After My Mate Tried Killing Me

The moment Lennox's teeth sink into Brielle's throat, I feel it in my own chest—like a nail driven through bone at 8:47 on a Friday night, torchlight guttering across a hundred watching faces. Thaddeus, Lennox's grandfather and the pack's iron-fisted elder, stands at the dais with his arms folded, satisfied. I am not permitted to look away. His decree put me here, in the third row, a witness to my own erasure.

The bond doesn't snap clean. It cracks—molten silver poured down a channel that was supposed to carry only warmth—and my wolf throws back her head and howls a sound no one else hears. My knees give. My fist crushes flat against my sternum like I can hold the fracture shut with my own hand. *It means nothing,* he told me through the mind-link an hour ago. *I'm coming back to you.* He does not look at me now. Not once, not even when I go down into the crowd like something felled.

Forty-eight hours later I stand in the Alpha's study, and it smells like her—vanilla and something cloying underneath, Brielle's new perfume soaked into the drapes I chose. Lennox doesn't stand. He signs a paper without lifting his eyes and speaks in full Alpha tone, the kind that isn't asking.

"Omega quarters. Laundry and kitchen rotation. You will not speak of what we were to anyone in this pack."

The command locks my jaw shut mid-breath. My spine goes rigid, my hands curl at my sides like a puppet's, and for three full seconds I cannot make my own mouth move even to breathe properly. But under the compulsion, where he can't see, my wolf slams her whole body against my ribs—once, twice—a fury with no outlet, the first real fight she's shown in years. When the tone releases me, I walk out without a word. I don't trust myself to have one that wouldn't get me killed.

They gut the den two days after that. I'm handed a box and told to carry it. I watch workmen tear out the hearth stones I chose with my own hands, the window seat we argued over for a week because he wanted it east-facing and I wanted the morning light on my face instead of his. A pack technician moves room to room with a canister, spraying something bitter and clean over every wall, every doorframe, every place my hands have ever rested. Erasing me molecule by molecule. Brielle directs the new paint colors in a voice like syrup. I set the last box down, straighten my spine, and go to my new quarters without being told twice. My wolf goes silent. Not defeated—coiled.

The third day, Brielle drags her pup into the training yard, a thin red line scored across the child's cheek, and wails that I did it. I know instantly what I'm looking at—a silver-tipped claw mark, too neat, too shallow to be an accident. Lennox doesn't ask. He doesn't look for a scratch on my own hands. He puts his palm flat against my shoulder and shoves, and the platform edge disappears from under my feet.

I hit the packed earth wrong. My arm folds at an angle it was never built for, and pain floods white behind my eyes, but I don't scream. I won't give the yard that. Around me, pack members who called me Future Luna eight days ago stand frozen, staring at their boots. Only Beta Marcus, Lennox's second, doesn't look away. His jaw is tight enough to crack. For one second my vision goes gold at the edges, my wolf surging so hard I taste copper on my tongue, and I have to force the shift back down with everything I have left.

That night, splinted with a broom handle and a torn sheet, I catch Marcus alone outside the medical wing.

"I'm not asking you to believe me," I say. My voice comes out flat, steady, nothing like begging. "I'm telling you what happened. Dates. Witnesses. Every incident since the marking."

I hold out the folded pages I've kept hidden in the seam of my Omega mattress—a ledger, written in the dark, one entry at a time. "If Shadowcrest's founding law still means anything to you, open a security review. If it doesn't, throw it away."

Marcus takes it. He doesn't answer. He doesn't hand it back.

Down the corridor, Brielle's voice rings out, sweet and carrying, calling his name.