My Alpha Chose Another Luna

The fever broke and came back twice in the first two days.

Sky kept track of it on her phone. She had a little chart going, time-stamped, like I was a patient in a clinic and not a woman lying on her own bed staring at the ceiling. She brought me water every hour. She made me eat toast. She changed the pillowcase on the second morning when I told her, very quietly, that I could still smell him on it.

She didn't say anything. She just stripped the case off, put a fresh one on, and threw the old one in a trash bag instead of the laundry. I loved her for that.

The worst part wasn't the fever. It was the pull.

The full moon was still days away, but the bond, even severed, knew. It tugged at something behind my sternum like a hook on a fishing line, and every tug brought a flash of him — the shape of his shoulders, the cedar-and-rain smell that was supposed to be safety, the sound of his voice in our mind-link. Not the voice he used with me. The other one. The one I'd heard in the corridor.

I didn't cry.

I kept waiting for it. Sky kept waiting for it too, I could tell. She'd glance at me sideways while she was folding a blanket or filling a glass, and I could almost see her bracing for the moment I broke.

It didn't come.

I just lay there, my thumb pressed to the unmarked side of my neck, and started taking my own life apart in my head.

The dawn runs. He'd suggested those in the first month. *Something I've always wanted to share with someone.* I had thought he meant me. I had thought I was the someone. I went through the memory carefully now, the way you go through a drawer looking for something you might have lost, and I let myself feel how the words actually fit. They didn't fit me. They fit the shape of someone else.

The cabin. The pup. The dress he'd bought me last winter that, now that I thought about it, was a color I didn't really wear.

One by one. I sorted them out. I set the real ones — and there were a few, a small pile — on one side of my mind, and I set the borrowed ones on the other. The borrowed pile was so much bigger.

I didn't cry about that either. There wasn't room.

---

On the third morning, Sky brought a cardboard box up from the storage room.

"We don't have to do this today," she said.

"Yes, we do."

She nodded once and set the box on the floor.

We worked in silence. The silver bracelet he gave me on our first anniversary went in first. Then the framed photo from the pack festival, the one where I was laughing and he was looking at the camera instead of at me. I noticed that for the first time. He was always looking at the camera. The book he'd given me last spring, with a note in the front cover. The scarf. The little carved wolf he'd left on my pillow one morning.

Sky packed quickly, no commentary. I appreciated that more than I could say.

Then she reached for the small leather collar on the dresser. Pumpkin's collar. The one with her name tag on it, the one I'd picked out myself at a pet store in town because Daniel had said *whatever you want, she's yours.*

My hand moved before I thought about it.

I caught Sky's wrist.

She stopped. Looked at me.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't, right then. Pumpkin was asleep at the foot of the bed, one back paw twitching, her ear flicking at some dream. Her chin was on the edge of the mattress, the way it always was. Waiting for permission to climb up.

Sky's eyes went soft for a second. Then she just nodded, set the collar back down on the dresser, and kept packing the rest of the box like it had never happened.

When we were done, she taped the lid shut.

"Storage," she said. "Not trash. Yet."

"Storage is fine."

She carried it out. I watched the door close behind her.

Pumpkin lifted her head, looked at me, and yawned. Her tail thumped once against the blanket.

I reached down and ran my hand along her back.

"Not yet," I told her quietly. "Not yet."

I didn't know yet what *yet* meant. I just knew it was honest, and I was running a little low on honest things to say.

---

He came that night.

I knew before Sky knew. The pull behind my sternum tightened, sharp and familiar and wrong, and my wolf went up on her feet inside me with a low warning sound I felt in my teeth. Then I heard the claws on the hallway floor.

He was in wolf form.

Sky was already moving — across the room, between me and the door, her shoulders squared. I sat up slowly on the couch.

The pacing started outside. Heavy. I could hear his breathing through the door, ragged and huge, the way an Alpha wolf breathes when he's trying not to break something. There was a soft scratch, claws against wood, and then a whine — low, broken, almost a question.

I didn't move.

Sky looked at me. I shook my head.

The pacing went on for a long time. Then it stopped.

I heard the shift — that wet rearranging sound, bone and muscle finding their human shape — and then his voice, right against the wood.

"Mila."

I didn't answer.

"Mila, open the door."

The Alpha tone slid under the words like a current, and I felt it. I felt it the way you feel the bass through the floor at a concert — present, physical, pressing on something deeper than my ears. My shoulders wanted to obey. My hand wanted to reach for the lock.

Three weeks ago, I would have. Without thinking.

But the bond was severed. The formal words had done what they were supposed to do. The tone hit me and rolled off again, and underneath it I was still here, still myself, still sitting on the couch with my thumb pressed against the unmarked side of my neck.

"Open the door. Now."

Sky's hand closed around mine. I hadn't realized I'd been gripping the cushion.

"Mila, please. Just let me explain. Just let me — I can fix this. You don't understand what you heard. Open the door, baby, please —"

*Baby.*

He had never called me baby. Not once in three years.

I almost laughed. I think Sky saw it in my face, because her hand tightened on mine.

He kept talking. The Alpha tone fractured halfway through, like a voice trying to be two things at once and failing at both. Commands, then pleas. Pleas, then commands. The words started to repeat themselves.

I sat in the dark with Sky beside me and Pumpkin warm against my ankle, and I listened to the Alpha of the Silverfang Pack lose his composure on the other side of my door, and I did not say a single word.

He left somewhere around four in the morning. I heard the footsteps go heavy down the hall, then quieter, then gone.

Sky exhaled.

"You okay?"

I thought about it.

"No," I said. "But I will be."

It was the truest thing I'd said in three years.

I pressed my thumb to my neck, and I closed my eyes, and somewhere out beyond the pack house the sky was already starting to think about getting light.