My Mate Chose His Ex Over His Luna

The rogues came from the eastern tree line just as the sun began to set.

I saw them first—three shadows moving wrong through the undergrowth, their forms low and fast. My mouth opened to shout a warning, but Jonas was already barking orders, his voice cutting through the gathered pack like a blade. The Council observers stood frozen near the center of the clearing. Bianca was beside Jonas, her hand clutching his arm.

Everything happened too fast and too slow at once.

The rogues broke from the trees. Five of them. No—six. Their eyes were wild, their fur matted and filthy. The pack warriors shifted mid-stride, bones cracking, bodies elongating into wolf form. I felt my own muscles tense, my body moving on instinct even though I had no wolf to call, no shift to complete. I stepped forward anyway, putting myself between the rogues and the Council observers because that was what a Luna did.

Then Jonas's voice slammed into me.

"Seraphina—STAY."

It wasn't a request. It was the full weight of his Alpha tone, unrestrained and absolute, the kind of command that locked every muscle in a wolf's body and left them helpless. My legs stopped moving. My lungs stopped pulling air. I couldn't turn my head. Couldn't blink. My body was a statue, frozen mid-step, and the rogues were still coming.

I felt Jonas's hand close around my upper arm. Then Chase's hand on my other side.

They lifted me—not gently, not carefully—and hurled me forward.

I hit the ground in front of the rogues.

The impact drove the air from my lungs. I heard something crack—ribs, maybe more—and then teeth closed on my shoulder and tore. Pain exploded white and blinding across my vision. I tried to scream but my throat wouldn't work. The Alpha tone still held me, even as the rogue's jaws shook me like a rag doll.

Somewhere behind me, Bianca was sobbing.

My left arm bent wrong. I felt it snap in two places, the bone giving way with a sound I would hear in nightmares for the rest of my life. Another rogue's claws raked across my side, and blood soaked into the dirt beneath me, warm and sticky and so much of it.

And then—deep in my chest, in the place where the mate bond had lived for eight years—something fractured.

It wasn't physical. It was worse. It was the sacred thread the Moon Goddess had woven between Jonas and me, the bond that was supposed to be unbreakable, snapping like a bone inside my soul. The pain of it was cold and hollow and so much worse than the teeth in my shoulder or the shattered ribs or the arm that wouldn't move anymore.

I closed my eyes.

The sounds of the fight went distant. Snarls. Yelps. The wet thud of bodies hitting earth. Jonas's voice, commanding the warriors, driving the rogues back.

When I opened my eyes again, the rogues were gone.

I was lying in the dirt fifteen feet from where the pack had gathered. My vision swam. Everything hurt in a way that made it hard to remember what not-hurting felt like. I tried to move my left arm and couldn't. Tried to sit up and my ribs screamed.

Jonas was crouched over Bianca.

She was sobbing—loud, gasping sobs—her hands pressed to her face. She wasn't bleeding. There wasn't a scratch on her. Jonas cradled her head in his lap, murmuring something I couldn't hear, his face twisted with worry.

I lay in the dirt and watched him hold her.

Elena, the pack healer, appeared at the edge of my vision. She ran toward me, her medical bag bouncing against her hip, her face tight with focus. She dropped to her knees beside me and reached for my shattered arm.

"Tend to Bianca's panic attack first."

Jonas's voice. Flat. Commanding. Not even looking at me.

"She's hyperventilating," he added. "Seraphina can wait."

Elena froze. Her hands hovered over my arm. She looked at me—really looked at me—and I saw it in her eyes. The calculation. The choice she was being forced to make.

She looked at Jonas. Then back at me. My blood was pooling under her knees.

"Alpha, she's—"

"Now, Elena."

Elena stood. She picked up her bag. She walked toward Bianca.

I closed my eyes again.

The ground was cold beneath me. My breath came in shallow, painful gasps. Somewhere far away, I could hear the Council observers murmuring, their voices low and careful. I wondered if they were writing this down. If they would note, in their formal reports, that the Luna of Ironveil had been used as a shield and left to bleed while the Alpha comforted his ex-mate.

I wondered if it mattered.

Eventually—minutes or hours, I couldn't tell—Elena came back. She didn't speak. She just knelt beside me and began working, her hands quick and practiced, splinting my arm, wrapping my ribs, packing the wound on my shoulder with gauze that turned red almost immediately.

Two warriors lifted me onto a stretcher. The movement sent fresh waves of agony through my body, and I bit down on my tongue to keep from crying out. They carried me to the pack house, up the stairs, into the healer's ward.

Elena worked in near-silence. She couldn't meet my eyes.

When she finally finished, she stood at the foot of the bed and stared at her own hands. They were still stained with my blood.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

I didn't answer. I didn't have the strength.

She left.

I lay in the narrow bed, my body splinted and bandaged and screaming, and stared at the ceiling. The mate bond pulsed in my chest like an open wound, sending cold nausea through me in waves. I pressed my good hand flat against my sternum and felt it—the fracture, the hollow place where Jonas's presence used to be.

And beneath it, buried deep, something else stirred.

Not a flicker this time. Not a stir.

A snarl.

Low and furious and so, so tired of being silent.

I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me.

But even in sleep, I could feel her—my wolf, my dormant, poisoned, beaten-down wolf—pacing behind my ribs.

Waiting.