My Mate Chose His Mistress Over Our Unborn Child

Nana's cottage smelled like dried lavender and woodsmoke, and for the first two days I didn't get up.

I told myself it was exhaustion. The drive, the cold, the weeks of holding myself together with nothing but locked knees and silence. But my body knew the truth before I did. It finished what the bond's severance had started, quietly and without mercy, in the narrow spare bed under Nana's oldest quilt. I lay still and let it happen because there was nothing else I could do.

Nana knew something was wrong within the first hour. She didn't push — not at first. She brought broth and didn't ask why I wasn't eating it. She changed the quilt when I ruined it and didn't say a word. But I could hear her in the kitchen, the particular way her footsteps went hard against the floor when she was furious and trying not to show it.

On the second morning she stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and looked at me the way she used to when I was twelve and lying about where I'd been.

"Tell me," she said.

"He chose someone else." My voice came out flat. It didn't even hurt to say it. That was the worst part — how flat everything had gone.

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she turned back toward the kitchen and I heard her say his name, low and vicious, in a tone I'd never heard from her before. The sound of a pot hitting the stove. Silence.

I stared at the ceiling and tried to find my wolf.

She wasn't there. Not sleeping, not pacing, not even a distant warmth at the back of my skull. Just absence. A room with the furniture removed, walls still standing. I'd never been alone inside my own body like this — not since I was thirteen and she first surfaced, clumsy and enormous and mine. Now there was nothing, and the nothing had a shape, and the shape was the exact size of everything I'd lost in that clearing.

I didn't cry. I'd done the crying alone in a clinic bathroom while Petra Voss stood outside the door and said nothing because there was nothing to say. I'd used up whatever that was. What was left was quieter and harder and I didn't have a name for it yet.

By the end of the first week I was out of bed. I helped Nana with the garden, carried the heavier things she couldn't manage, watched her hands tremble when she thought I wasn't looking. The oxygen tank had appeared since my last visit, tucked beside her reading chair like it belonged there. She didn't mention it. I didn't ask.

I was watching those hands when Ronan's car pulled up the gravel drive fourteen days after the ceremony.

I heard the engine before I saw it. Something in my chest — the hollow where my wolf used to live — went very still. Not recognition. Just bracing.

He looked the same. That was the first thing I noticed, and it made me tired in a way I couldn't explain. He looked exactly the same, standing in Nana's kitchen doorway with his jaw set and his eyes moving over me like he was checking inventory. Like I was still something that belonged on his list.

"You need to come back," he said. Not hello. Not I'm sorry. Just that.

Nana's chair scraped in the next room. The oxygen tank hissed softly.

"No." The word came out without effort.

His eyes moved toward the sound. Something shifted in his expression — not softness, exactly. Calculation wearing the face of concern.

"Her condition is worse than she's telling you." He kept his voice low, reasonable, like he was doing me a favor. "The pack Healer network has three specialists who could be here within the week. Resources the cottage can't provide." He paused. "All I need is a public pretense. Just through the political season. Six weeks, maybe eight. You come back, you stand beside me at the necessary events, and Nana gets the care she needs."

I looked at him for a long moment. The man who had carved a small wooden wolf with frozen fingers in a hunter's cabin because he had nothing else to give me. The man who had stood between me and his father's enforcers and taken the hit. I looked at him and tried to find the version of him I'd spent years protecting, and found only this: a man who had learned, very early, that my love had no floor.

From the next room came the sound of Nana shifting in her chair, a small labored breath.

My jaw didn't move when I said yes. It came out of somewhere below speech, below decision, from the same place that had driven myself to the clinic alone and folded a report into a recipe book and kept driving north. The place that had been calculating since before I knew there was anything to calculate.

"Six weeks," I said.

He nodded, already satisfied, already turning toward the door like the conversation was finished.

I watched him go and thought: he has no idea what he just handed me.