My Alpha Accused Me of Hurting His Mistress

They did not let me walk on my own.

A warrior on each side, a hand under each elbow, lifting me when my feet caught on the uneven stones of the courtyard. I kept my chin up. That was the only thing I had left to decide, and I decided it.

The pack walked behind us. All of them. Declan had ordered it.

We went through the training grounds first. The young wolves who came to me last winter for sprained wrists and split lips and the small cuts they would not show the Gamma — they stood along the fence and watched me pass. One of them, a boy of fifteen whose collarbone I had set in October, opened his mouth and then closed it. He looked at the dirt.

The mate bond burned.

That is the part I cannot explain to anyone who has not had one. It was not pain in the ordinary sense. It was a brand laid against the inside of my chest, and every step Declan took ahead of me stretched it thinner and hotter. Through the bond I could feel what he felt. Conviction. Cold, righteous conviction, the kind a man feels when he believes he is delivering justice. He thought he was right. He thought this was mercy.

That was the worst of it. Not the rage. The certainty.

We passed the healer's wing.

I had built that wing. The east-facing window over the surgical table, because morning light helps with stitching. The herb shelves I had measured and sanded myself, two summers ago, when I was newly marked and could not stop smiling for no reason. The door I had painted pale green because the pups who came in crying were less afraid of pale green doors.

They walked me past it. They did not let me look long.

My hands swung at my sides. I could not lift them. The fingers were the wrong shape, swollen and dark, and the smallest movement sent a shock up to my shoulders that whited out my vision for a half-second. So I did not move them. They hung. Useless. Two pieces of meat at the ends of my arms.

The market square was the worst.

Wolves leaning out of doorways. Wolves I had treated. Wolves whose mates I had healed, whose pups I had pulled into the world with these same hands. A she-wolf I had stayed up three nights with through a fever last spring spat at the ground as I passed. She did not look at me. She just spat, and went back inside.

I did not blame her. I almost did not feel it. The bond was burning so hot now that the spit was a small thing, a cold dot on the side of my shoe.

Lilia stood on the pack house steps.

She had a hand resting on her stomach, careful and shallow, the way a woman holds something fragile. Her dress was the soft cream color again. Her hair was loose. She watched me come up the road and her face was perfectly composed — not gloating, not even satisfied in a way you could point at. Just calm. Just a woman watching her work go forward.

Our eyes met for one second.

She inclined her head. The smallest possible gesture. A small, polite nod, the way you acknowledge someone whose funeral has gone exactly to schedule.

Then we were past her, and we were climbing.

---

The cliffs above the Puget Sound were a forty-minute walk from the pack house, up through pine and salt wind. I had been here a hundred times. With Declan, mostly. We used to come up at dusk and watch the water turn black, and he would stand behind me with his arms around my waist and tell me that the moon laid a path on the water for wolves like us. He had said that. Those words. I remembered them now without wanting to.

The wind was hard at the top. It pulled at the Omega grey, ugly and rough against my skin, and it took my hair and pushed it forward into my face. I could not lift a hand to clear it.

Declan stopped at the cliff's edge.

He turned to face me, and from his coat he drew something wrapped in dark cloth. He did not unwrap it slowly. He let the cloth fall and held the moonstone up between us in his bare hand.

My mother's memorial. Pale, smooth, the size of his palm. The one he had commissioned himself, three years into our bond. The one he had placed in my hands on the morning of her death-day with such tenderness that I had cried into his shirt for an hour.

"Your bloodline," he said, "is worthless."

The wind took the words and threw them at me.

"Your mother was a Healer with no rank. Your father was nothing. You came to this pack with nothing, and I lifted you. I called you Luna." His voice was steady. He was not shouting. He was reading a sentence he had already passed. "The Moon Goddess made a mistake when she paired us. I see that now."

I did not speak. There was nothing to say to a man who had chosen.

"You were never worthy," he said.

Then he turned, and he threw the moonstone over the cliff.

I watched it go. A pale arc against the grey sky. It turned end over end, slow, almost lazy, and I thought of my mother's hands and the way she had braided my hair when I was small, and I watched the stone fall the long fall down the rock face and into the black water below, and it was gone.

I did not move.

Declan stepped back from the edge. He did not look at me again. He gestured to the warriors and they let go of my arms, and I understood, in the dim distant way you understand things when the bond is burning the inside of your chest hollow, that he was leaving me here. That the dragging was over. That the rest was up to whatever I chose.

Footsteps moving away on the stone path. The pack, withdrawing. Declan's stride, even and unhurried, going back the way we came.

I was alone at the edge.

I looked down.

The water was black, the way it was supposed to be at this height, churning white at the rocks. The wind smelled of salt and pine and something colder underneath. My hands hung at my sides. The bond burned. Sable was silent — not gone, I could feel her, curled tight and small somewhere deep — but silent.

I looked for the moonstone, because I could not help it. Because some part of me still wanted to say goodbye to my mother properly.

And I saw it.

Far below, riding the swell, a faint pale gleam on the surface of the black water. Bobbing. Not sinking. The current pulling it slowly out toward the open sound.

I did not understand. I did not have the room left in me to understand. A stone should sink. It was not sinking. It floated there, small and pale and impossible, and I stood at the edge of the cliff in Omega grey with my ruined hands and my burning bond and I looked at it.

Then I looked at the sky one more time. Pale. Featureless. Belonging to no one.

I stepped off the edge.