The Villainess's Wolf Begged Me Not to Save Her Alpha

Isabella's POV

Ruth came for me at dawn.

She didn't knock. She unlocked the pantry, looked at me sitting on the crate with flour on my sleeves, and said, "Alpha's orders. You're on kitchen duty until noon."

"Good morning to you too."

She didn't smile, but she didn't shove me either. She just walked, and I followed her down a narrow corridor that smelled like old stone and yeast until it opened into the kitchen.

Warm steam hit my face. Three big pots were going on the iron range, and one of them held soup, thick and peppery, with onions in it. My stomach clenched so hard I almost bent over.

And then my head turned.

Not toward the pot. Toward the arched doorway that led to the dining hall, toward the head of the long table where Noah would sit. My body waited. It actually waited, still and quiet, for someone to say I was allowed.

Nobody was even in there.

"Sit," Ruth said.

She set a bowl on the corner of the prep counter, away from the doorway where anyone passing could see. Porridge, with a pat of butter melting into the middle. The rim was chipped on one side, a little crescent of bare clay where the glaze had broken off.

I reached for it and heard myself say, "I'm sorry. Thank you. I'm sorry."

Ruth's eyebrows went up a fraction.

I stared at my own hands around the bowl. I'd apologized twice for being handed oatmeal. That wasn't me. That was a year of this body learning that food came with a price.

*He's just been so tired lately,* Ceci said, very softly. *With Evelyn sick, and the council, and the border patrols. He doesn't mean to forget about us.*

"Ceci." I picked up the spoon. "Eat first. Then you can decide who you're worried about."

*But...*

"You don't have to earn breakfast, Ceci."

She went quiet. I ate standing at the counter, burning my tongue and not caring, and somewhere in my chest I felt her ease, just a little, like a dog finally lying down by a fire.

Ruth watched me scrape the bowl clean. She took it back without a word and dropped it in the wash basin.

---

I was elbow-deep in potato peels when Evelyn walked in.

She looked like a spring morning, pale yellow cardigan, the crescent necklace sitting in the hollow of her throat. One of the younger omegas trailed behind her carrying a tray with a single teacup on it.

"Isabella." She said my name like we were old friends. "I heard you had a rough night. I had the infirmary make you something. It's chamomile and valerian, for your nerves." She took the cup off the tray herself and held it out to me. "Noah worries that you get so worked up."

Everyone in the kitchen had stopped pretending to work.

If I refused, I was the jealous wife throwing the sick girl's kindness back in her face. That story would be all over the pack by lunch.

I dried my hands and took the cup. "That's thoughtful."

It smelled like flowers and something bitter underneath. I took one small sip.

Ceci's voice went thick, like she was talking through a pillow. *Isabella... that's... I feel heavy.*

I didn't let anything show on my face. In the book, Isabella had always been so foggy and slow in these last chapters. I'd assumed it was grief.

It could still be grief. One sip and a sluggish wolf didn't prove anything, and I didn't have the luxury of being wrong out loud.

"Thank you, Evelyn," I said. "I'll finish it while I work."

She studied me for a second, then smiled and left with her omega. The kitchen noise picked back up.

I carried the cup to Ruth, who was ladling soup into a row of small glass jars along the back shelf. Each jar had a strip of paper tied to it.

"You keep samples of everything that goes out of this kitchen," I said quietly.

"Since the Alpha's father was poisoned. Twenty years." She didn't look up. "Why?"

"I'd like you to keep one of this."

Now she looked up.

"I'm not accusing anyone," I said. "I'm asking for a jar. Keep the bottle. Write down who brought it."

For a long moment she just held the ladle. Then she took a clean vial from a drawer, poured a measure of tea into it, and corked it. She wrote on the paper strip in small, cramped letters: *Infirmary tea. Brought by Miss Evelyn. 7:40 a.m.*

*Isabella.* Ceci sounded clearer now that the cup was out of my hands. *The key. The spare key for the chain. I saw it once, in the infirmary. In the glass cabinet with the little hooks, on the left side.*

I glanced at Ruth. "Do you do the infirmary inventory?"

"Every Sunday. Bandages, tinctures, keys." Her eyes narrowed. "What are you after, girl?"

"Nothing yet. Next time you count, is there a spare silver key on the left side of the cabinet?"

Ruth tucked the vial onto the back shelf behind the soup jars. "I'll look," she said, and went back to ladling.

---

At noon a guard walked me upstairs to my old bedroom to collect clean clothes. Noah had moved me into the servants' wing months ago, but my things were still here, shoved into the bottom of a wardrobe like nobody wanted to deal with them.

The guard waited outside. I knelt and dug through folded sweaters until my fingers hit metal.

A tin box, the kind cheap cookies come in, with a dent pressed into the lid. I pried it open.

Inside were a dried flower, a ribbon, and a single strawberry candy wrapper, flattened and soft from being handled a thousand times.

I knew what this was. Readers had mocked it endlessly. Isabella kept the wrapper from the candy Noah gave her when they were kids, like it was a wedding ring. I picked it up, already turning toward the trash basket.

*No.* Ceci's panic hit me like cold water. *No, no, please, don't...*

And then I wasn't in the bedroom anymore.

I was seven, and my black dress itched, and I was sitting in wet leaves at the edge of the pack woods where nobody could see me. Behind me, at the house, grown-ups were eating little sandwiches. Every one of them had patted my head and told me to be strong. My mom would want me to be strong. Good girl, so strong.

I wasn't strong. I was shaking.

Footsteps crunched. A boy with scraped knees and hair sticking up in the back sat down next to me in the dirt. Ten, maybe. He didn't say anything. He didn't tell me to stop.

I cried until my nose ran and my chest hurt, and he just sat there, picking at a stick.

When I finally ran out, he dug in his pocket and pulled out two pieces of candy. Then he looked at them, put one back, and handed me the other. Strawberry.

"It's my last good one," he said. "The other's licorice. Nobody likes licorice."

He didn't promise me anything. He didn't say he'd marry me or protect me forever. He just gave me the better candy and walked me back when it got dark.

I came back to myself on the bedroom floor with the wrapper in my palm and my cheeks wet.

Slowly, I laid it on my knee and smoothed it out with my thumb, pressing the creases flat.

I'd spent hundreds of chapters calling her pathetic. A grown woman clinging to a piece of trash.

"She wasn't stupid," I told Ceci. "She was alone."

*He was the only one who let us be sad,* Ceci whispered.

"I know. I saw it." I swallowed. "That night was real. It's worth remembering. But the boy who sat in the leaves isn't the man who signs our name on the full moon. That man's orders are going to kill us, Ceci. Both of us."

Silence. Then, small: *I don't know how to leave him. I don't know how to stop wanting to.*

"I'm not asking you to stop today."

*Then what are you asking?*

"Help me stay awake. When something makes you feel heavy, like that tea, you tell me. When my body reaches for him, you warn me before I do something I'll regret. Can you do that much?"

A long pause. *Yes. I can do that.*

I folded the wrapper in half, then in half again.

"You loved him. I won't take that from you. But we don't die for him."

Three sharp knocks rattled the door. It opened before I answered, and Ruth slipped in, breathing hard like she'd taken the stairs fast. She shut it behind her.

"Owen just went up the east staircase toward your room in the servants' wing," she said low. "He was carrying a man's shirt. White. Folded under his arm like he didn't want anybody to see."

My heart started pounding.