After My Mate Chose Her, I Lost Our Pup

Tate found a side corridor off the main hall — narrow, quiet, lit by a single sconce that threw more shadow than light. He didn't ask if I wanted to follow. He just moved, and I went, because standing in that ballroom with blood dripping onto the floor and Colton's aura pressing against my back felt like the worse option.

He tore a strip from the inner lining of his jacket without hesitating. Not a handkerchief this time — something more deliberate, like he had decided the jacket was a reasonable price.

"You don't have to do that," I said.

"I know." He wrapped the cloth around my palm in careful, even passes, his fingers steady. He had a healer's instinct without the title — the kind of touch that doesn't flinch from the wound.

We stood there in the quiet for a moment. The noise from the banquet hall filtered through the wall — laughter, the clink of glasses, someone giving a toast I couldn't make out.

Then Tate said, without looking up from my hand: "How long?"

I knew what he was asking. There was no version of that question that was about anything else.

"Three years," I said.

His jaw tightened. A muscle jumped just below his cheekbone, and then his face went very still in a way that reminded me, painfully, of his uncle — except where Colton's stillness was pressurized and cold, Tate's was the stillness of someone absorbing a blow they had already braced for.

He didn't ask anything else. He just finished wrapping my hand, tied the cloth off neatly, and held my palm between both of his for a moment — not possessively, just steadily, the way you hold something you want to make sure is still intact.

"Okay," he said quietly. That was all.

When he walked me back toward the hall, he positioned himself to my left without making a production of it. Just there, between me and the room, close enough that his shoulder was a half-step ahead of mine. I noticed it the way you notice a door that's been quietly unlocked — not dramatic, just suddenly available.

I didn't look for Colton when we re-entered. I didn't need to. I could feel the moment his attention found us again — that familiar pressure, the air going dense — and I kept my eyes forward and let Tate's steady presence do what it was doing.

Some things, I was beginning to understand, you don't have to fight. You just have to outlast.

---

Natalie came on a Tuesday.

Mid-morning, which I would later understand was not accidental. The path past my cabin was well-traveled at that hour — pack members heading to the training grounds, the supply depot, the communal kitchen. She had chosen her audience before she knocked.

I opened the door and she was standing there in a cream-colored coat, her hair perfect, a small canvas bag hanging from one wrist. She smiled the way people smile when they've already decided how the conversation ends.

"Margot." Her voice was warm. Practiced. "I hope I'm not interrupting."

She was. She knew she was. That was the point.

"Colton left a few things here," she continued, lifting the canvas bag slightly. "I told him I'd collect them. I hope that's all right."

It wasn't a question.

I stepped back from the doorway. Not an invitation — just a removal of myself from the threshold, because blocking her felt like a declaration I wasn't ready to make in front of whoever was passing on the path behind her.

She moved through the cabin the way she moved through the banquet hall — with the unhurried ease of someone who has never had to wonder whether a space would accommodate her. She touched the shelf near the window. Opened the cabinet above the sink and looked at the two mugs — his side, my side — and said nothing, which was somehow louder than anything she could have said.

"It's a sweet little place," she offered. "Very cozy."

I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the main room and watched her.

"I want to be honest with you," she said, turning to face me. Her expression was kind. Carefully, precisely kind. "Because I think you deserve that, even if the situation is uncomfortable."

She set the canvas bag on my kitchen table — my table, the one I had sat at three nights ago with my hand on my stomach and the ghost of an uncooked meal in front of me — and folded her hands over it.

"An unmarked she-wolf doesn't carry standing in Ironveil. You know that. No rank, no claim, no formal right to remain on pack lands." She paused, letting the words settle. "I'm not saying this to be unkind. I'm saying it because the alternative is waiting until it becomes a formal matter, and that would be embarrassing for everyone."

Everyone. As if my humiliation were a logistical inconvenience she was generously trying to spare me.

"Leaving quietly," she continued, "before the mating ceremony — that's the dignified choice. I think you're someone who values her dignity."

She said it like a compliment. It landed like a threat.

I didn't answer. There was nothing to say that she didn't already know, and I understood, standing there in my own doorway, that she had not come here for a conversation. She had come to perform one — for herself, for the pack members on the path outside, for whatever version of this story she was already composing.

So I stood, and I watched her move through the small space I had built my life inside for three years, and I felt something shift in my chest — not anger, not yet. Something quieter and more permanent. The particular grief of watching someone catalogue the evidence of your life and find it insufficient.

My wolf stirred. Not with aggression. Just with a low, aching awareness, like a creature pressing its nose against a door it knows is about to close for good.

Natalie picked up the canvas bag. She smiled again — gracious, final.

"I'll let you think about it," she said.

She walked past me toward the front door, and I turned to watch her go, and I noticed, for the first time, that she had not actually taken anything from the cabin. The bag had been empty when she arrived. It was empty when she left.

She hadn't come for Colton's things.

She had come to make sure I understood that everything here already belonged to her.