My Alpha Poisoned Our Pups for His Mistress

The cabin still smelled like the last person who'd used it—woodsmoke and gun oil, a border patrol relic nobody had cleared out since Theodore's time. I sat on the cot with my knees pulled up under the ruined banquet dress and pressed my palm flat against my sternum, because something under my ribs had started pushing.

Not pain. Not exactly. Pain I knew. This was different—a low, animal pressure, like a fist closing slow around a held breath. It moved when I moved. It went still when I went still, and then it pushed again, harder, as if testing a door it had never once tried to open in twenty-three years.

"I know," I whispered into the dark. My voice came out wrecked. "Not yet."

It didn't answer. It had never answered. But it didn't go back to sleep either, and that was new enough that I sat there a long time with my hand on my chest, waiting to see if I'd imagined it.

My phone buzzed against the floorboards where I'd dropped it. I almost didn't look. Then I saw the name—Nessa, one of the kitchen girls I'd trained myself, sixteen and terrified of her own shadow around Christopher—and I picked it up because Nessa never called anyone.

"Luna—" She caught herself. "Zoey. I'm sorry. I didn't know who else to—" Her breath was ragged, like she was running. "She's throwing everything out. Right now. All your things, out the Luna suite windows, into the yard. Marcus tried to say something and Christopher just looked at him and Marcus stopped."

I didn't say anything. I found I couldn't.

"They're burning it," she said. "There's a pile in the yard, your dresses, your books, and—" Her voice cracked. "Zoey, she's got the quilt. The one from your room. She's holding it up and she's asking everyone if it's true, if it really is your dead mother's, like it's funny, and I don't—"

"Nessa." My own voice came out flat and far away. "Is it burning yet."

A pause. Wind on her end, and voices, and then the particular crackle of something catching that I would know anywhere, because I'd built a hundred bonfires for that pack with my own hands. "Yes," she said, very small. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

I sat with the phone against my ear and listened to a fire I couldn't see.

Six pups. A pendant. Seven years. I had walked out of that hall without a sound for all of it. But my mother's hands had sewn that quilt before I had a name anyone bothered to remember, before Theodore, before the debt, before any of it—and some things apparently keep a separate ledger from everything else you've already paid.

"Christopher's on the balcony," Nessa said. "Just watching. He hasn't said anything."

"Of course he hasn't." I closed my eyes. "Thank you for calling me. Don't do it again. If he finds out you have this number, he'll hurt you for it."

I hung up before she could argue. Under my ribs, the pressure surged once, hard enough that I gasped out loud in the empty cabin, and then it subsided, like something had bitten down on its own fury to keep from being seen.

"Soon," I told it. My hand was still on my chest. "I promise you. Soon."

The hours after that blurred. I don't remember most of them. I remember the cold getting into the cabin through a gap under the door, and I remember checking the satchel of ledgers twice, three times, running my thumb down the spines of the documents I'd smuggled out of Silverfang's records room a piece at a time over six months, back when I still thought I might need them for something smaller than this.

The headlights came a long time after I'd stopped watching for them.

Three black SUVs, no markings, moving without hurry down the border road the way things move when they don't expect resistance. I stood in the cabin doorway with the satchel over my shoulder and did not go to meet them. Let them come to me.

A man got out first—tall, dark-uniformed, an escort's bearing rather than a soldier's swagger. He looked at me for a second longer than protocol probably required. Whatever he saw, he didn't comment on it.

"Zoey Mitchell?" His voice was even, careful. "Prince Callum sent us."

"I know." I walked toward the vehicles on my own feet, satchel against my hip, spine straight even though every step still cost me something. Someone offered a blanket at the car door and I shook my head.

"The temperature's still dropping," the escort lead said, mild, not pushing.

I took it without answering. Wrapped it once around my shoulders.

"Thank you," I said, and meant it exactly once, and got into the car.