My Alpha Ordered My Blood Draw to Save His Mistress

The door to my new quarters stuck at the hinge. I had to push it with my shoulder to get it to open, and when it swung wide I already knew, in the animal part of me that had learned to catalog absence before the eyes caught up, that something was gone.

Barnaby's bed was not in the corner.

I stood in the doorway with my hand still on the frame and let my eyes do the accounting my chest refused to. The wicker bed — gone. The chipped ceramic bowl I'd carried down from the Luna suite that morning — gone. The braided leather leash that had hung on the peg by the window — gone. Even the small tuft of golden fur that had lived permanently in the corner near the radiator had been swept clean.

Someone had been thorough.

I walked into the room and closed the door behind me and stood in the center of the floor for a long moment. Then I turned around and walked back out.

I checked the kitchens first, because he sometimes wandered there hoping for scraps. Then the training yard, where he liked to lie in the sun and watch the Deltas spar. Then the perimeter of the pack house in a slow deliberate circle, my voice low, calling his name in the tone he came to. Nothing. No one had seen him. The Omegas in the laundry room dropped their eyes when I asked. That told me enough.

I found Zander in the hallway outside his study, mid-conversation with two Gammas. He turned when he felt me approach, the way the bond still forced him to whether he wanted to or not.

"Where is Barnaby?"

He glanced at the Gammas. They took the hint and moved off.

"The mutt." His voice was flat, the way it always was when he wanted to end a conversation before it started. "It was a distraction. I had it rehomed."

"Rehomed where."

"Lucille." He said my name like a door closing. "It's a dog. Find something useful to do with your afternoon."

He walked past me. I did not move for a full minute after he was gone. Then I walked back down the corridor to the smaller room in the lower wing, and I closed the door, and I sat down on the edge of the narrow bed, and I put my face in my hands.

I cried for the first time in three years inside those walls.

Not loudly. Not with any of the shape a grown woman's grief is supposed to have. Just a thin steady leak that would not stop, my shoulders shaking in a way I couldn't hold still, my palms pressed hard against my eyes because if I made any sound at all someone would hear it through the thin door and it would become another thing Laila could use.

I cried for the golden dog who had greeted me every evening for three years like I was worth greeting. I cried for the pup whose heartbeat had stuttered under my hand. I cried for the twenty-four-year-old woman kneeling on stone in front of two hundred wolves. I cried until I could not tell which loss the tears belonged to anymore, and then I stopped.

I washed my face in the small basin. The water was cold.

By the time the sky outside the narrow window began to gray toward morning, I was back at the security desk in the records room with three folders open in front of me. Rogue incursion reports for the past eighteen months. The pack's supply budget ledgers. The offshore forwarding address I'd traced the night of the miscarriage.

I began to cross-reference.

Dates. Amounts. The particular weeks when small unexplained diversions appeared in the supply accounts. The particular weeks when rogue activity spiked on our southern border. I laid the two timelines against each other and watched them begin to interlock.

I did not write anything down. I put it in the cold organized place inside me where I kept everything now, and I let it sit there and take its shape.

---

Two days later a rogue got into the pack house garden.

Or didn't. The story Laila told, sobbing in Zander's arms with her hair coming loose in exactly the right way, was that a hooded figure had come at her through the hedge with a blade. The story the ground told, when I walked the garden alone at dawn the next morning, was that no scent trail led to or from the hedge in question. No footprint in the soft earth beyond the paving. Nothing.

Zander did not walk the garden.

He summoned me to his study before noon and informed me, in a voice that did not invite discussion, that I would be reassigned to peripheral patrol duty effective immediately. Laila needed her rest. Laila needed to feel safe in her own home. Laila would be moving into the room adjacent to the Alpha suite for her protection.

I accepted the schedule without changing my expression. I took the patrol map from his desk, thanked him, and left.

Outside in the corridor, I paused just long enough to look at the map's border coverage.

It gave me access to every outer route I'd been trying to verify for three months.

I folded the paper into my jacket and went to change into boots.

---

I found the rogue on my fourth patrol.

He was young — maybe seventeen, if that — and he was slumped against a birch tree at the edge of a shallow ravine with a gash along his thigh that had stopped bleeding only because he'd stopped moving. His eyes were fever-bright when they found me. He did not have the strength to shift.

I knelt down at a careful distance and set my pack on the ground where he could see it.

"I'm going to bind that," I said. "Then you're going to talk to me."

He watched me the way animals watch. He did not have the reserves for anything else.

I cleaned the wound with what I had and wrapped it tight. His breath hitched twice. When I sat back on my heels, he closed his eyes and I thought for a moment he'd passed out, but then his mouth moved.

"You're the one they don't like."

"Who is *they*."

"The pack." His head lolled slightly. "She said you'd be the one who found me. She said if you did I should ask you for water and you'd give it."

Something very cold moved through my chest.

"Who is *she*."

His eyes drifted. "Doesn't have a name. Pays in silver. Wants quiet work. Wants — information. Wants people in the right places on the right nights." His breath rattled. "She's inside. Your pack. That's all I know. I swear that's all I know."

I gave him water from my flask. I sat with him for a moment longer. Then I stood up, walked ten paces down the ridge, and sent a mind-link to the warrior unit with his coordinates.

They came within the hour. I handed him over. I said nothing about what he had told me.

On the walk back to the pack house, under a sky going the flat gray of late autumn, I opened the cold organized place inside my chest and added a new column to what was already there.

*Silver. Inside. Right places. Right nights.*

My wolf, who had gone very quiet since the great hall, made a small sound I almost didn't catch. Not the stunned sound from the healer's wing. Not the slam against my ribs from the tribunal.

Something sharpening.

I kept walking.