After My Alpha Chose Another, I Cut the Bond

Three days after the Moon Banquet, my chair was gone.

I walked into the communal hall at breakfast like I always did — head down, tray in hand, aiming for the far end of the second table where no one usually sat. Except someone had moved that chair. And the one beside it. And the one across from it.

Every seat at every table was taken or pulled close to someone else, angled inward, the way wolves do when they're closing a circle. I stood there for a moment with my tray and looked at the room and the room looked back at me.

Petra Voss was at the center table. She had her chin resting on one hand and she was watching me with the patient, pleasant expression of someone who had planned this and was now enjoying the results.

"There's a chair in the corner," she said, loud enough to carry. "But omegas don't sit with ranked wolves, do they?" She tilted her head. "Pack rules."

No one said anything. No one moved. A few wolves looked down at their plates. One or two looked at me with something that might have been discomfort, but discomfort is not the same as help, and no one offered either.

I set my tray down on the nearest table edge. I picked up the chair from the empty corner. I carried it to the kitchen.

I ate standing at the prep counter with my back to the door. The cook, an older woman named Bess who had never been unkind to me, set a second roll on my tray without being asked and did not comment on why I was there. I ate the roll. I did not cry.

That was the thing about Petra. She was precise. She never did anything you could point to directly and call cruelty. She just removed things. Chairs. Space. The small dignities that add up to a person feeling like they exist.

I was getting very good at existing without them.

***

I folded August's coat on the fourth day.

It had been hanging on the back of my door since the night at the border. I had not worn it again. I had also not moved it, which I told myself was because I kept forgetting, and which I knew was a lie.

The coat smelled like him. Cedar and honey and something underneath that my wolf kept turning toward in her sleep, that slow, involuntary lean of an animal toward warmth. I had been ignoring it. I was getting less good at that.

I folded it carefully along the original creases. I wrapped it in brown paper from the supply room. I wrote a note on a scrap of paper — *Thank you* — and nothing else, because there was nothing else I knew how to say that wouldn't be too much or not enough.

The neutral market town was forty minutes by car. I drove with the windows down even though it was cold, because the coat was in the back seat and I needed the air to think clearly.

The trading post proprietor, a heavyset man named Dov who had been running the neutral exchange between territories for twenty years and had the discretion of someone who had seen everything, took the package without blinking.

"Powell household?" he said.

"Yes."

He set it behind the counter. I drove back to Shadowridge.

Two days later, Dov called my cell.

"Package for you," he said. "Small one."

I drove back out. He handed me a small glass jar across the counter. Honey, pale gold, with a wax seal pressed with a small crescent moon. No note. No name. Just the jar.

I sat in my car in the trading post lot for longer than I should have. The honey caught the afternoon light and glowed like something alive.

My wolf made a sound I hadn't heard from her in years. Not words. Just a sound. Low and soft and wanting.

I drove home and put the jar on my windowsill.

I told myself it was just honey.

***

He started appearing after that.

Not in any way I could object to. Not in any way I could even name clearly if someone asked. He was just — there. At the neutral training grounds before dawn, when I ran the perimeter alone because I couldn't run inside Shadowridge anymore without someone finding a reason to make it difficult. He would be on the far side of the field, stretching or running his own line, and he would raise one hand when he saw me and then leave me alone.

At the market town on Tuesdays, when I went for supplies. He would be at the far end of the same street, or coming out of the hardware store, or waiting for something at the post counter. Always with enough distance that I could pretend I hadn't noticed him.

Except I always noticed him.

The first time he actually spoke to me, it was a Tuesday, three weeks after the banquet. I was standing outside the market with two bags of groceries and the bond-sickness had come on fast, the way it did sometimes — a wave of cold nausea that started in my chest and radiated out, my body still mourning a tether it hadn't wanted but didn't know how to stop missing.

I had my hand on the car door and I was breathing through it, slow and deliberate, when I heard his footsteps stop a few feet away.

"How did you sleep?" August said.

I looked up. He was holding a paper cup of coffee, both hands wrapped around it, and he was watching me with an expression that was careful and quiet and not at all like pity.

"Fine," I said.

He nodded. "Is the bond-sickness easing?"

I thought about lying. "No."

"It won't for a while," he said. Not sorry, not alarmed. Just honest. "Is your wolf speaking to you?"

I thought about the sound she had made over the honey jar. "Not really."

He accepted that. He didn't push it, didn't offer reassurance I hadn't asked for, didn't fill the silence with anything. He just stood there in the cold with his coffee and let me breathe.

After a minute I picked up my grocery bags.

"I have to go," I said.

"I know," he said. "Drive safe."

I drove back to Shadowridge with his scent still faint in the cold air and my wolf's nose lifted toward it the whole way home, and the jar of honey on my windowsill catching the last of the afternoon light when I walked through the door.

I didn't move it.

I wasn't sure I was going to.