I Refused to Save the Luna Who Tried to Kill Me

VIOLA'S POV

The first thing I heard was his voice.

"Start the next round. She's awake enough."

My eyes opened to a white ceiling and a humming light that made my teeth ache. Something tight bit into my left forearm. I turned my head and saw a leather restraint buckled over skin already bruised purple and yellow, the old marks layered under fresh ones like someone had been tracing the same line for months.

Someone had.

"Alpha Derek," a nurse said quietly. She was young, with a tired ponytail and a name badge that read *Nell*. "Her pulse is still low. If we push another session this soon..."

"You can rest when Chloe is better."

He wasn't talking to Nell. He was looking at me.

Derek stood at the foot of the treatment table in a dark coat still wet at the shoulders, two pack guards behind him at the door. He was exactly the way the book had described him. Sharp jaw, gray eyes, the kind of stillness that made other wolves lower their heads without being asked.

The book.

My gaze slid past him to the metal rack against the far wall. A covered instrument tray sat on the top shelf, a white cloth draped over it, but I knew what was underneath. A silver bowl. A row of thin, hollow needles. The clamp shaped like a closing hand.

In the last chapter of that novel, Viola Mills had been strapped to this same table while those instruments pulled her wolf out of her, piece by piece, to keep Chloe alive. She'd died with her mate holding Chloe's hand in the next room.

I was Viola now.

*Viola.* The voice inside my chest was so faint it barely counted as sound. *It hurts.*

Ceci. My wolf. She sounded like a thread about to snap.

If I lay here and let them start again, I already knew where this road ended.

Derek came around the side of the table and put his hand on my shoulder.

It was meant to hold me down. I knew that. But the second his fingers touched me, my body leaned toward him before my mind could stop it, like a plant turning toward a window.

His fingertips were cold. They always had been.

And all at once I was somewhere else. Rain hammering the healing den windows. My mother was inside, and nobody would tell me if she was alive. Eight-year-old me in a borrowed sweater, too numb to cry, and a boy sitting down beside me on the wet porch steps without a word. He'd opened his hand. A caramel in wax paper, the cheap kind from the gas station.

"You didn't eat," Derek had said back then. "Eat something."

Viola had held on to that caramel for sixteen years. She'd let it carry her through every cold look, every missed dinner, every time he'd walked past her to reach Chloe.

My hand was shaking against the leather strap. I didn't know if it was her grief or mine. It didn't matter. It hurt the same.

*I miss him too,* Ceci whispered. *I miss how he used to be.*

I closed my eyes.

*I know why we stayed,* I told her. *We're still allowed to leave.*

She didn't answer, but something in my chest eased a fraction. Like she'd been waiting a long time for someone to say it.

I opened my eyes and looked at the man holding my shoulder.

"Where are Chloe's test results?"

Derek's brow creased. "What?"

"The first time she got sick. Someone must have tested her blood. I want to see what the poison was."

Behind him, Silas stepped forward. The pack's head healer, gray at the temples, wire-rimmed glasses he pushed up whenever he was about to lie. He pushed them up now and handed me a clipboard.

I scanned it. Session times. Dosage of healing energy. A note that read *Donor: V. Mills, continue until patient stabilizes.*

"This is a schedule," I said. "I asked for a diagnosis."

"The diagnosis is that Chloe is dying," Silas said. "That's all you need to know."

"Then it won't hurt to show me."

I flipped to the second page. There was a header that said *Initial Toxicology*. The lines below it were blank. No results. No signature.

I held it up so Derek could see.

"Nobody signed this. Nobody even filled it out."

"Silas has been treating Chloe for weeks." Derek's voice went flat. "I don't need a form to tell me she's sick. I've watched her cough up blood."

"Then why does it have to be my wolf? Why not a donor bank, or a healer from another pack?"

"Because your blood is the only one that works." His grip tightened. "Is this about jealousy, Viola? Because if it is, this is a really bad time for it."

The old Viola would have spent ten minutes swearing she wasn't jealous. She would have cried and apologized and given him whatever he asked for just to prove she was good.

I didn't say anything.

A smooth gray stone was set into the device beside my arm, wired to the needles taped above my elbow. It glowed faintly whenever I let my power flow into it. I'd done it so many times my body knew the motion on its own.

I pulled back.

It was like closing a hand that had been open too long. Ceci shuddered with relief. The glow in the stone flickered, dimmed, and went dark.

Silas frowned at the monitor. "The connection's dropped."

"It didn't drop," I said. "I stopped."

Derek leaned down until his face was inches from mine.

"Turn it back on." The Alpha command rolled through the room. The guards stiffened. Nell took a half step back.

My shoulders locked. My spine tightened like someone had pulled a wire through it. Every instinct I had wanted to obey.

But obeying wasn't the same as having something to give. Ceci was nearly empty. His command could make me want to bleed for him. It couldn't make blood.

"I said turn it on."

"Show me the diagnosis," I said through my teeth. "Until then, you get nothing."

The silence that followed was loud enough to hurt.

"And I want an independent healer here," I added. "Someone outside this pack. Until that happens, I'm not starting another session."

Silas laughed, short and thin. "She's stalling, Alpha. Every hour she plays games, Chloe gets worse."

Derek straightened slowly. He looked at me for a long moment, and something in his face closed like a door.

"Get me the containment form."

Silas had it ready. Of course he did. Derek signed it against the wall, the pen scratching hard enough to tear the paper.

"Effective now, Viola doesn't leave the treatment wing." He handed the form to the nearest guard. "She's already hurt Chloe by stopping. I won't let her do more damage out of spite."

"Hurt her," I repeated. "By not letting you drain me."

"By choosing your pride over her life."

He didn't wait for my answer. He walked out, and the cold of his hand stayed on my shoulder after he'd gone.

The guards started clearing the room. Silas went with them, already muttering into his phone.

Nell stayed by the counter, pretending to sort gauze.

"Nell," I said quietly. "Can I borrow your pen?"

She hesitated, glanced at the door, then pressed it into my free hand.

On the counter beside her was a stack of standard forms. I'd seen them every time I came in. *Patient Transfer Request: Outside Evaluation.* Any patient in a healer's care could file one. The book had mentioned it once, in a single line, on the day Viola was too broken to remember it existed.

Nell slid one onto the table next to my hand without a word.

My fingers were too shaky to write a decent signature. I clicked the pen open, smeared the ink across my thumb, and pressed it into the signature box. The print came out dark and smudged, but it was mine.

"Done," I whispered.

Footsteps came back toward the door.

Nell moved fast. She folded the form in half and tucked it into a canvas pouch stamped with the logo of the neutral clinic downtown, the one that collected routine referrals every evening. She dropped it into the outgoing bin with three others like it, then picked up her tray as if nothing had happened.

A guard filled the doorway, a ring of keys in his hand.

"Out," he told her.

Nell left without looking back at me.

The guard reached for the door. Through the gap, I caught a glimpse of Derek in the hallway, his phone pressed to his ear, his back to me.

"Lock the door if you want," I called after him. "My answer stays no."

He didn't turn around.

The door shut. The lock turned with a heavy metal click, loud in the quiet room.

I lay there with the dark stone beside my arm and ink drying on my thumb. Ceci's breathing slowed into something almost like sleep, and for the first time in this body, nothing was being taken from her.

I'd kept my wolf.

And I'd learned the truth about my mate. He would lock me in a room to get what he wanted from me, and he wouldn't even turn around while he did it.