My Alpha Poisoned Me for His Chosen Mate

Three days after I pulled the wards, the eastern border broke.

I was on my knees scrubbing the kitchen floor when the pack-link buzzed through the house—two warriors down, rogue tracks past the old oaks, blood on the moss. I kept scrubbing. My sponge moved in even circles. I heard boots pounding through the corridor above me, heard Marcus shouting orders, heard Enzo's voice cut through it all like a blade.

"Doubled patrols. Every shift. If anyone missed a rotation this week, I want their name."

He blamed the warriors. Of course he did. I heard him tell Marcus the men had gotten soft, that the borders had been too quiet for too long and complacency had crept in. He never once said the word wards. He didn't know the word applied to him.

I kept scrubbing. My hands ached from the cold water, but they still worked. That would matter later.

Dinner came on a tray Brittany brought down herself.

She set it on the little folding table by my cot and smiled at me the way you smile at something already dead. "Kitchen said you'd missed the last two meals. Alpha's orders—the pack takes care of its own."

She left. The door closed. I looked at the tray.

Stew. Bread. A cup of water.

I should have known. I should have smelled it. But my wolf was still silent, and my nose had been dulled since the ceremony, and I was so tired that hunger had become a low steady hum I'd stopped hearing. I ate the stew. All of it. I even wiped the bowl with the crust.

I woke at 3:12 AM screaming.

My hands were on fire. Not metaphor—actual fire, the kind that lives inside bone and eats outward. I looked down and my fingers were blackening at the tips, the skin curling inward like paper held to a candle. I could feel the nerve channels—the same delicate pathways I'd used to weave wards for seven years—burning shut one by one. Wolfsbane. Concentrated. Enough to destroy, not kill.

I knew the difference. I'd studied both.

I staggered up the basement stairs on legs that didn't want to hold me. My hands seized against my chest, the fingers curling into claws I couldn't uncurl. I made it down two hallways before I remembered where I was going. Enzo. Enzo would call the healer. Enzo would—

I pounded on his door with my forearm because my fists wouldn't close.

He opened it in a black t-shirt and sleep pants. His hair was rumpled. Brittany was somewhere behind him in the room; I could smell her perfume in the doorway, cloying and floral, wrong.

He looked at my hands.

He looked at my face.

I opened my mouth to tell him—wolfsbane, poisoning, please, the healer—and he said, "Enough."

His Alpha tone.

It cracked through my skull like a whip against wet stone. My teeth clacked together. My knees gave. The word rolled through my nervous system with the full weight of his authority behind it, and my body obeyed before my mind could catch up.

"You've been hysterical since the ceremony," he said, quieter, but the tone was still there. "Go back to bed, Vivian. This is beneath you."

He closed the door.

I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor. My hands throbbed against my chest. I could hear his voice through the door, low, telling Brittany something I couldn't make out. I could hear her murmured answer. I could hear a soft laugh.

And then—for the first time since the platform—my wolf stirred.

She didn't howl. She didn't rage. Her voice came through the ruined silence in my chest like a coal breathed back to life, faint and damaged and unmistakably present.

*Get up. We are not done.*

I got up.

I don't remember the walk back to the basement. I remember the cot. I remember laying my hands palm-up on the cold sheet and staring at them for a long time. The blackening had stopped at the second knuckle. The nerve channels were gone. I would never weave a ward again. I would never set a bone the old way, never stitch a wound with light instead of thread.

But the fingers moved. That was enough.

I treated myself for three days.

Comfrey paste from the kitchen herb rack. Willow bark tea. A poultice of yarrow and honey that I mixed with my elbows because I couldn't grip a spoon. I knew every plant in Nightfall's territory the way most wolves know the faces of their own family—I'd studied them alone, in the hours before dawn, back when I thought knowledge was a kind of currency I could someday cash in.

On the fourth morning, I rose. I tied my hair back with my teeth. I put on the Omega uniform. I performed my duties.

And I began collecting.

A glass vial from the infirmary supply closet, small enough to palm. A lancet from the same shelf. A strip of wax seal from the archive room's cabinet, folded into my apron pocket. No one watched me. Omegas are furniture. Omegas are the mop and the bucket. Brittany passed me twice in the hallway that day and did not look down.

That night, while I was in the kitchen scouring pots I couldn't quite feel against my palms, she went to the archive vault.

I didn't know it then. I only learned later that the smoke came at 2 AM, that the vault's ancient door had been left ajar, that the centuries of bloodline records had been reduced to ash by the time anyone noticed. And in the ash, embedded like a signature, was the scent of an Omega's stolen tunic.

Mine.

She was thorough. She was unhurried. She accounted for everything.

Except the vial in my apron pocket.