Rejected While My Mate Saved Another Woman's Life

The cell had no windows. I learned to count time by Alonzo's footsteps.

Three days in, I found the corner.

It was the far one, where two silver panels met without quite meeting. A thin seam ran the length of the wall, no wider than a pencil. I pressed my fingertips into it and waited for the burn that didn't come. The silver had forgotten that one place. A mistake. A breath of air in a sealed room.

I pressed my thumb against my wrist. Pulse there. Still alive. Still here.

"Injection one," I whispered into the dark. "Tuesday, eleven-fourteen. Two milliliters. Authorization header: by order of Alpha Dillon, seal stamped lower right corner of the log page. Routing notation in Alonzo's handwriting—initials A.M., page number forty-one."

My voice sounded strange. Drugged. Slow. But the words were right.

I said them again. And again. Until the rhythm of them outpaced the wolfsbane crawling through my veins.

Footsteps in the corridor.

I moved away from the corner before the door opened.

Alonzo came in the way he always came in—clipboard tucked under his arm, syringe case in his other hand, eyes flat as paper. He didn't look at my face. He never did. He looked at my arm.

"Roll your sleeve."

I rolled my sleeve.

The needle went in. Cold first, then a slow burn that traveled up my shoulder and settled behind my eyes like a hand pressing down. My wolf—if I had a wolf, if there was anything inside me at all—stayed silent. Buried. The wolfsbane found her wherever she was hiding and held her there.

Alonzo stamped the log. Click of the seal. The sound a door makes when it closes for good.

"Injection two," I recited silently. "Wednesday, eleven-oh-six. Same dosage. Same authorization. Page forty-two."

He left.

I counted four injections by the end of the third day. Four timestamps. Four pages. Four chances to memorize the architecture of my own burial.

---

On the fifth day, Alonzo made a mistake.

He was refilling the syringe at the small steel cart by the door. His back was turned. The clipboard sat on the floor beside his boot, just inside my reach if I was careful, if I didn't move too fast, if I didn't breathe wrong.

I looked at the wall.

I did not look at the clipboard. I looked at the wall, and I let my eyes drift down at the angle a drugged prisoner's eyes drift, and I read.

Three routing notations. Alonzo's handwriting—square, efficient, slightly slanted to the right. The dates. The dosages. The authorization header repeating like a heartbeat at the top of every page: BY ORDER OF ALPHA DILLON, IRONRIDGE PACK. The seal pressed firm and clean in red wax, the wolf's-head insignia I'd watched Dillon use to sign three years of pack documents.

I memorized it the way I'd memorized prayers as a child. Word for word. Mark for mark.

Alonzo turned. Bent. Picked up the clipboard.

He looked at me.

I was staring at the wall.

He stamped the log. He left.

My thumb found my wrist pulse in the dark. Still here. Still here. Still here.

---

The sixth night, the wolfsbane thinned.

It always did, in the hour before the next dose—a window where the drug loosened its grip just enough that I could feel my own thoughts without dragging them through mud. I sat in the corner with my fingers pressed into the seam and reached.

Mind-link was not supposed to work in here. The silver was supposed to kill it. But the corner forgot the silver, and I had been her father's best friend's almost-daughter, and the channel between us had been worn smooth by years of use.

I pushed.

The link caught.

It was thin—thinner than thread, thinner than spider silk—and the moment it connected I knew it was wrong. One-directional. I could hear, but I could not speak. My voice was too weak to push back through.

I almost wept anyway. Just to hear someone who wasn't Alonzo.

Riley was in his study. I knew the room from his side of the link—the leather chair, the smell of pipe smoke, the low fire. He was not alone.

"—the northern ridge as well," Dillon was saying. "Hunting rights for your line. Permanent stewardship, Riley. Yours and your sons'."

A long, comfortable pause. The sound of a glass being set down on wood.

"And the logs?" Riley said.

His voice was warm. Unhurried. The voice he used when he sat me on his knee as a pup. The voice he used at my father's grave.

"Natural wolf-heart failure," Dillon said. "Your seal on the cause-of-death entry. The healer's withdrawal disappears. Marcus's name comes off the ritual log entirely."

"Mm."

A scratch of pen on paper. A breath of air through Riley's nose. The soft, final sound of an elder's seal pressed into wax.

"Done," Riley said.

It took less than ten minutes.

Then the pause.

The terrible pause.

Riley's voice, suddenly sharper: "—is someone—"

I severed the link before he could trace it.

The dark came back. The cell came back. The cold of the silver and the slow burn of the wolfsbane in my veins and the empty patch of skin on my neck where something sacred used to live.

I sat very still.

I didn't cry. I had stopped crying on the second day, when I understood that crying used water, and I needed the water for staying alive.

I pressed my thumb to my wrist.

Still here.

The last thread of who I had been before that night unraveled in the dark, and what was left underneath was not grief. It was not even rage anymore. It was something quieter than both, and harder, and far more useful.

I began to recite the log entries again.

From the beginning.

Word for word.