behind me on a pack that had just watched their Alpha carve his own mate out of the world.

---

My quarters were already being emptied when I got there.

Two Omegas, wide-eyed and pale, folding my clothes into boxes on Cannon's order. One of them — Petra, small and wolfless and kind in the furtive way of survivors — met my eyes for one half-second and then looked at the floor. I did not blame her. I sat on the bare edge of the bed and pressed two fingers to my wrist.

Beat. Beat. Beat.

Still alive.

The mark throbbed. A ghost-thread of the bond still ran between us, thin as spider silk, and through it came a faint acidic pulse of Cannon's contempt — like tasting a memory of poison. Not gone. Not yet.

"He rejected me," I told Buster.

Buster laid his enormous head on my knee.

"The bond isn't fully dead. He can still command me through it until it snaps clean." My voice was calm. I did not recognize it. "That's a problem. But it's a problem I can name, so it's a problem I can work."

I reached under the bed and pulled out the folder I had confiscated from the perimeter ward logs three weeks ago — a rogue scout's intercepted report, stamped and dated and never delivered to the Alpha's desk because I had gotten to the ward station first.

Inside the folder was a photograph.

Eloise Watkins stood on a coastal dock in a gray sweater, hair shorter than I remembered, one hand shielding her eyes from a sun that had no business shining on her. Alive. Unmistakable. The scout's handwritten note underneath: *Confirmed. Coastal enclave. Rogue affiliation, six years.*

Six years.

My parents had been dead for six years and four months.

I did not shake. I noticed that I did not shake, which felt like a small piece of information worth keeping. I folded the photograph in half, walked to the cedar chest, lifted out the wolf pelt I had stitched from memory — the small one, the child-sized one, the one I would not leave behind — and tucked the photograph beneath it.

Then I sat at the desk and drew a sheet of Council-grade parchment from the drawer.

*Petition under the Luna Accord, Section Nine, Clause Three. Filed by Saoirse Watkins, formally rejected mate of Alpha Cannon Carter of the Ironveil Pack. Grounds: independent Council investigation into crimes committed against her direct bloodline, specifically the wolfsbane arson deaths of Healers Iona and Marek Watkins, and the falsified death record of one Eloise Watkins, herewith documented as living.*

I signed it. Dated it. Sealed it. Buster watched me the whole time with his chin on the desk.

By the time the sky outside my window turned from black to iron-gray, the petition was in a Council courier's hand on the pack's south road, and I was pouring water into Buster's bowl.

Behind me, in the hall, footsteps.

Elder Duncan's voice, low and unhurried, speaking to someone I could not see: "Wake the Alpha. She's filed."

I set the bowl down.

Buster drank.