After My Mate Chose the Other Woman

I got up off that floor because staying down was the one thing I refused to give him twice.

The hall watched me walk. I felt it the way you feel weather change — a pressure on the skin, the whole room turning to track me like I was something dangerous now instead of something beneath them. Good. Let them wonder.

The healer's stores were through a side door off the great hall, shelves of brown glass lined up neat as teeth. Edric didn't stop me. He stood by the pup's cot with his red hands hanging at his sides and he didn't say a word, and I understood that his silence was the only kindness he had left to give me.

I opened the cabinet.

The vials were cold in my hands, each one labeled in my own careful writing from five years of nights spent measuring my own blood into a system I'd built to keep other people's mates alive. I carried the first one to the hearth fire at the edge of the hall, the one still warm from burning my father's letters three nights before, and I held it over the flame until the glass went dark, then white, then cracked with a sound like a knuckle breaking.

The liquid inside hissed when it hit the coals.

I went back for the second. And the third. No one moved to stop me. I heard someone — an Omega, maybe, someone too low in rank to matter to anyone but me — make a small sound of protest, quickly swallowed. I didn't look for who it was. I kept walking, kept pouring, kept feeding five years of my own blood into a fire that had already eaten everything else I'd loved.

When the shelf was empty I turned around.

The border warriors stood along the east wall, the same men who'd carried my father in on their shoulders four nights ago, still faintly gray with the memory of it. I found their eyes one at a time.

"Every vial that kept you alive on the northern line," I said, "came out of my body. Once a month, for five years, I let Edric put wolfsbane in my veins in doses small enough not to kill me and large enough to make an antiserum you never asked whose blood it was. It kept your hearts beating through rogue arrows. It also kept something in me asleep that never should have slept." My voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "That's finished now."

Nobody spoke. Lance's jaw was tight, his eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder, refusing to land on my face. Makenzie's expression didn't move at all, which told me more than if it had.

I walked out of the hall and into the blizzard, and not one wolf came after me.

The cold hit like a wall, snow already thick enough to swallow sound. I put my head down and crossed the yard toward the eastern ridge, toward the cairn I'd built stone by stone with split hands, because it was the only place left that still felt like mine.

It was gone.

Not fallen. Taken apart. The stones I'd carried up in the rain were scattered across the slope, a wide dragged furrow through the snow showing exactly where they'd been hauled — down, away, toward the rogue-side border, toward the line the pack used for everything it didn't want touching its own ground anymore.

I stood there a long moment with the wind cutting through my clothes and looked at what was left of my father.

Something moved behind my ribs.

Not pain. Not grief, though there was plenty of both crowding in beside it. This was pressure, low and steady, like a held breath finally leaning against the inside of my chest. It didn't speak. It didn't need to. It simply refused — refused to let the ground under me finish opening, refused to let me go down into the snow the way my knees wanted to.

I pressed two fingers to my left temple, the old habit, the thing I did when I needed my body to stay a body and not come apart in front of an audience that no longer existed.

"I know," I whispered, to no one, to something. "I know."

Behind me, boots crunched in the snow. Many of them.

I turned and Lance was there, flanked by six warriors, and one of them carried a blade that caught what little light the storm allowed and threw it back silver.

He stopped an arm's length from me, close enough that I could smell the mourning-oil still clinging under his own scent, and behind him the wreckage of my father's cairn lay scattered like something already forgotten.

"Pack law requires a reckoning for the pup," he said, in a voice built for an audience, not for me. "You've been found guilty by evidence and by your own silence."

"Lance." One word. I didn't beg. I'd promised myself, kneeling on that hall floor, that I would never beg him again.

He raised the blade.

I watched his hand and I did not look away, not even when the silver came toward my face, not even when it opened my cheek from bone toward jaw and the pain arrived a half-second behind the burning, deeper than any cut steel could make, smoking against my skin in the cold.

He spoke the words like he'd rehearsed them in a mirror.

"I, Lance Bradley, Alpha of Ironcrest, reject you, Sienna Reed, as my mate."

The bond didn't break like glass. It broke like something being torn out of the socket it had grown into for five years, and I felt every place it had ever touched go cold at once — my chest, my throat, the base of my skull.

My scent went first. I felt it leave me the way heat leaves a body in snow.

Then the snow came up to meet me, and I didn't feel myself land.