His Mistress Bound Me While He Rejected Our Bond

By the second week, the pain in my legs had dulled into something I could live inside of, like a room I'd learned the shape of in the dark. Sofia changed the dressings twice a day and stopped flinching when she peeled them back. I counted that as progress. I counted a lot of small things as progress now, because the big things had stopped being mine to count.

Cataleya came on a Tuesday. I knew her step before I saw her — light, unhurried, the tap of a woman who had never once in her life needed to move fast for anyone. She didn't knock. She never knocked anymore.

"You look better," she said, and smiled like she meant it.

I didn't answer. I'd learned that silence cost her more than words did.

She pulled the visitor chair close to the bed, closer than comfort allowed, and sat down with her phone already in her hand, thumb moving before she even looked at me. "I thought you'd want to see something," she said. "For your records. You're so good with records."

She turned the screen toward me.

Two wolves, moonlit, running through a tree line I didn't recognize. One dark and broad-shouldered, one sleek and pale — flank pressed to flank, close enough that their fur blurred together in the frame. I knew the dark one's gait before I let myself know anything else. I'd watched that same body move through a thousand mornings of my life.

"Neighboring territory," Cataleya said, pleasant as a weather report. "Franco likes to run when his wolf gets restless. I keep him company." She swiped to the next photo. Same tree line, different angle, her wolf's head tucked briefly against his throat. "This one's timestamped. Look at the corner."

I looked.

The date sat small and gray in the corner of the frame, and my whole body went still around it, the way water goes still right before it freezes solid. That night. The night I'd woken alone in the Luna quarters with cramping low in my belly and blood soaking through the sheets before I understood what was happening, before I understood that I was losing something I hadn't even told the pack existed yet. I had called for him. I remembered that clearly — my own voice, thin and useless, calling a name into an empty room.

She swiped again.

Another night. Another timestamp. This one I didn't need to calculate. I'd had that date memorized since the healer who wasn't ours, the one my mother's pack had sent because our own healer was too far, had called me at dawn to say Elena Evans had stopped breathing sometime before sunrise, alone, with no one beside her but a nurse she'd never met.

Both times. He had been running with her both times.

Cataleya watched my face the way a scientist watches an experiment — patient, curious, waiting for the exact moment the reaction started. I could feel her wanting it. I could feel how badly she needed to see something break open in me so she could carry the memory of it around like a coin in her pocket.

I gave her nothing.

Under the blanket, out of her sight, I pressed my nails into the mark on my neck until the skin split and I tasted copper somewhere at the back of my throat, sharp and grounding. The pain gave me a place to stand. I held her eyes over the top of the phone until the silence stretched long enough that it became hers to carry instead of mine.

She looked away first. Just barely. Just a flicker toward the window before she caught herself and smiled again, thinner this time, and slid the phone back into her pocket like she'd decided the show wasn't landing the way she'd hoped.

"Rest well, Luna," she said, and left the way she'd come — unhurried, humming something under her breath that I didn't recognize and didn't want to.

I waited until her footsteps faded down the corridor. Then I reached under my pillow for the suppressant vial and pressed the cloth against my wrist, and I opened the channel.

*The fractured bond was never real,* I told Onyx, once I'd laid out the timestamps, the dates, the two nights that belonged to my mother and my pup and no one else. *He simply chose her. The lie was the leash.*

His answer came slower than usual, like he was choosing each word with a blade instead of a pen. *I know. And now we have enough to begin. When you are ready, I will come for you — but the timing is yours.*

I closed the channel and lay in the dark a long time before I reached for the ledger on the nightstand.

I wrote my mother's name at the top of a clean page, and under it, the date. I wrote the second date beneath it, and left a line of space where a name should have gone, because I had never let myself choose one, and grief didn't need a name to be counted.

Then I turned to a fresh page, and I started planning.