After My Alpha Betrayed Me for My Sister

I don't remember the drive out of Ironclad territory.

I remember the healer's hands — cold, steady, slick with my blood — pressing the syringe into the soft skin inside my elbow. I remember the way the paralytic moved through me like cold water filling a glass, and how I thought, for one strange second, that maybe I was actually dying after all and she had decided to be merciful in a different way.

I remember the howling outside. The rogue attack on the eastern border. The chaos that gave her the cover she needed.

I remember reaching up to my own neck — to the mark Dallas put there — and tearing.

Not with my hands. With whatever was left of my wolf. The bond severed in a single, wrenching pull, and the pain of it was so total that for a long time afterward I could not tell which part of me had screamed.

Then there was a road. A truck bed. A blanket that smelled like diesel.

Then there was nothing for a long time.

---

The Shadowveil intake room has no windows.

It is small and grey and smells of antiseptic and pine — the pine I will later learn is the disinfectant they use on the cot frames, not anything alive — and the woman across the desk from me has her sleeves pushed up to her elbows and a clipboard balanced on her knee.

"Vital signs are stable," she says. She is not speaking to me. She is reading aloud to her own notes. "Hemoglobin low. Soft tissue scarring at the cervical mark site, consistent with self-severance. Wolf signature reads — " She pauses. Her pen taps once against the clipboard. "Flatline."

I sit very still in the metal chair.

She lifts her eyes. They are dark, unsentimental, and they assess me the way I will later learn to assess a body on a triage table — not for who I am, but for what can still be salvaged.

"Do you have anything you want to tell me about that?" she asks.

"No."

"Family?"

"No."

"Pack?"

I press two fingers against my wrist pulse. Fast. Uneven. I focus on it.

"No."

She writes something down. She does not ask again.

"You'll be in the junior field triage unit. Bunk seventeen, west barracks. Survive the first month and we'll talk about training. Don't survive it and we won't." She sets the clipboard aside. "Anything you need before you're shown to your cot?"

I think about it.

The river stone is in my pocket. I do not know why I kept it. I put my hand around it through the fabric of pants that are not mine, and I shake my head once.

"No."

---

The west barracks is a long, low room with twelve cots on each side and one bare bulb burning at the far end. The other healers in my unit look up when I come in. They look at my neck. They look at my face. None of them say anything.

I lie down on bunk seventeen in my clothes.

I do not sleep. I do not cry. I lie on my side with my hand pressed flat against my stomach, and the stomach is empty, and I keep my hand there anyway because some animal part of me has not yet been told.

The first week passes that way.

I eat what they put in front of me because not eating draws attention. I run the morning drills because not running draws attention. I do not speak unless spoken to, and when spoken to, I answer in the fewest words the question requires. The other healers stop trying within four days. One of them — a tall woman with a scar that splits her eyebrow — watches me longer than the rest, and once, on the fifth night, she sets a tin cup of coffee on the floor by my bunk and walks away without a word.

I drink it after she's gone.

It is the first kindness I accept from anyone in five years' worth of nights to come.

---

Somewhere — and I will not learn this for years, not until the tribunal pulls it into the light — Dallas is making arrangements.

He does not grieve me. He rages. The pack believes he is locked in his study with the door bolted, mourning his Luna and his lost heir; in truth he is on the phone, in the dark, arranging a transfer of one packless she-wolf to a private rehabilitation facility in the foothills he quietly owns through three layers of corporate shell.

Sabrina goes willingly. She believes it is sanctuary. She believes it is the next stage of the plan.

The first month, he doesn't visit.

The second month, he comes at night. He sits across from her in a small white room with no decoration. He uses his Alpha tone — low, unhurried — and he forces her to walk him through the staircase. Step by step. Her hands on my back. The angle of the shove. The sound my body made when it hit the floor below.

When she is finished, he stands up and leaves without speaking again.

She sits very still after the door closes. Then she smooths the front of her gown with both hands, and she begins, quietly, to plan.

She has survived on manufactured helplessness her entire life. She is patient. She can wait.

---

The third year, the ceiling comes down.

We are in a bombed-out forestry station three ridges north of the Wyoming line, and the rogues have us pinned, and the Delta on my table has shrapnel in his abdomen and a femoral bleed I have approximately ninety seconds to find before he becomes someone I lose.

The ceiling fragments above me. Plaster dust falls into the open cavity. I cover the wound with my body and keep working.

My hands do not shake.

This is the thing I have learned about myself in three years here: my hands do not shake. They have not shaken since the night on the hardwood floor. Whatever broke in me that night broke a circuit somewhere between fear and fingers, and the result, in this work, is that I do not falter under fire. I find the bleed. I clamp it. I close him.

The rogues are driven back at some point. I don't notice when. By the time someone touches my shoulder and says my name, the Delta is breathing in long, even pulls, and I am sitting on the floor next to his litter with my hands red to the wrist and my back against a wall that is no longer entirely a wall.

The Shadowveil commander finds me there an hour later.

She does not say good work. She does not say thank you. She crouches in front of me, looks at the blood on my hands, and says, "Pack your kit. You're moving to the senior bunks tonight."

That is all.

That night, in a private room that is barely larger than a closet, I lie on a cot that is mine alone for the first time in three years, and something happens.

It is not large. It is not a flood. It is barely anything at all.

A warmth. A faint, silver warmth, curling at the edges of my consciousness like breath on cold glass.

My wolf.

Not awake. Not yet. Just — there. A coal that remembers it was once fire.

I press my fingers against my wrist pulse in the dark and I do not let myself cry. I have not let myself cry in three years and I am not going to start tonight, in a strange bunk, over a flicker that may not survive until morning.

But I lie awake until the bulb in the hallway clicks off at dawn, and I keep listening for her.

She is still there when the sun comes up.

She is very small. She is very quiet.

She is still there.