When My Alpha Left Me to Burn Alive

Lucy handed me a basket of her silk and lace the morning after I took my mother's letters, her smile so bright it could have passed for warmth if you didn't know her. "Cold water only," she said. "Hot ruins the fabric." She didn't mention that cold water meant an hour longer at the basin, my knuckles going raw and blue. I didn't write anything about it. Some things weren't worth the ink.

The scalding came two days later, in the kitchen, while I was rinsing her breakfast dishes. She came up beside me with a kettle in her hand, humming, and then the humming stopped and the water didn't. It poured over my knuckles and up my wrist, and I bit down on the scream before it could tear anything else out of my throat. She gasped, dropped the kettle with a clatter, pressed both hands to her mouth like she might be sick.

"Oh my goddess, Ruby, I'm so sorry—here, let me—"

I stepped back before her hands could reach me. She didn't need to touch me to finish it.

By dinner, Kamden knew. I heard it through the floorboards of my cot-room, his voice climbing the stairwell in that flat register he used for pack business. "She's clumsy, Lucy says. Burned herself on a kettle." A pause. "She's an Omega. Assign her something with less breakage risk." So they moved me to the laundry room at night instead, where there was nothing to break but myself. Three hours of sleep, if I hurried through the folding.

I was on my fourth night of that schedule when I found the scrap of chicken in my apron pocket—saved without thinking, muscle memory older than my muteness—and I carried it to the kennels because Barnaby's ribs had started showing through his coat and no one else was going to feed him.

He pressed his nose to the bars when he scented me, tail low and trembling, and I slid the meat through before I let myself feel anything about the cage, about the rust, about how thin he'd gotten waiting for a girl everyone told him was dead.

Someone saw. Of course someone saw.

Lucy's voice, sweet as poison, drifted from the kennel doorway the next morning while I scrubbed floors two rooms away. "Theft of pack resources, Kamden. She's stealing food meant for the working wolves and feeding it to a mutt that doesn't even hunt anymore." I heard him exhale through his nose, heard the particular silence that meant he was deciding how much energy my existence was worth.

He found me in the hall an hour later. I felt him before I saw him—the air changing, pressure building behind my sternum like a held breath that wasn't mine.

"You will not go near the kennels again," he said, and the words dropped into me with the weight of Alpha-tone, hooking into whatever thread of the bond was still alive enough to obey.

My feet stopped mid-step. My throat closed around nothing, the way it did whenever a command landed somewhere the wolfsbane hadn't quite killed. I stood there, frozen, staring at a spot on the wall above his shoulder until he walked away satisfied, and only then did my legs unlock enough to carry me to my cot.

That night I opened the notebook. My hand was steadier than my heart. *Kettle—Tuesday—Lucy, witnessed by kitchen staff. Laundry, three hours sleep, five nights running. Barnaby, starved, reported as theft. Kamden—kennels forbidden, Alpha-tone, 6:40pm.* I underlined the last line twice. Not grief. Evidence.

The compulsion over the documents came two days after that, worse than the first time—longer, sharper, his voice dragging through what was left of the bond like a hook through raw flesh. I hit the desk hard enough to rattle the inkwell, blood sheeting hot from both nostrils, my vision narrowing to a tunnel with his face at the far end of it.

My hand crept toward the pen. Stopped. Crept again.

In the half-second where the compulsion faltered—just a half-second, just enough—I threw my weight sideways and knocked the inkwell across the papers. Black bloomed over the transfer lines, over his careful signature blanks, ruining three weeks of legal work in one motion.

I looked up at him through blood and stinging eyes and shaped the word with my ruined mouth. *Accident.*

His palm cracked flat against the desk. The pressure in my spine broke like a rope giving way.

And underneath the pain, something else moved—not the dormant nothing I'd carried for three years, but a low, coiled presence pacing behind my ribs, alive and furious and *mine.* Not yet, it said. Wait.

New documents would take three days.

That night I didn't write about the pain. I wrote: *She's coming back. Don't let them know.*