My Mate Sacrificed Me to Save His Mistress

The crystal clicked on at 3:47 in the afternoon, and my own name came out of it in my mate's voice.

I was crouched behind Kolton's desk, the recording device warm in my palm where I'd wedged it out from under the drawer track. I'd only come in for the trade contracts he'd sent me to fetch. My fingers had brushed something that wasn't wood, and now his voice was in the room with me, calm and quiet, the way he sounded when he was giving orders about grain shipments.

"Wolfsbane at the joints of the climbing frame. Silver shavings woven into the grip wraps. Nothing lethal. We want the pain response, not a body."

My ribs — the ones that had cracked in the third "accident," the ones that still ached when it rained — went cold from the inside.

Then Brooke's voice. Soft. Clinical. "Keep the dosage under two grams. Any more and her wolf stops producing the essence cleanly. We need her healing, not dying."

"Understood," Kolton said.

I sat down on the rug. I didn't decide to. My knees just stopped holding me.

The silver line across my back. The wolfsbane discoloration on my forearm that never fully faded. The night I woke on the training field with my ribs grinding and Kolton's face above me, telling me I'd been careless. All of it — laid out in his voice like a supply order.

Inside me, my wolf — the wolf that had been so tired for months I'd started to forget the sound of her — let out one small whimper. Then went quiet. The kind of quiet that isn't sleep.

I shoved the crystal into my boot, jammed it down against my ankle, and I was still trying to stand up when the door opened.

Kolton took one look at my face and did not ask.

"Stop."

The Alpha tone hit me like a hand around every muscle at once. My foot froze halfway to the floor. My throat locked. I couldn't even blink fast.

He crossed the room without hurrying. He was never in a hurry. He lifted the moonstone pendant off my collarbone with two fingers, the chain sliding up under my hair, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

"You'll get it back," he said, "when you've proven your loyalty."

My wolf lunged inside my chest. I felt her throw herself at the compulsion and hit it like a wall. She fell back. She didn't get up.

The pendant leaving my skin felt like something being cut. Not sliced — cut, the way a wire is cut, with a small final snap. My hand wanted to fly to my throat and couldn't.

"Silas is outside," Kolton said. "Go with him."

My body walked before I told it to.

---

The medical wing smelled like antiseptic and something metallic underneath. Silver. I knew before I turned the corner.

The table was already set. Silver inlay running down the length of it in a thin bright vein, restraints at the wrists and ankles, a tray of instruments laid out on a white cloth. Declan, the pack healer, stood beside it with his sleeves rolled up. He didn't meet my eyes.

I understood then, all the way down.

I screamed into the mate bond. Not words. There weren't words. I poured every raw piece of terror I had left down that link — *Kolton please Kolton please it's me it's me it's me* — a wordless animal noise flung across the bond with everything my broken wolf had.

His end went silent.

Not silent like he was thinking. Silent like a door closing. He'd muted the link. He didn't want to hear me.

Silas put his hand between my shoulder blades and guided me forward. Not roughly. Almost gently. That was worse.

I don't remember getting on the table. I remember the silver against my back, the way it burned in a slow smoldering line, and Declan's voice saying something about breathing, and then a pain I don't have language for — a hooking, dragging pain that went into the place inside me where my wolf lived, and pulled.

She made one sound. A thread of a howl. Then a whisper. Then almost nothing.

When it was over they left me on the table.

---

I woke up in a bare room with a cot and a water pitcher. No Kolton. My hand went to my throat before I remembered, and closed on empty skin.

The door opened. Brooke came in.

She wore the soft face, the one with the trembling mouth and the wet eyes, and she wore it right up until the door clicked shut behind her. Then her expression smoothed like a bedsheet.

"You've been sufficient," she said, pulling a chair over and sitting down with her hands folded. "For now. There may be future extractions. I wanted you to know in advance so you can prepare yourself emotionally."

I couldn't move enough to answer.

"You should be grateful," she added, almost kindly. "The Moon Goddess gave you a strong wolf so you'd have something to offer. Not everyone gets a purpose."

My wolf, faint as breath, stirred.

Not in grief. In something cold and directional I had never felt from her before. *Remember this*, she said, quiet under my ribs. *Every word.*

I closed my eyes and I did.

---

Three days later I could walk again if I went slowly.

I went back through the common grounds like a woman who'd been ill. Head down. Steps careful. Nobody looked at me too long. I made it to the storage shed off the training field where I'd left my boots after the last drill, and I sat on the bench and pulled the left one off.

The crystal was still wedged against the inner sole. He hadn't thought to check.

I tore a strip from the inside hem of my shirt, wrapped the crystal tight, and tucked the small hard weight of it up against my ribs, under the band of my bra where nothing on me was ever searched. It sat over the cracked place. The one bone in my body that still felt like mine.

I didn't have a plan yet. I didn't destroy it.

My wolf, thin as a whisper, went still. Not sleeping still. Watching still.

Something like approval.

Across the yard, through the open door of the Alpha's house, I saw Brooke walk past a window in my Luna robe.