After His Pup Ended My Pregnancy, He Locked Me Away

The pack ran on Friday nights. That was the rule.

I could not run. I had no wolf. So I walked. At the rear of the line, behind the youngest pups, far enough back that no one had to slow down for me. I wore boots and a thick jacket and I carried a flashlight I never turned on. The pack moved through the trees as wolves, low silver shapes flickering between the trunks, and I followed in human form like a shadow that had lost the body it belonged to.

Alistair always ran at the front. Anya, in her tiny pup form, ran beside him.

I tried not to look.

The air that night smelled like wet pine and frost. I kept my eyes on the trail and counted my breaths. Four in. Six out. The same way I counted steps in the banquet hall, the same way I counted the tiles in the Luna suite bathroom when Alistair came home late and I wanted to seem asleep.

The attack came from the left.

I did not hear it until it was on me. A blur of dirty gray fur, yellow teeth, the wet sound of a wolf moving fast through underbrush. It did not pause to choose. It did not weave between the rear pups. It came straight for me like it had been pointed.

I threw my arm up. That was all I had time to do.

The claws went through my jacket like wet paper. I felt them open my shoulder and then my ribs in two long pulls and I was on the ground with my face in cold leaves before my brain caught up to the pain. The rogue's breath was hot on my neck. Its eyes were the wrong yellow. Not silver, not amber. A sick yellow, like an animal that had been kept somewhere dark.

It was not feeding. I understood that even then. It was not tearing at me to eat. It was driving for my throat with the focus of a thing on an errand.

Delta warriors hit it from three sides. I heard the snap of its spine before I felt them lift me up.

Sera Voss met us at the healer's wing. She did not speak much. She never does. She cut what was left of my jacket off me with kitchen shears and laid me on my side and worked over my ribs with a steady, narrow focus, her hands warm, her face unreadable. The wounds were deep. She told me four claws had gone through to the bone on my shoulder. She told me I would carry the scars.

"Healer," I said.

"Mm."

"It came right at me."

Her hands did not stop moving. "I noticed," she said.

That was all. But she wrote something on her chart that took longer than the usual line. I watched her pen move. She lifted the page when she was done and slid it into a folder and locked the folder in her cabinet, and she met my eyes for one second before she turned away.

I lay in that bed and stared at the ceiling and felt something cold begin to unfold under my ribs that had nothing to do with the wounds.

The holding cells where captured rogues were kept were on the north side of the pack house. I knew that because I had walked past them once, by accident, and Anya had been coming up the stairs from below, dust on her knees, humming.

I went to Alistair the next morning.

His study smelled like coffee and old paper. He was at his desk with his sleeves rolled up, reading something on a tablet. He did not look up when I came in. He gestured to the chair across from him without lifting his eyes.

"Sit, love."

I sat. The bandages pulled when I did. I did not let it show on my face.

"The rogue last night," I said. I kept my voice soft. I had practiced softness all my life. "It came straight for me. It ignored the pups. It ignored the line."

"Rogues are unpredictable."

"Sera said it was malnourished. Like it had been kept somewhere."

He turned a page on the tablet.

"Alistair." I pressed my thumbnail into my palm under the desk. The new skin there split easy. "Anya was seen near the holding cells two days ago. The Omega who cleans the lower hall said—"

He set the tablet down.

He still did not raise his voice. He did not have to.

"Ellie."

That was the first word. Just my name. But there was weight under it, the kind of weight that gets into your chest and takes the air out before you know it has.

"You are being hysterical," he said, "about a grieving pup."

The Alpha tone hit me like a hand laid flat across my mouth.

I felt my jaw close. I felt the rest of the sentence I was about to say go down my throat backwards and lodge there. I sat with my mouth shut and my hands folded in my lap and my eyes on the edge of his desk, and I nodded.

"Good girl," he said. He picked up the tablet again. "Get some rest. You're upset."

I walked out of the study.

I walked the long way back to the Luna suite. Past the dining hall. Past the east stairwell. Past the door that led down to the kitchens. I counted doors. I counted windows. I counted exits. I memorized the corridor that ran behind the library and the narrow service stair the Omegas used to bring up firewood. I did not know yet what I was building. I just knew I was building it.

That night I lay in the dark with the bandages tight across my ribs and I drew the pack house in my head, room by room, until I had it the way I used to have my Greymist bunkroom. Every door. Every lock. Every place a small body could be standing where I could not see her.

Three days later, Anya found me on a walk near the pack border.

She came out of the trees the way she always did, soundless, smiling up at me with her mouth closed. Her hand slipped into mine before I could pull away. Her fingers were cold and very small.

"Luna," she said. The pup voice. The wide eyes. "Show me where the foxes live."

I tried to take my hand back. Her grip tightened.

We walked. The trail narrowed. The undergrowth thickened. I knew, in a distant way, that we were close to the boundary. The packs marked their borders with old iron posts and warning ribbons, and somewhere ahead of us, I could see the faded red of one fluttering between two pines.

Her hand tightened again.

Then she shoved me.

It was a hard, two-handed push, low into my hip, with the full weight of a body she did not pretend was a child's. I went forward off the path. My boot caught a root. My ankle turned under me with a hot wet pop and I went down sideways into the leaves, and as I fell I saw the silver glint half-buried at the base of the next tree, the curve of a snare jaw waiting open in the moss, six inches from my face.

I did not breathe.

I lay very still.

When I lifted my head, Anya was already walking back the way we had come. She was not running. She was not hurrying. Her small back was straight, her hair swinging gently, her hands loose at her sides, and she did not look back once.