My Alpha Hid His Illness Behind Another Woman’s Scent

I did it while he was on the eastern grounds running drills with the pack's younger wolves.

I'd watched him leave from the guest bedroom window — his black SUV pulling out of the drive at seven sharp, the way it always did on training mornings. I gave it ten minutes. Then I took the dashcam and the GPS tracker out of the box I'd ordered three days ago and delivered to the pack's administrative address, not the house, and I went outside.

The SUV was unlocked. He never locked it on pack territory. He never had to.

I mounted the dashcam behind the rearview mirror, angled low, tucked behind the tint line where it would catch the road ahead and the driver's face without announcing itself. The GPS tracker went under the rear wheel well, magnetic, the size of a matchbox. I'd watched two tutorials the night before. It took me eleven minutes total.

I did not let myself think about the last time my hands had been this steady doing something I didn't want to do. I did not let myself think about much at all.

I synced both feeds to my phone, confirmed the signal, and went back inside.

The chamomile tea I'd made was cold by then. I drank it anyway.

---

That night, I lay in the guest bedroom with my phone face-up on the pillow beside me and watched the GPS dot.

For a while it didn't move. Enzo was in his study — I could hear the low murmur of what sounded like a phone call through the wall, though I couldn't make out words. The mate mark on my neck pulsed faintly, the way it does when he's close and feeling something he isn't saying. I pressed two fingers to it and made myself breathe.

At ten forty-three, the dot moved.

Not toward the training grounds. Not toward the pack house on the north end of the territory. It moved south, through the tree line, out onto the highway, and into the human town.

I sat up.

The dot stopped at an address I didn't recognize — a street in the newer part of town, near the waterfront development. It sat there for fifty-one minutes. Then it moved again, back through the highway, back through the tree line, back into the driveway.

I heard his key in the front door at midnight.

I heard him pause in the hallway outside the guest room. The mark on my neck went warm — his awareness of me, bleeding through the bond the way it always does when he's near and awake and thinking about me. I kept my breathing even. I kept my eyes on the ceiling.

After a moment, his footsteps moved on.

I screenshotted the location and saved it to a folder I'd labeled, with a flatness I didn't entirely feel, simply as Records.

Then I put my phone face-down and stared at the dark until morning.

---

Two days later, the tracker showed Lorelei's vehicle — I'd noted the plates outside the nursing home, another habit I didn't announce — moving out of Moonveil territory at half past seven in the evening.

I was already in my car.

I followed at a distance, three vehicles back, headlights on because disappearing entirely draws more attention than blending in. She drove like someone who wasn't expecting to be followed — steady speed, no doubling back, no hesitation. She pulled into the lot of a hotel I recognized: the Harrow, the kind of upscale human establishment that doesn't ask questions and doesn't remember faces.

I parked across the lot. Engine off. Headlights dark.

I waited.

Seven minutes later, Enzo's black SUV turned in off the main road.

I watched him get out. He was wearing the dark jacket I'd bought him two Christmases ago, the one that fits across his shoulders the way I used to think nothing else ever would. He looked thinner. Even from across the parking lot, in the amber wash of the hotel's exterior lights, I could see it — the way the jacket sat differently now, the slight hollowness in his face. He walked toward the lobby doors with his hands in his pockets and his head down, and he didn't look around.

He didn't look around because it didn't occur to him that he should.

The glass doors swallowed him.

My wolf made a sound I felt more than heard — low, wounded, the kind of sound she makes when something is wrong in a way that can't be fixed by running toward it. I put my hand flat on the steering wheel and I sat there.

Forty-seven minutes.

When he came out, he was alone. He walked back to the SUV at the same measured pace, got in, and pulled out of the lot at exactly the speed limit. I followed — too far back for my wolf, who wanted to close the distance, not far enough for the part of me that was already somewhere very cold and very quiet.

He drove straight back to pack territory. I peeled off before the tree line and took the long way home.

---

The florist was on Clement Street, a narrow shop wedged between a dry cleaner and a wine bar. I'd driven past it a hundred times. I'd never had a reason to go in.

The owner was a human woman in her sixties with reading glasses pushed up into her hair and the comfortable authority of someone who has been arranging flowers in the same shop for thirty years. She recognized me — or rather, she recognized the Luna of the Silverfang Pack, which in the human town means she recognized the wife of the man who buys flowers here regularly.

Her face lit up when I walked in.

'Mrs. Clark,' she said warmly. 'Are you here to add to your husband's standing order? He was just in yesterday.'

'Actually,' I said, 'I wanted to ask about that. He mentioned he'd changed the arrangement recently.'

She nodded, already moving toward her order book with the cheerful helpfulness of someone who has no idea she is handing me a weapon. 'He keeps two separate ones now — has for a few months. The red roses for you, of course. And then the pale lilies.' She smiled. 'Different tastes, I suppose. The lilies are lovely though. Very elegant.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Very elegant.'

I thanked her. I walked back to my car. I sat in the florist's parking lot with my hands in my lap and I felt the mate bond crack.

It wasn't a metaphor. It was physical — a fracture through the mark on my neck, sharp and sudden, like a hairline split in something that had been under pressure for a very long time. My wolf made that low, wounded sound again, and then she went quiet. Not the quiet of waiting. The quiet of something retreating somewhere deep and small and dark.

I pressed two fingers to the mark.

I didn't realize I was doing it until I was already doing it.

Red roses for his Luna. Pale lilies for someone else. Months of this. Months of two arrangements, two women, two versions of a life he'd been running in parallel while I moved into the guest bedroom and told myself I was gathering evidence before I moved.

I had the evidence.

I sat in the parking lot for a long time, watching the foot traffic on Clement Street — humans going about their Tuesday afternoon, buying wine and dropping off dry cleaning and living lives that did not include mate bonds or wolfsbane serums or the particular agony of loving someone whose scent you can still smell on your own skin.

Then I started the car and drove home.