After My Alpha Chose Another, I Cut the Bond

I felt her before I saw her.

Not the way you feel a mate, or a pack member, or anything supernatural. Just the ordinary prickle on the back of the neck that tells you you've been watched for longer than you knew.

I was halfway up the back stairs to my quarters when I looked up.

Aleyna was standing on the landing above. One floor up. Not moving. Her hand on the railing. She hadn't come from anywhere. She was just there, the way a thing is there when it's been there a while.

She smiled at me.

"Long day?" she said.

"Yes."

"You should rest." Her eyes slid down to my wrist. The bruise was already darkening past purple. "Take care of yourself, sweetheart."

She turned and went the way I couldn't see, and I stood on those stairs a moment longer than I needed to, listening to her footsteps recede into the upstairs hall.

I thought about what she had seen. The corridor. Cassian's hand on my wrist. August's aura putting an Alpha on his knees. I thought about how long she had been standing on that landing before I noticed her.

I thought: she is planning something.

I went to my room and locked the door.

***

That night the pack house was strange.

I noticed it the way you notice weather before a storm. Doors closing softer than usual. Footsteps in pairs in the corridor outside my room. The low murmur of voices from the smaller sitting room downstairs, the one Aleyna had taken for herself when she moved into the pack house. Petra's voice. Two others I didn't know well enough to name without thinking. And underneath them all, Aleyna's, calm and even and giving instructions.

I couldn't make out the words. I didn't try.

I sat on the edge of my bed with the honey jar catching the moonlight on the windowsill, and I listened to the shape of it. The meeting. The pauses. The precise quiet of women arranging something.

After a while I got up and pushed a chair against my door.

It wasn't going to stop anything. I knew that. But it made the room match the shape of what was inside me.

***

The pack alarm went up just before dawn.

I woke to the long, low howl that meant *border*. A Delta on the eastern fence, calling something in. Then footsteps in the corridor, fast this time, no pretense of quiet. Cassian's voice from somewhere downstairs, sharp, clipped, giving orders. A door slamming hard enough that I felt it through the floor.

I lay in bed and listened.

By the time I came down for breakfast, the story was already moving through the pack. *Rogue attack. Eastern border. Aleyna had been out for a morning run. She'd been ambushed.* Three claw marks on her forearm. Her shirt torn. She had made it back to the pack house leaning on Petra, who had heard her cry out from the trail.

Bess told me this in the kitchen, while she sliced bread. She didn't look up while she said it.

"She's in the healing wing now," Bess said. "Cassian hasn't left her side."

I poured my coffee. My hands were steady. I was getting used to that.

"Three claw marks," I said.

"That's what they're saying."

"Where?"

"Forearm."

I drank the coffee.

Rogues didn't claw forearms. Rogues went for the throat, or the back of the neck, or the soft place under the ribs. A wolf in a real fight didn't leave clean parallel marks on the most defended part of an outstretched arm. That was a wound someone made on themselves. Or that someone made carefully, with permission.

I didn't say any of that to Bess. I drank my coffee and I went back upstairs.

Halfway up, I passed Petra.

She was coming down. She was in fresh clothes and her hair was pulled back and her face was arranged into the appropriate expression of a ranked she-wolf concerned for her future Luna. When she saw me, her mouth twitched at one corner. Not a smile. Not quite. But close enough to make my stomach turn.

"Delilah," she said. "Cassian's been looking for you."

"For me."

"The healer is overwhelmed." Petra's voice was warm, almost concerned. "Aleyna's wounds need attention and the assistant is out with the patrol. Cassian asked that you come help."

I stood on the stairs and looked at her.

Cassian had not, in three years, asked me for help with anything. Cassian had not, since the rejection, said my name in a room I was standing in. Cassian was not asking for me now.

Aleyna was.

"When," I said.

"Now would be best." Petra's mouth did the small twitch again. "It's an order, sweetheart. Pack notice. You'll find it under your door, if you want to read it first."

I didn't need to read it. The order came down through the pack hierarchy and the hierarchy was clear. An Alpha's request, channeled through a ranked notice, to an unmarked she-wolf with no standing. I did not get to refuse.

I went to my room anyway. I needed thirty seconds.

I stood at the window. I put my hand on the honey jar, just briefly, just my palm flat against the cold glass. I thought about August's coat at the territory border in the rain. I thought about him saying *I'll have someone bring your things to the neutral house. Tonight, if you want.*

I thought about the way I had said *not yet*.

I thought: maybe I should have said yes.

Then I went down to the healing wing.

***

The corridor was empty.

That was the first wrong thing.

There was always someone in this hall. A Delta on rotation, a healer's assistant going for supplies, someone. The corridor outside the healing wing was always lived-in. Today it was a long, quiet stretch of polished floor and closed doors, and my footsteps came back at me from both walls.

The door to the healing wing was ajar. Just an inch. Light spilling out yellow against the gray of the hallway.

I pushed it open.

The room was clean. That was the second wrong thing. The healer's wing in the middle of a rogue attack response was supposed to be a controlled mess of bandages and instrument trays and the smell of antiseptic still hanging in the air. This room was set. Arranged. The way a stage is set before the curtain goes up.

Petra Voss was already beside the door. I hadn't heard her come in behind me.

Two of the ranked she-wolves were at the far counter, arms crossed, watching me without bothering to perform anything else. I knew their names. I had eaten at tables with them. I had been ignored by them at tables with them.

Aleyna sat on the examination table.

Her arm was bandaged in clean white gauze. Neat. Professional. Already dressed before I had been called. Her hair was loose down her back. Her cheeks had a faint, careful pallor. She was holding a paper cup of water in her uninjured hand like a prop she had been given to remember.

She was smiling.

Behind me, the door clicked shut. Then the lock turned over with a slow, deliberate sound that I felt in my teeth.

"Delilah," Aleyna said. Her voice was warm. Almost kind. "Thank you for coming. We've been waiting for you."