After My Mate Tried Killing Me

The training yard is empty at that hour, frost still silvering the packed dirt, and Marcus is already there when I arrive—running drills alone, like a man who doesn't sleep anymore either.

I don't wait for him to notice me. I walk straight across the yard, boots crunching, and stop close enough that he has to look up.

"I need what's on the drive," I say. "Nora Pratt. The nursery. The kitchen corridor. The night my moonstone went missing. I know you have it."

He straightens slowly, wiping his palms on his thighs. "How do you know that."

"Because someone had to watch her," I say. "Since day one. It might as well have been me."

He studies my face for a long moment—the way you'd study a wolf you weren't sure had teeth yet. Then he pulls a tablet from his jacket, thumbs it awake, and turns the screen toward me without another word.

I watch it once. Nora, small and hunched, hurrying past the same camera three separate nights, a bundle each time, her eyes flicking up at the lens like she can feel it judging her. I don't flinch. I don't gasp. I just nod.

"Keep it safe," I tell him. "We're going to need it."

It isn't a request, and something in his face tells me he understands that.

---

The Luna Acknowledgment Ceremony is held two days later, the whole pack crowded into the great hall beneath banners freshly dyed. I stand at the back with the other Omegas while Brielle kneels before Thaddeus and receives the moon-bloom crown, white flowers wilting slightly even as they touch her hair.

The pack bond channels outward—her borrowed Luna aura sweeping the hall like a held breath. It's shallow. Performative. My wolf recoils from it, physically, my stomach turning as if I'd swallowed something rotten.

And in that recoil, the cracked bond—the one that's ached dully in my chest for months—flickers.

Then goes silent.

Completely, terrifyingly silent, for one full second.

I press my palm to my sternum, the old habit, except this time I'm not searching for him. Beneath my hand there's something else. Vast. Waiting. Entirely mine.

---

The chance comes on a Thursday, when Dr. Voss is called away to a warrior gashed open in a training accident. I'm assigned to scrub the medical wing floors, alone, and the locked cabinet in the corner—the one he never opens in front of anyone—sits three feet from my bucket.

My hands don't shake. I pull a hairpin from my hair, an old skill from a life I don't talk about, and the lock gives after four careful turns.

Inside: a sealed bag of synthetic silver-dust, more than any healer would ever need. A blade with a hollow handle, built to hold liquid. A small vial with Brielle's name on the label—wolfsbane simulant, harmless, built only to make someone cough blood that means nothing.

I photograph each item twice. I put everything back exactly as it was. I relock the cabinet and I'm back on my knees scrubbing the floor when Voss returns, and he doesn't even glance at me.

---

That night, alone in the Omega quarters, I sit cross-legged on the mat with the photographs spread in front of me, and the bond does something it hasn't done in weeks.

It transmits.

Warmth—not mine. Contentment. Brielle's perfume thick in someone else's lungs, someone else's chest full and easy in a way mine hasn't been since the marking. It floods into me like a hand shoved beneath my ribs and twisted, and I gasp out loud into the empty room.

My wolf doesn't grieve. She rises, furious and clean, burning through the sensation like it's smoke to be cleared.

And underneath that fury, through the half-open window, something else drifts in on the night air.

Cedar. And beneath it, the electric tension of a storm that hasn't broken yet.

It isn't from anywhere in this pack house. It isn't anywhere it should be able to reach me from at all.

My wolf goes utterly still.

Then, out in the corridor, past my locked door, I hear it—slow, deliberate footsteps, stopping directly outside.