After My Mate Saved His Mistress, I Burned My Old Pack

I am Winifred Harrison, healer of the Moonveil Pack, and I have spent my entire adult life learning how to keep my hands steady when everything around me is falling apart.

Tonight, my hands were the steadiest things in the room.

The Moon Festival was supposed to be beautiful. Lanterns strung across the great hall, the Alpha's table gleaming with silver, the whole pack gathered in that rare, collective exhale that only comes once a year. I had prepared the ceremonial wellness tonics myself—twelve small glass bottles, each one measured to the milligram, each one logged in my healer's journal with the obsessive precision I learned before I could shift. I know every ingredient I touched. I know every ingredient I didn't.

So when Jade Carlson crumpled to the floor in the center of the hall, foam at the corners of her mouth, one trembling finger pointed directly at my tray of tonics, I felt something settle inside me rather than shatter.

The pack did not settle. The hall erupted—chairs scraping, voices rising, someone near the back crying out wolfsbane like it was a verdict instead of a question. I watched the panic move through the room in a wave, and I stepped forward.

I was going to test the tonic. Right there, in front of everyone. I had nothing to hide, and I knew that the fastest way to end a lie is to stand in the light and let people look.

I didn't get the chance.

Sage's aura hit me like a wall.

I have felt a Beta's aura before—the heavy, pressing weight of pack authority, the kind that compresses the air in your lungs and makes your wolf go quiet whether she wants to or not. I had felt Sage's specifically, in training exercises, in pack disputes, in moments when he was managing a situation that required force. I had never felt it directed at me.

Until tonight.

It pressed down on my shoulders like hands, and the words I was about to speak simply stopped. Not because I chose to stop them. Because he made them stop. My wolf, Lyra, went rigid inside me, and I felt the mate bond flare with something that was half pain and half fury.

Sage didn't look at me. He was already moving, already scooping Jade into his arms with the practiced ease of a man who had done this before—who had positioned himself as her protector so many times that it had become muscle memory. He carried her out of the hall, and the pack watched him go, and nobody tested the tonic.

I stood in the center of the room with my hands still steady and my voice locked inside my chest, and I thought: there it is.

—

I found him in the clinic afterward. Jade had been settled into a recovery room, her 'symptoms' already conveniently fading, and Sage was in the hallway with his arms crossed and his jaw set in the way that meant he had already decided what the conversation was going to be.

He wanted me to apologize. Formally. To Jade.

He wanted me to step down as head healer—temporarily, he said, as though the word temporary was supposed to make it reasonable—to keep the peace. To honor Dorian Carlson's legacy.

Dorian Carlson. The wolf who killed my parents.

I pressed two fingers to my wrist. It's a habit I developed years ago, after the funerals, when I needed something solid to hold onto. My own pulse, steady and real, against the pads of my fingers.

'You didn't let me speak,' I said.

'I was managing the situation.'

'You used your aura on me, Sage. On your mate. In front of the entire pack.'

He looked away. Not with guilt—with the particular kind of discomfort that comes from knowing you did something wrong and having already decided not to examine it too closely. 'Winifred, the pack needed calm—'

'The pack needed the truth.' I kept my voice level. I was very good at level. 'I was going to give it to them. You stopped me.'

He didn't answer that. He just repeated his request, softer this time, as though softening it would change what it was.

I left without agreeing to anything.

—

Our quarters were quiet when I got back. Sage came in an hour later and didn't say a word. He took a blanket from the closet, moved to the couch, and positioned himself near the door—the door that faced the hallway leading to Jade's recovery room.

I stood at the window for a long time.

Then I went to my healer's journal, opened the cover, and looked at the small pressed flower tucked inside—pale lavender, dried almost to paper, from the fields outside the Moonveil Pack's eastern border. The last thing I took when I left my birth pack. The only piece of it I still had.

I touched the edge of one petal.

The mate bond hummed between me and the man sleeping on my couch, aching and insistent, the way it always did when we were in the same room and not touching. It wanted reconciliation. It always wanted reconciliation.

But I was starting to understand that what the bond wanted and what I needed were no longer the same thing.

I closed the journal. I did not sleep.

I started making a list.