My Alpha Ordered My Blood Draw to Save His Mistress

The records room had no windows, so I didn't know it was morning until Caleb, one of the Deltas, opened the door without knocking.

"Alpha wants you in the great hall," he said. He wouldn't look at me directly. "Now, Luna."

I closed the folder of rogue patrol maps I'd been staring at for six hours and stood. My back ached from the chair. My eyes felt sanded down. "What's this about?"

"I don't know." He did know. I could smell it on him, the sour edge of a wolf carrying news he didn't want to deliver. "Just — come on."

I followed him up the stairs already understanding, in the cold administrative part of my mind that never fully shut off anymore, exactly what was waiting for me. Laila had told me where she was aiming three days ago. I had simply misjudged how fast the arrow would fly.

The great hall was full when I walked in. Not the usual scattering of pack business — this was everyone. Betas, Gammas, Deltas lined along the walls, Omegas pressed near the back doors, faces turned toward the raised dais like flowers toward a light that was about to burn them. Zander stood at the center of it in his formal coat, the one he wore for judgments. Laila stood a half-step behind his right shoulder, hands folded, eyes lowered in an expression I recognized now as fluent grief.

A folder sat open on the table in front of him. I didn't need to read it to know what was inside. Bribed testimony. Forged incident logs. A written account, probably in careful looping handwriting, describing a Luna who had lunged at a frightened, ailing she-wolf with her teeth bared.

"Lucille." Zander's voice carried to every corner of the hall without effort. That was the thing about him — he never had to try. "You've been summoned to answer for conduct unbecoming a Luna of this pack."

I walked to the center of the floor because there was nowhere else to walk. The stone was cold through the soles of my shoes.

"I'd like to hear the accusation," I said. My voice came out level. Three years of practice.

"You know the accusation." He didn't look at the folder. He didn't need to; he'd already decided. "Threatening a pack member during a medical emergency. Instability that has been observed by multiple witnesses over recent months."

"Which witnesses?" I asked. "I'd like their names."

A muscle moved in his jaw. He hadn't expected me to ask that, which told me he hadn't thought this through past the folder Laila had handed him.

"That's not the point of this tribunal."

"It's exactly the point." I made myself keep going, made my voice carry the way his did, flat and unhurried. "For three years I have run this pack's security reports. I have tracked every rogue incursion on our southern border. I have balanced supply ledgers that no one else in this hall has looked at since I arrived. I would like the pack to hear that, before—"

"Kneel."

The word came out of him low and absolute, wrapped in the Alpha tone, and it hit the mate bond the way it always did — like a hand closing around the back of my neck from the inside. My knees buckled before I decided anything. I heard the crack of bone on stone and understood distantly that it was mine.

A sound went through the hall. Not quite a gasp. A held breath, multiplied by two hundred throats.

I knelt on the cold floor of the great hall in front of my entire pack, and I felt my Luna aura — the thing that had been guttering low and thin since the healer's wing, since the life force I'd poured out of myself two years before that — dim further, like a candle pinched between two fingers. I felt it happen. I felt the pack feel it happen. The subtle deference in the room, the automatic weight an aura commands even from wolves who don't like you, thinned to almost nothing.

Laila's face, over Zander's shoulder, arranged itself into perfect, sorrowful concern. Not triumph. She was too skilled for triumph. Just concern, gentle and terrible.

Along the side wall, the Beta stood very still, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere above my head.

I did not cry. I had promised myself that a long time ago, in a hallway with a door that didn't lock, and I kept the promise now the way I kept all of them — through sheer refusal.

Inside my chest, my wolf slammed against my ribs. Once. Hard enough that I felt it in my teeth.

Zander let the silence hold for the length of time it took him to decide I'd learned whatever lesson he intended to teach. Then, without ceremony: "You're dismissed."

I rose. My knees screamed. I did not let it show on my face.

I walked out of the great hall with my spine straight and two hundred pairs of eyes on my back, and behind me I heard Laila's breath catch — soft, grateful, relieved — the sound of a woman certain she had just won everything.