My Alpha Left Me to Die in a Silver Cage, So I Chose the Enemy Who Opened It

Leah's POV

The truck came back before nine.

I heard it grind up the drive, and then the gate rattled. A guard shouted something. A woman's voice answered him, calm and flat, the voice of someone who'd argued her way past a lot of gates.

She climbed down from the passenger side with a worn leather medical bag over her shoulder. Gray hair cut short, a canvas coat patched at both elbows. In her other hand she held a square of paper, folded twice.

My letter.

Darian met her on the steps. "You're the Greywater doctor."

"Miriam Kessler. I'm here for Leah Marsh."

"You can examine her." He looked down at me through the bars. "And then you can tell me whether she's actually sick, or whether she's putting on a show for you, too."

"I'll tell you what I find," Miriam said.

Two guards unlocked the cage and hauled me up by the arms. My legs folded halfway, so they half-carried me toward a storage room off the side of the house that someone had cleared out, with a cot and a space heater ticking in the corner.

At the doorway, my foot caught on the threshold. It was maybe two inches high. I lifted my knee and nothing happened, and I stood there staring at a strip of wood I couldn't step over.

The guard on my left sighed and lifted me over it like a sack of flour.

Miriam pulled a stool up to the cot and set her bag on the floor. She didn't reach for me right away.

"Leah, I'm going to touch the collar. Is that all right?"

Nobody had asked me anything since I woke up. Not like that, as if the answer mattered.

I nodded.

Her fingers were warm. She eased the torn fleece out from under the band, and I clenched my teeth hard enough to hurt. She tilted my chin toward the light, looked for a long moment, and said nothing about what she saw. She just reached for a pen.

"You wrote that your wolf is barely answering. Is she answering now?"

I closed my eyes. *Lyra?*

Nothing. Then, very faint, a sound that wasn't quite a word.

"Just now," I said. "But it took a while."

"How long, would you guess?"

"Maybe a minute."

She marked it on a pulse chart clipped to a board, next to a column of numbers. "I'll ask you again in ten. Batch GW-0417. What was in it?"

"Gauze." My voice came out slurred and thick. I had to stop and swallow. "Amoxicillin. Two... two suture kits."

She waited for me to finish. She didn't fill in the words when I stumbled, and she didn't look at Darian in the doorway while she did it.

Then she put the pen down.

"She needs the collar removed," Miriam said, turning toward him. "And she needs transport to my clinic. Today. Now."

"No."

"Alpha, the silver is through the skin. I can see tissue damage near the left artery. Her wolf takes a full minute to respond, and that number is going in the wrong direction."

"The collar stays on until the rite," Darian said. "That's pack law for a banishment."

"Then loosen it and keep it off her skin entirely..."

"You can loosen it one notch." He folded his arms. "Put something under it. I need her standing at sunset. That's all I need from you."

Miriam looked at him for a long moment.

"She needs the collar removed. Keeping her conscious is not the same as keeping her safe."

"One notch, Doctor."

She didn't argue again. She took a padded collar lining from her bag, a strip of gray cloth with a silver-blocking weave, and loosened the band one hole. It shifted, and I made a sound I didn't recognize. She slid the lining under it, slowly, all the way around.

Then she tore a page from her notebook and wrote. I watched her hand move. *Continued silver contact. Risk of permanent loss of wolf. Risk of death.* She wrote the time at the bottom and drew a line under it.

"This is my medical warning," she said, and held it out to Darian. "If you're refusing transport, I need you to sign that you've read it."

He took the pen.

I stared at the tip of it, the way you'd watch a coin spinning on a table. He had read it. He'd seen *death* in her handwriting. Some part of Leah still believed he'd stop at his own name.

He signed. The pen didn't slow down at all.

He pushed the paper back across the cot. "When can she go back in the cage?"

The door behind him opened before Miriam could answer.

Allison came in with a guard at her shoulder. Mason, the one with the flashlight from last night. She held up a small amber bottle between two fingers, the way you'd hold something dead.

"Since there's a doctor here, she should see this," Allison said. "We found it in Leah's room. She swapped her daily pills for something else and poured it into my tea." She looked at Miriam with big, wet eyes. "I was sick all night."

Darian's face went hard. "Is that true, Leah?"

I looked at the bottle instead of him.

Leah's pills had come in a white paper sleeve, printed with the pharmacy logo, sealed with a blue strip. I knew it the way I knew her handwriting. This bottle had a red foil seal and no sleeve at all.

"That's not my packaging," I said. "Doctor. There's a number on the seal. Write down the number before anyone takes it away."

Allison's grip on the bottle tightened. Miriam had already uncapped her pen.

"Hold it to the light, please," she said to Mason.

He did, frowning. Miriam copied the digits into a medical notebook and read them back out loud. Then she paused.

"When did you find this?"

"Around four this morning," Mason said. "Searched her room before dawn."

"This is a batch stamp. It's dated today. Morning issue." Miriam looked up. "How did you find a bottle at four a.m. that wasn't issued until this morning?"

Nobody spoke. The heater ticked.

"Stamps get misprinted," Allison said. "It happens all the time."

"Then the batch records will show that." Miriam turned to Mason. "You're on duty. I'm asking you to seal this bottle under that number and log it. Nobody opens it before review."

Mason glanced at Darian. Darian didn't say no. Mason took the bottle from Allison's hand, and she let him.

Miriam was writing again, a new page. "I'm also requesting, in writing, that Greyfell Clinic preserve the sample they took from Ms. Allison last night and her original chart. Untouched. Pending review." She tore it off and handed it to Mason too. "Make sure that gets sent."

Allison's smile came back, but it sat on her face like it didn't belong there. "Of course. I have nothing to hide."

Darian looked at the bottle in Mason's hand for one second too long. Then he said, "Take her back out."

The guards lifted me. At the threshold, Miriam stepped close and pressed a folded form into my sleeve. A clinic transfer request, stamped and signed by her.

"I'm going to get a transport team," she said quietly. "Stay as warm as you can. Keep your hands against your body. Keep talking to her."

"Will you make it?"

She held my eyes. "I'm going to try."

That was all. She didn't promise. I hated how much I trusted her for it.

They put me back in the cage, and the lock snapped shut. I tucked both hands up into my sleeves and pressed them flat against my chest, over the paper, over my heartbeat.

The white medical van rolled out through the gate. I watched it shrink down the drive, following those same tire tracks.

*Lyra.*

Nothing.

"Stay with me, Lyra," I whispered. "She's coming back."

Something stirred, deep and far away. It might have been her. It might have been me, wanting it to be her.

The van turned onto the road and disappeared.

Behind me, the courtyard bell began to ring.

"Everyone to the yard," Darian called from the steps. "Now."

Doors opened all over the house. Feet crunched across the snow. Near the eastern gate, two guards stood with a sheet of paper between them, and one read aloud in a slow, careful voice, like he was practicing for a speech.

"I, Darian of Ridgefall, Alpha of this pack, reject you, Leah Marsh, as my..."

"Louder," the other said. "He'll want it louder."

The guard cleared his throat and started again.