After My Mate Maimed Our Son

The bond snapped at 3:47 on a Thursday afternoon, while I had my hands inside an omega's shoulder.

I felt it the way you feel a tooth cracking in your own mouth — a sudden wrongness one floor up, through the pack-house ceiling, straight through the wood and plaster into the hollow under my ribs where Eli lived. His thread of warmth went thin. Then it jerked, hard, like a leash yanked out of my hand.

I dropped the suture. The omega yelped. I was already running.

Up the back stairs two at a time. Down the hall. The nursery door was open an inch, which was wrong because I always closed it. I pushed it the rest of the way with my shoulder because my hands were shaking too hard to work.

Blood on the window ledge. Not a lot. Just enough. Four parallel claw marks dug into the sill like someone had braced themselves there and then let go. The window was open. The curtain was still moving.

On the floor by the rocking chair sat his left mitt. The small wool one. I had knitted it in September, and he had chewed the thumb into a little gray knob.

I picked it up. My wolf — the one everyone said was dead or lazy or never there at all — slammed up under my sternum like a fist against a door. Once. Twice. Hard enough that my knees buckled against the crib. Then she went quiet again. Nothing. A room with the lights off.

I reached for the mind-link. *Adrian.*

It bounced. Flat echo. He was out of range, or someone had put him out of range.

I called again. *Adrian, Eli is gone.*

Nothing came back.

I pressed the mitt against my mouth and breathed through it once, and then I stopped shaking, because shaking was not a thing a healer did while her child was bleeding. I went down the stairs and across the courtyard to my cottage and I took my kit off the hook by the door.

---

He came back three hours later with snow in his hair and Haven two steps behind him. Haven was wearing white. She was always wearing white that winter.

"Border was clean," Adrian said, before I could speak. "No rogues anywhere near the eastern line. Someone wasted our—"

"They took Eli."

His face did something I had never seen before — a flinch under the jaw, buried fast. He glanced sideways at Haven like a man checking the ground for footing. Haven's hand went to his elbow. Soft. Steadying.

"Alpha," she murmured, "let me handle the ransom. You're needed here with the warriors. I'll make sure every coin is accounted for."

I said, "The note says silver. By sundown. The old quarry."

"I'll see to it personally," Haven said, and she looked at me when she said it, and her eyes were the eyes of a woman watching a candle she had already decided to pinch out.

Adrian nodded. He did not look at me. "Haven will take it."

I opened my mouth to argue and closed it again, because arguing with Adrian in front of Haven had never once in four years ended in anything but my own humiliation. I thought: *the drop is a nine-mile ride. I will follow at a half-mile. I will see it with my own eyes.*

But Corvin caught me at the stable door with a hand on my arm and the saddest apology in his face, and he said, "Luna, the Alpha ordered you kept inside until the exchange is done. For your safety." He said *Luna* like the word already tasted like ash.

I did not fight him. I went back to the infirmary and laid out silver-wound supplies on the clean cloth. Honey. Burdock. Charcoal. The small bone saw I prayed I would not need. I laid them out in the order I would reach for them, and I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, and I did not let myself picture his face.

---

The package came back before Haven did.

A warrior I did not know the name of brought it to the gate wrapped in rogue-cloth, a strip of oiled canvas tied with twine. He would not meet my eye. He put it in my hands and stepped back like it might bite him.

I unwrapped it on the gatehouse table because the gatehouse was closer than the infirmary.

It was small. Smaller than small. A child's left pinky, severed clean at the second knuckle, the cut edge black and glossy the way only silver burns go black. The nail was still a little dirty from the sandbox behind the kitchens.

I knew that nail. I had trimmed it on Sunday.

The note was pinned through the cloth with a thorn. Six words in rogue scrawl: *YOUR COIN WAS SCRAP. TRY AGAIN.*

I heard someone in the room make a sound. It might have been me. I did not think it was me.

My hands did not shake. That is the part I remember most clearly — my hands did not shake. They folded the cloth back over the finger, tucked the thorn flat so it wouldn't catch, and set the bundle on the table. Then they went to my kit. Silver protocol. Honey first, to seal. Charcoal paste under the dressing. Cold compress, not warm — warm would spread it.

I was listing supplies in my head when the gate alarm rang a second time, and a warrior shouted something about a shape in the snow at the border post, small, not moving.

I picked up my kit.

Behind me, from the pack-house steps, I heard Haven's voice — syrup over gravel — say to someone, *"Oh, the poor thing. We did everything we could."*