My Alpha Has Ninety Days to Make Me Hate Him

LENA'S POV

I told myself he'd been angry.

That was the only explanation I could live with at three in the morning, lying awake in our bed alone while the mark on my neck throbbed like a second heartbeat. People said cruel things when they were cornered. Noah had been caught with Serena in his shirt, and I'd handed him a ring in a dark hallway. Of course he'd said something sharp. Of course he'd tried to win.

By morning, I'd almost convinced myself we'd talk.

Then I walked into the kitchen and found a manila folder sitting beside my coffee cup.

Noah was already at the head of the table, sleeves rolled, reading something on his tablet like it was any other Tuesday. He didn't look up.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Separation papers." He scrolled with one finger. "I've signed them. Marcus will file them with the council once you do."

I opened the folder. His signature was on the last page, dark and certain, the ink not even smudged. He'd done it at some point between finally and sunrise.

"That was fast," I said.

"You asked for it."

"I asked last night, Noah. You had a lawyer draft this in six hours?"

He set the tablet down then and finally met my eyes. His were gray and flat as river stones.

"There's something else. Until the council formalizes things, Serena will be taking over the Luna's duties. The healers' rotation, the school board, the Eastwood trade meetings. She already knows most of it."

I stared at him.

"She knows most of it," I repeated, "because she's been sitting in on my meetings for six months."

"She's been useful."

There it was. Not a defense. Not an apology. Just a fact, laid on the table next to the papers.

A year ago, I would have fought. I would have cried and argued and asked him what I'd done, how I could fix it, whether he remembered the night under the full moon. I could feel the old words lining up in my throat, worn smooth from use.

I didn't say any of them.

I pulled out the chair across from him and sat. Then I reached up to the collar of my blouse and unclasped the Luna pin.

It was silver, shaped like a crescent moon wrapped around a pine branch, the symbol of Blackthorn. Noah's mother had worn it before me. He'd fastened it on me himself at my ceremony, his fingers clumsy because he'd been nervous, and he'd laughed at himself in front of the entire pack.

I laid it on the table between us.

His gaze dropped to it and stayed there.

"Serena can have that too," I said. "It'll save you a trip."

"Lena."

"No, you've said what you needed to say. Now it's my turn." I folded my hands on top of the folder. "I want the house on Cedar Lane. It's in my name anyway, my father left it to me. Everything I brought into this marriage stays with me. Everything you brought stays with you. The joint accounts get split down the middle, and I want the council to audit them, not Marcus."

His jaw shifted. "You don't trust Marcus?"

"I don't trust anyone who answers to you right now."

"And your duties?"

"Gone. All of them. As of this morning." I pushed the folder toward him. "I'll sign once my own counsel reads it. I'm not signing anything you put in front of me over breakfast."

He watched me for a long moment, like he was trying to find the crack in me. I didn't give him one.

"You've thought about this," he said.

"You made it very easy to think about." I held his gaze. "You wanted this, Noah. You said so. So I'm going to give it to you, and I'm not going to beg you to come back. Not today, not next month, not ever. You don't have to brace yourself for it."

Something moved in his face again, that same quick shadow from the hallway. His hand flattened on the table, close to the pin, not touching it.

"Good," he said. "Then we understand each other."

"We really don't," I said. "But it doesn't matter anymore."

He opened his mouth to answer.

The window behind me exploded.

I heard the crack first, sharp as a gunshot, and then the high glittering sound of glass giving way. I didn't even have time to turn. A chair scraped, and something hit me hard from the front, and suddenly my face was pressed into Noah's chest and his arm was locked around the back of my head.

Glass rained against him. I felt it through his body, a dozen small impacts, the sting of it hitting his back and shoulders while he curled over me like a wall.

Outside, someone was shouting. The training field. One of the younger wolves must have thrown a boulder in a drill, or kicked loose a chunk of the stone wall.

None of that registered for long.

Because Noah was holding me.

His heart was slamming under my cheek, fast and wild, nothing like the cold man at the head of the table. His hand was spread across the back of my skull, fingers buried in my hair, and he was breathing hard against my temple. For one stupid, endless second, he smelled exactly the way he had when we were twenty-two and he'd carried me home from the river after I'd twisted my ankle. Pine and smoke and something warm underneath.

The mark on my neck flared. Not with pain this time. With recognition.

He felt it too. I know he did, because his whole body went rigid.

Then he shoved me away.

Not gently. He let go like I'd scalded him, both hands lifting off me at once, and stepped back so fast his heel crunched on broken glass. I caught myself on the edge of the table.

We stared at each other across a floor glittering with shards. A cold breeze pushed through the shattered window, lifting the corner of the separation papers.

"Are you hurt?" he asked. His voice was rough.

"No." I looked at him. Really looked. There was a thin cut along his cheekbone, and his right hand was bleeding freely, a long gash across the back of it where he'd shielded my head. Red ran between his knuckles and dripped onto the tile. "Noah, your hand."

"It's nothing."

"You moved before you even thought about it."

I hadn't meant to say it out loud. It came out soft, almost a question, and I hated how much hope was folded inside it. Ninety days. The bond doesn't lie. If he still loved me, if it was still there under all that ice, then maybe—

His expression closed like a door.

"Don't," he said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't read into it." He pulled a napkin off the table and wrapped it around his hand without looking at the wound. "The Luna of Blackthorn getting sliced up by a window in her own kitchen, the week she files for separation? You know how that would look. The council would be all over it. The other packs would say I couldn't protect my own house." He tightened the napkin with his teeth and spat out the next words. "I'm not dealing with that scandal on top of everything else."

The little flicker of hope in my chest went out quietly.

It didn't hurt the way I expected. It was more like stepping off a stair that wasn't there, that small lurch, and then the floor again, solid and cold.

I looked down at his hand. The napkin was already soaking through, red spreading across the white cotton in a slow bloom. A drop slid off his wrist and landed beside the Luna pin, a bright spot on the polished wood.

Under my collarbone, the mark burned. I wondered if his was burning too. I wondered if he'd ever tell me.

He wouldn't. I knew that now.

So I picked up my coffee cup, stepped carefully around the glass, and paused beside him just long enough to meet his eyes.

"Then you won't have to worry about your Luna much longer."

I felt him go still beside me.

I didn't wait to see what was on his face this time. I walked out of the kitchen with glass crunching under my slippers and his blood drying on the table behind me, and I didn't look back.