My Mate Let Them Kill Our Pup

The staff tore through me like a key turning in a lock I didn't know I had.

And the first image that came wasn't Ethan's face.

It wasn't the font, or the blood, or Victoria's soft, poisonous mouth.

It was me. Twelve years old. Barefoot on the iron spikes of Ironveil's outer gate, the points pressing up through the thin skin of my soles, not quite breaking through. Not yet. I was holding myself very still, the way you learn to hold yourself when pain is the only thing keeping you upright.

No one opened the door.

The staff didn't care what I wanted to remember. It went digging.

---

I was nine when my parents sold me.

Not to a pack. Not to anyone with a name I was allowed to know. A man who smelled like copper and river water came to our house on a Tuesday, and my mother made tea, and they talked in the kitchen while I sat on the stairs and listened to the sound of numbers being exchanged. A price. My price.

I remember thinking it was higher than I expected.

The cage was silver. Not bars—actual silver, the walls, the floor, the low ceiling I couldn't stand up straight under after I turned eleven and grew three inches in four months. The man who bought me had theories about what I was. He kept records in a leather notebook, columns of dates and measurements and observations. He bled me on a schedule. He noted how the silver slowed the bleeding but never stopped it entirely. He noted the way my wounds healed—faster than human, slower than wolf. He noted the faint shimmer at the back of my neck that appeared when I was feverish or frightened.

He called it an anomaly.

I called it the thing that was going to get me out of here.

The day I escaped, I didn't plan it. I'd stopped planning things by then. Planning required a version of the future you could believe in, and I'd run out of those. What happened was simpler: he left the notebook too close to the cage door, and when he reached in to retrieve it, I grabbed his wrist and didn't let go. I bit down until something gave. I don't know if it was his wrist or mine. I think it was mine.

I ran anyway.

Three days. No shoes. No coat. The silver had done something to my sense of direction—or maybe that was just hunger—but the collar around my neck had a name pressed into the back of it, stamped into the metal like an afterthought.

Ironveil.

I followed it like a compass.

---

The gate was taller than I remembered imagining it.

I stood on the spikes because the ground in front of them was lower, and I needed the height to see over the wall. I needed someone inside to see me. I stood there and I bled, slow and cold, into the iron, and I waited.

The night passed.

The sun came up gray and indifferent.

And then there were footsteps on the other side of the wall—unhurried, like someone on an early patrol who wasn't expecting anything—and a voice said, "What in the—"

The gate opened from the inside.

He was young. Seventeen, maybe eighteen, with a Beta's build and an expression caught somewhere between alarm and something more careful. He looked at my feet first. Then up at my face. Then he pulled off his coat without saying a word and wrapped it around my shoulders, and the warmth of it hit me so suddenly that my knees nearly went.

His name was Nathan Hollow.

I didn't know that yet. I didn't know anything yet except that someone had opened the door.

He crouched down to look at my feet, and then his hand moved—slowly, deliberately, like he was trying not to startle me—to the back of my neck. His fingers found the birthmark there. The one that shimmered faint silver when I was scared.

I felt him go very still.

When he looked up at me, something had changed in his face. Not the careful blankness people use when they're deciding whether to be afraid. Something quieter. More like grief.

"Silverblood," he said. Barely a sound.

I didn't know what that meant. I didn't ask.

He stood up. Looked back at the gate, then at me, then at the gate again. Then he pressed two fingers lightly against the birthmark—not hard, just enough to cover it—and his voice dropped to something I had to lean in to hear.

"Don't show them this. Not yet." A pause. "Not ever, if you can help it."

He said it like he was pressing a thumb over a fuse.

Then he picked me up—just lifted me, because my feet were useless and he'd apparently decided that was simply the situation—and carried me through the gate and into Ironveil.

He never told anyone about the birthmark.

Not that I knew of. Not for years.

---

The staff wrenched me back to the present like a hook through the jaw.

I was on the treatment table now—they'd moved me while I was under, or maybe I'd never fully tracked the transition. The stone room. The cold light. Soren's hands somewhere near my head, and the staff's compulsion fading to a dull, nauseating hum at the base of my skull.

I stared at the ceiling and I thought about Nathan's voice.

*Not ever, if you can help it.*

And then I thought about Victoria.

The thought arrived the way the worst realizations do—not with drama, just with a quiet, terrible click of pieces falling into place.

Victoria had known.

Not guessed. Known. She'd known about the birthmark from the beginning—or close enough to it that the difference didn't matter. Five years of watching me, testing me, pushing me toward Ethan with one hand and pulling the ground out from under me with the other. Five years of small cruelties and careful positioning, of making sure I was isolated enough that no one would question whatever came next.

She hadn't been trying to destroy me.

She'd been farming me.

Silverblood couldn't be extracted from a body at rest. The old texts—the ones I'd found in Ironveil's lower library three years ago, the ones I'd told myself were mythology—were specific about that. The blood had to be activated. Stressed. Pushed to the edge of something.

Like, for instance, pregnancy.

Like, for instance, a forced truth-compulsion on a woman three months along.

Like, for instance, right now.

Victoria didn't want Ethan's heir.

She wanted what the heir's existence had done to my blood.

She'd been waiting—patiently, methodically, with that soft wounded smile she wore like a weapon—for the exact moment when my body held the highest concentration of activated Silverblood possible. Mother and child together. Three hundred years of dormant lineage, finally live.

And she was going to drain us both dry.

I turned my head.

Victoria stood at the edge of the room, near the door, her dark eyes already on mine.

She wasn't smiling.

She didn't need to.