After My Mate Tried Killing Me

The bruises come up dark and fast, purple already blooming along my collarbone in the shape of his fingers. I sit on the edge of the straw mat and don't touch them. Touching them makes them real, and I need a few more minutes of them being just pain, uncounted.

The room is small enough that I can hear my own heartbeat bounce off the walls. But underneath it, closer than it's ever been, I hear something else.

*He is not our Alpha.* The wolf's voice doesn't howl. It doesn't claw. It simply speaks, low and even, the way you'd tell someone the sky is blue. *He never was.*

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. "I know," I whisper, and it's the first time I've said it out loud to anyone, even her.

My hands are steady when I reach under the mattress for the folded pages hidden in the seam. I write the date. The location — the kitchen corridor, third pillar from the east wall. The witness — Beta Marcus. I don't write what it felt like, his hand at my throat, the gray creeping in at the edges of my vision. Numbers and names don't need feelings attached. They just need to be true. I fold the pages back into the seam and lie down, and for the first time in a week, I sleep without dreaming of him at all.

---

The alarm comes two nights later — a rogue sighted at the northern marker, warriors mobilizing, the whole pack house emptying into the yard in a scramble of boots and shouted orders. I'm herded out with the other Omegas to the perimeter fence, told to stay put, stay quiet, stay useless. It takes forty minutes before Gamma Reeve calls it a false trail. Paw prints, no scent. A drill, maybe, or nothing at all.

I don't think anything of it until I get back to my room and find the drawer of my little table standing open.

The moonstone is gone.

I tear the room apart anyway, because some animal part of me refuses to believe it until every possibility is exhausted — under the mattress, behind the loose board, inside my one spare boot. Nothing. The chain my mother wore against her own skin for years, the only object left in this world that might have carried some trace of wherever she came from, is simply not there.

I sit down on the bare floor in the wreckage of my own searching. The cracked bond throbs once, dull and distant, like a bruise pressed by accident. But that's not what makes me go still.

It's the absence. A scent I never understood — faint, floral, something underneath winter jasmine that was always just slightly wrong, slightly other — is gone from the room entirely, and only now, in its sudden silence, do I realize how loudly it had always been speaking. My wolf doesn't rage. She listens, ears pricked toward something buried so deep I can't name it, something the pendant's theft has just made audible for the first time.

*Soon,* she said, days ago. I start to understand that soon might not mean rescue. It might mean revelation.

---

What I don't see, three floors up in the security office, is Marcus leaning close to a monitor at two in the morning, jaw tight, rewinding the same eleven seconds for the fourth time. Nora Pratt, east corridor, a bundle against her chest, glancing at the camera the way you glance at something you know is watching. He pulls the timestamp from the night of the pup. Then the wolfsbane accusation. Then, tonight, the east wing again, this time with nothing in her arms but something small clutched in her fist. Nora appears at the edge of every frame, every time, like a thread pulled through three separate lies. Marcus copies the files. He locks them in his desk. He says nothing to anyone. Not yet.

---

The wolfsbane comes three days after that.

Brielle coughs it up in front of the healer at breakfast, delicate and horrified, blood-flecked spittle on a white napkin, and by the time I hear the word *poison* the Gamma guards already have my arms.

Thaddeus doesn't ask questions. "Remove her," he says, and it isn't even loud.

They drag me through the great hall, past the same tables I served water at a week ago, and out toward the main entrance. At the top of the stone steps — the ones I used to sweep as a girl, worn smooth by a hundred years of pack feet — they let go.

I don't have time to catch myself. The world tips. Stone meets shoulder, then hip, then skull, over and over, a rolling percussion of impact until I land in a heap at the bottom, breath gone, world ringing white.

I look up. Lennox is on the landing. He doesn't move. Brielle presses a shaking hand to her stomach beside him, performing pain so prettily it could win awards, and he puts his arm around her and turns his back on me like I'm something spilled that will clean itself up.

Something in my chest tears loose.

My nails lengthen against the stone — not nails anymore, claws, sharp and pale and gone again before anyone sees. I feel it happen and I file it away, calm as filing anything else now. I press my palm flat to the ground and push myself up, one bruised inch at a time, and I do not look at the landing again.