My Mate Suppressed My Wolf for Seven Years

The neutral grounds smelled like cedar smoke and unfamiliar packs — pine from the Marrow delegation, something coppery from Redbrook, a clean cold scent I couldn't place at all. I moved through it with a tray balanced on my forearm, pouring wine into cups I didn't recognize, for Alphas who didn't know my name used to mean something.

Sylvie stood near the east entrance exactly where she said she'd be, Ashfell colors on her collar, arms crossed like she was bored. She wasn't bored. Her eyes tracked me every time I crossed the clearing, quick and precise, a soldier counting exits.

The stranger was harder to place. He stood apart from every delegation, dressed in dark Court livery none of the packs wore, and he didn't eat, didn't drink, didn't make the small polite noises everyone else made to fill silence. He watched. Three times in twenty minutes his gaze found me and stayed a beat too long, like he was trying to place a smell he couldn't name. I told myself it didn't matter. Omegas don't get to wonder why someone looks at them.

Dylan held court at the center of it all, Arianna on his arm in green silk, laughing at exactly the right moments. "Thornwood has never been stronger," he told Alpha Corvin of Redbrook, and Corvin nodded like he believed it, but his eyes drifted past Dylan's shoulder to me twice, then a third time, something assessing in his face that made Arianna's smile go thin at the edges.

She found an excuse within the hour. "The perimeter decorations," she said to her two shadows, loud enough for anyone nearby to hear. "I want to check them before the toasts." Her eyes cut to me. "Omega Twelve. Come hold the lantern."

I set down my tray and followed her toward the boundary line, where the silver-thorn fence marked the edge of neutral ground, strung with lanterns for the occasion. Her two she-wolves trailed us, already smirking, already knowing the shape of what was coming.

"You're standing wrong," Arianna said, not looking at me, examining a lantern like it had personally offended her. "Shoulders back. You used to know how to hold yourself. Or did that leave with your wolf?"

I said nothing. I held the lantern steady.

"And your scent." She wrinkled her nose. "Lye and fear. Very Luna of you." She turned, finally, to look at me directly, waiting for something — a flinch, a tremble, anything to feed on. I gave her nothing. My silence had cost me before. Tonight it seemed to cost her more.

Something in her face cracked open. "Do you think staying quiet makes you dignified?" Her voice climbed, sharp enough that one of the visiting Deltas glanced over. "You're staff. You're nothing. Say something."

I still didn't. That was the mistake, maybe, or maybe it was never going to matter what I did.

Her hand hit my chest before I saw it coming, and the fence was closer than I'd realized, close enough that when I stumbled back there was nothing behind me but silver thorns strung tight on wire. I felt the impact before I understood it — a hundred small mouths biting into both forearms at once, heat and ice at the same time, a smell like scorched hair rising off my own skin. I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize.

Blood ran warm down both wrists, dripping off my fingers into the frost-hard grass. The burn didn't fade the way ordinary pain fades. It sank in, spreading under the skin like something looking for a way further in.

Arianna stepped back from the fence line, inspecting her own hands under the lantern light — unmarked, pale, perfect — and smiled like she'd proven something.

I heard Dylan before I saw him, boots crossing the clearing at a run, and for one useless half-second something old in my chest lifted, some seven-year reflex that still expected him to reach for me first.

He stepped over me.

His boot came down in the space beside my bleeding arm, close enough that I felt the cold air move, and he caught both of Arianna's hands in his, turning them under the light, checking her fingers, her palms, her wrists, his face tight with a fear he'd never once shown for me.

"Are you hurt? Did it touch you?" His voice cracked with real panic. "Show me."

He never looked down. Not once. Not at the blood soaking into the frozen ground beneath me, not at my arms, not at me.

The clearing had gone very still. I felt it rather than saw it — every visiting Alpha frozen mid-motion, cups lowered, conversations dying in throats. Sylvie was already moving, fast, cutting a straight line through the crowd toward me. And across the grass, the stranger in Court livery had stopped pretending to watch anything else at all.