My Alpha Ordered My Blood Draw to Save His Mistress

The Autumn Hunt roster went up on the great hall board at dawn, and I found my name at the bottom, under a heading I'd never seen used for a Luna before: Peripheral Support.

No one had told me directly. That was its own message. I read the list twice to be sure, then walked past the cluster of Deltas already murmuring near the board, their voices dropping when they saw me, and went to find my assigned sector map without asking anyone to explain.

The ranked wolves ran the interior circuit — the honor route, thick with game, thick with pack prestige. Peripheral Support meant the outer tree line, alone, watching for nothing in particular while everyone who mattered ran together under the same moon. I had been Luna of this pack for three years. Now I was a fence post.

I didn't argue. Arguing required an audience that believed I deserved one.

My sector was quiet timber, half a mile of birch and low bramble along the southern boundary. I moved through it slow and careful, my senses stretched thin the way they'd been since the tribunal, since the garden, since the boy with the fever-bright eyes had said *she's inside.* My wolf pressed against my ribs with a restlessness I hadn't felt from her since the great hall floor. Not fear exactly. Something more like a held breath.

I checked the map again. Laila's sector, according to the roster, sat directly adjacent to mine. Two names beside hers I didn't recognize — junior warriors, the board said. I'd memorized every warrior in this pack over three years of security reports. I didn't know those names.

I kept walking. My hand found the small hunting knife at my belt, more out of habit than plan.

The attack came without warning, the way real ones never do and staged ones always do — too clean, too close, the underbrush crashing exactly where it needed to crash. Wolves shifted around me in the dark, snarling, a chaos of fur and teeth that I could not immediately sort into friend or enemy. I backed against a birch trunk, blade up, breath fast.

Through the confusion, Laila appeared at my shoulder. Uninjured. Untouched. Her eyes found mine for exactly one second, and in that second I saw the calculation running behind them, cold and complete, and I understood — too late to matter — that I had walked into the shape she'd built for me.

"Lucille—" Her voice cracked with manufactured panic. Her hands closed on my arms.

A rogue broke through the tree line with a blade that caught the moonlight silver and wrong.

Laila shoved.

Both hands, full weight, her face already arranging itself into terror before the blade ever found me — she'd rehearsed the expression, I thought distantly, she'd rehearsed all of it — and then the silver went into my abdomen and there was no more room in my head for thinking anything at all.

The pain was not like the tribunal. It was not like the healer's wing. It was a white column of fire that started at my stomach and radiated outward until it filled every nerve I had, silver burning through muscle the way silver only burns through wolves, deeper with every heartbeat instead of less. I went down into the leaves. I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize as my own voice.

The trees tore open above me — black fur, a wave of aura so heavy it flattened the underbrush. Zander. His head swept the clearing in a single pass, cataloging it the way he catalogued everything, fast and final.

Laila on the ground, unmarked, arms outstretched, sobbing in the register that had always worked on him.

Me three feet away, silver buried in my gut, blood soaking black into the leaf litter.

He shifted back to human form in one motion. He crossed to Laila. He gathered her up against his chest with a tenderness I remembered from a lifetime ago, from a version of him I'd once believed existed for me too, and he turned and ran for the pack house at a speed that shook the ground under my cheek.

He stepped over me.

I felt the displacement of air as he passed, felt the shadow of him fall across my face and lift again, and I understood with a clarity that the pain somehow sharpened rather than dulled: he had looked at both of us in that clearing and made his choice in under a second, the same choice he'd made every day for three years, and he had not even slowed his stride to make it.

He did not look back.

I lay in the cold dirt and watched the canopy tilt and blur above me, black branches against a sky gone strange and silver-edged, and the silver in my wound burned lower, deeper, chasing the last warm places left in my body.

And for the first time since I was a child too small to remember why she'd gone quiet, my wolf spoke to me. Not a howl. Not the stunned animal sound from the healer's wing. One word, clear as a bell struck once in an empty room.

*Enough.*