After My Alpha Rejected Me, The Lycan Prince Claimed Me

For three weeks, Marcus was a ghost.

He was there when I came down for tea. He was there when I looked up from a patient chart. He nodded, poured, disappeared. But he was almost never in the residence during daylight hours, and the few times I caught him at the door, his coat smelled like places I could not name. Airports. Cold gas stations. Once, faintly, the antiseptic tang of a clinic.

I did not ask.

I knew what a file looked like when it was being built. My own patient records had that shape—the quiet accumulation, the careful cross-referencing, the moment when you finally had enough to say a thing out loud and be believed. Marcus was building something. Judah never mentioned it. Marcus never mentioned it. The silence around it was so complete that I understood, without being told, that mentioning it would be the one thing that broke it.

Once, in the hallway, Marcus was carrying a slim folder against his chest. He passed me and inclined his head. I saw the corner of a photograph slide half an inch out of the folder before he pressed it back with his thumb. A woman's profile. Not Priscilla. Someone I did not recognize, in what looked like a hospital gown.

I kept walking.

Wren rumbled inside me, satisfied in a way I did not want to examine.

*He is careful with us,* she said again. It was becoming her favorite sentence.

---

The convoy left for the alliance summit on a Tuesday.

Three vehicles. Blackmoor colors. The route cut through the pass because the lowland roads were flooded, and the pass meant snow, and snow meant we drove slowly with the chains rattling under the tires. I rode in the second SUV with two of Judah's warriors and a medic's kit strapped between my feet. Judah was ahead in the lead car, coordinating with the Silverfang contingent that had joined us at the border—which meant Cody. Which meant Priscilla.

I had known that. I had chosen to come anyway.

We hit the ambush at the switchback.

It was fast. It was always fast with rogues. Three of them dropped from the tree line onto the lead car's hood, and the driver swerved, and the whole convoy fishtailed on the black ice. My head hit the window. My kit slid. Someone shouted *shift*, and then the world outside the glass was fur and blood and the flat cracking sound of jaws closing on things they should not close on.

My door was ripped off its hinges.

I moved without thinking. I do not remember drawing the silver blade from my kit. I remember the weight of it in my palm and the yellow eye of the rogue two feet from my face and the specific angle at which a throat becomes a target. He lunged. I ducked. My blade went in under his jaw and out clean. He fell.

My warriors were already on the other two. I stumbled out onto the road and stood there, panting, blade dripping in the snow, and I looked for Cody.

I found him.

He had shifted. His Alpha wolf—broad-chested, silver-tipped, the wolf I had loved from a distance for most of my life—was planted in the road with his body angled across Priscilla's like a wall. She was crouched behind him with her hands over her stomach, wide-eyed, unscratched. His hackles were up. His teeth were bared at nothing. The rogues were dead already. He was still standing over her.

He had not looked at my car once.

I knew that. I knew it before I finished the thought. From the moment the first jaw hit the hood, his body had chosen its direction, and its direction was her.

I stood on the frozen road and I waited for it to hurt.

It did not hurt.

It was clinical. It was the same feeling I got when a fever finally broke on a patient I had been sitting with for three nights—a lightening, a strange stillness, the recognition that a thing I had been carrying was no longer in the room. Whatever last thread I had been dragging behind me from the boy I had once defended, from twelve-year-old Cody with a bloody lip and grateful eyes—it was gone. Not with a snap this time. Just gone. Melted off, like the snow steaming on the hood of the wrecked car.

Cody's wolf finally turned his head. His yellow eyes found me across the road.

He saw the blood on my blade. He saw the rogue at my feet. He saw that no one had been between me and the teeth except me.

His wolf made a sound. Small. Wounded. A whine that did not belong in a chest that size.

I held his gaze for one long breath.

Then I turned my back on him and knelt by the wounded driver of the lead car and pressed my glowing palms to the wound in his shoulder, because there was work to do, and I was the only Healer on this mountain, and the boy I had once defended was no longer any of my business.

Down the road, an engine started. Judah's car. He had been in the third vehicle, coordinating rearguard. He was coming.

I did not look up when I heard his door slam. I just kept my hands where they were needed, and I let the fever finish breaking.