When My Alpha Chose His Mistress Over Saving Me

The healer's briefing was on Monday mornings. It had been on Monday mornings for six years because I had put it there. I came down at seven-thirty with my notebook under my arm, the way I always did, and found the conference room empty.

I checked my watch. I checked the calendar in the hallway. The meeting had been moved to seven. By Sylvia. A small note in her looping handwriting was tacked to the corkboard. "Healers — please join me earlier this week so the Alpha can be present. — S."

I stood there for a minute holding my notebook. Then I went back upstairs.

It happened again on Tuesday. The patrol rotation meeting, which I had run every week since the year of the second border skirmish, started forty minutes before I arrived. By the time I got to the doorway, Gamma Reese was already gathering his papers. He saw me and did a small thing with his face — the kind of expression a person makes when they're hoping you'll pretend not to notice them.

"Sorry, Luna," he said. Then he corrected himself, fast. "Sorry. Eva. Sylvia said you had — she said you weren't feeling well."

"I'm fine."

"Right." He looked at the floor. "Right. Sorry."

He slid past me into the hall.

By Wednesday, two of the senior she-wolves who used to come to me with their pup-care questions stopped me in the corridor to say how lovely Sylvia had been at the welcome ceremony for the new transfers. The welcome ceremony I had not been told about. They said it kindly. They said it with the careful brightness people use when they're afraid you might cry on them.

I did not cry on them. I thanked them. I went back to the east wing.

Sable lay heavy inside me, watching it all happen. She did not howl. She did not pace. She just watched, the way you watch a fire burn down a house you used to live in.

By Friday, I understood what was happening. By Saturday, I understood I could not stop it.

It is a strange thing to feel yourself disappear in a place where you still walk around. People I had nursed through fevers no longer met my eyes in the kitchen. The omega girl who used to braid my hair before pack functions handed me a stack of folded sheets without speaking. Sylvia floated through the halls in the soft cream sweaters, leaning into Walker's arm at every meal, her laugh light enough to carry. "I'm just trying to take some of the weight off," I overheard her tell one of the betas in the courtyard. "Eva's been through so much. She deserves rest."

Rest. That was the word she chose.

On Sunday morning, I was in my room — if you could call it that — refolding the same shirt for the third time, when I heard footsteps in the hall. Not one set. Three. I knew before the door opened.

It was a junior delta named Mara, with two others behind her, and they had the awkward, sweating look of people who had been told to do something and not told why. "Room check, Eva," Mara said. Her voice cracked on my name. "I'm sorry. Standard rotation."

There was no standard rotation for Omega quarters. We both knew it.

I stood by the wall and let them look. There was nothing to find. A change of clothes. The pieces of the locket in a small cloth pouch I had sewn from a kitchen rag. A cookbook I had brought down from the Luna suite because it had my mother's recipes inked in the margins.

Mara opened the cookbook.

I watched her fingers stop. I watched her face change. She slid out a folded sheaf of papers from a slot cut into the pages — a slot I had not cut, in a cookbook I had owned for eleven years.

"What is that," I said.

She did not answer. She looked at the other two. One of them was already in the hallway calling for the Beta.

I crossed the room. I reached for the papers. Mara stepped back, not unkindly, just enough that my hand fell through the air. "I'm sorry, Eva," she said again, and this time it sounded like she meant it for something larger than the morning.

They took the papers downstairs.

I followed because there was nothing else to do.

Walker was in his study. Sylvia was already at his shoulder. Of course she was. She had her hand resting on the sleeve of his shirt, very light, the way she always touched him in public — barely there, plausible.

He was reading.

The pages were full of dates and patrol routes and the names of border checkpoints, written in handwriting that, even from across the room, I recognized as my own. Or close enough to mine that the difference would not matter to anyone who wanted to believe it.

Sylvia's voice was already moving. Soft. Wet at the edges. "I told you," she was saying, "I told you I hoped it wasn't true, Walker. I didn't want it to be. I kept telling myself there had to be another explanation —"

Walker looked up.

He looked at me across the desk, across the room, across seven years, and his eyes were not angry. That was the part that broke something else inside me. They were tired. They were already decided.

I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist.

I did not say anything yet. I was waiting to see if he would ask.