After My Mate Named Another Woman His Luna

Victor Sloane let me borrow the recorder without asking why.

He just looked at me across his desk — at my bandaged hands, at the particular quality of stillness in my face — and opened his bottom drawer and set a small flat device between us. The kind investigators used for depositions. No larger than a matchbox.

"You didn't get this from me," he said.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

He nodded once and went back to his files.

The Omega tea duty had been Natalie's idea. I understood that now. Every evening, in the hour before dinner service, I was assigned to prepare the head table's tea service — the loose-leaf blend she preferred, steeped precisely four minutes, the pot wrapped in a linen cloth to hold the temperature. She had requested me specifically. I had thought, in the first days, that it was simple cruelty. A reminder of the banquet hall. A way of making me carry the thing that had scarred me.

Maybe it was that too. But it was also routine. And routine made people careless.

I positioned the recorder beneath the third shelf of the kitchen spice rack, behind a row of glass jars that nobody moved. The angle gave it a clear line to the center of the room. I tested the activation twice. Then I set the kettle on and waited.

Natalie came in at six-fifteen.

She didn't look at me right away. She set her phone face-down on the counter and poured herself a glass of water and stood with her back to me, scrolling through something she'd pulled from her jacket pocket. A small notebook — cream pages, her own handwriting. The kind of thing you keep close when you're tracking something that needs tracking.

I poured the tea.

I kept my breathing even. My hands were still wrapped, the skin underneath still tender where the silver had eaten in, and I held the pot with both palms flat against the ceramic the way I had learned to — the pressure distributing the weight so no single blistered point had to bear it alone.

"You know what I've always liked about you, Gabrielle?" Natalie said, still not turning around.

I said nothing.

"You're patient." She turned then, leaning her hip against the counter, crossing one ankle over the other. Relaxed. Entirely comfortable in a room she had already decided was safe. "Three years in that cottage. Not one complaint I ever heard about. Daniel would've hated someone like you — he liked women with more fire. But Damian." She smiled. "Damian needed someone quiet. Someone who'd stay put."

She moved to the head table's tray and adjusted the placement of a cup.

"Daniel was the problem, really. He would have been Alpha, and then none of this—" She gestured vaguely, a small sweep of her hand that seemed to include the whole compound, the ceremony preparations, her own white dress from the banquet hall, all of it. "It worked out, though. Brake lines are such a small thing. Such a small fix for such a large problem."

My chest turned to glass.

I didn't move. Not a muscle. I kept my eyes on the teapot and my breathing on its even track and I felt my wolf go absolutely rigid behind my sternum — not with fear. With attention. The sharp, cold attention of something that understands it is witnessing something it will need to remember.

"His mother was a bigger project." Natalie picked up the linen cloth and began folding it with neat, practiced creases. "Wolfsbane in chamomile looks like nothing. Smells like nothing. You'd know, wouldn't you — you made her tea every morning for three years and never once—" She laughed, light and genuine. "Never once."

She set the folded cloth beside the tray.

"You were very good to her. That was sweet."

I wrapped the pot. I set it on the tray. I lifted the tray.

"That's perfect," Natalie said. "Thank you, dear."

I walked out of the kitchen.

In the corridor, I pressed my back against the wall and stood very still for a count of ten. My wolf was shaking. Not from fear — something else. Something that felt like a wire pulled to its absolute limit, vibrating at a frequency just below the edge of breaking.

I went back for the recorder at the shift change, when the kitchen was empty.

I hid it in the seam of my mattress, in the space I'd opened with a nail I'd found on the archive floor. Then I lay down and looked at the high window and thought about Daniel Greene, who had wanted women with fire, driving a car with a six-week-old service record and a hydraulic line that had been fine until it wasn't.

I thought about Mrs. Greene's hands in mine. The two squeezes, every morning before Natalie came.

I had squeezed back. I had smiled. I had brought her the chamomile.

For three years, I had brought her the chamomile.

I pressed my palms flat against the mattress and stared at the ceiling and did not sleep.

---

She came back.

I don't know what gave me away. A shift in posture, maybe — the way I carried the tray that evening, something in the set of my shoulders that was different from every evening before. Or maybe she'd simply turned it over in her mind through the night the way I had, and arrived at the same conclusion from the other side.

Natalie walked into the meal-prep kitchen at seven the next evening while I was quartering onions and looked at me from across the room.

Just looked.

Her face was perfectly composed. Not suspicious — assessing. The way you look at a lock when you're deciding whether to pick it or break it.

I kept cutting.

"What do you have?" she said.

The kitchen was otherwise empty. The two prep workers who'd been beside me ten minutes ago had been redirected — I hadn't seen by whom. The realization arrived now, flat and certain: she had cleared the room before she came in.

I set the knife down. "I don't know what you mean."

"Don't." Her voice dropped the warm register entirely. What was left was precise and cold, stripped of all performance. "What do you have, and who have you told."

I said nothing.

She crossed the kitchen.

She moved to the first burner and turned the dial. Then the second. Then the third and fourth in sequence, methodical, the way someone works through a checklist they've already made. The gas hissed and caught, blue flames rising in a row. On the back counter, a stockpot held three inches of cooking oil from the evening's prep — I'd measured it in myself an hour ago.

"Natalie—"

"You had one job." She turned the fifth burner. "Stay quiet. Stay small. Be useful and disappear when you weren't."

She lifted the stockpot and set it directly over the highest flame.

I moved toward the exit. The door handle gave nothing. Locked — from outside, already, before she'd even walked in. The service corridor was the same. I could feel both locks without trying them. The kind of certainty that settles in your stomach before your hands have time to check.

The oil began to heat.

"I didn't want this to be complicated," she said. Still calm. Still precise. The voice of a woman who had done this sort of calculation before and found it straightforward. "You made it complicated."

She walked to the service corridor, unhurried, and I heard the bolt slide home from outside a half second after the door pulled shut behind her.

Then the smoke alarm in the hall began to scream, and the oil reached its flash point, and the kitchen went white.