When My Alpha Left Me to Burn Alive

The gala hall glittered gold, chandeliers throwing light over silk and silver flasks, and I moved through it the way I'd learned to move through everything now—unseen, unheard, a tray balanced on my palm like an apology for existing.

I was three steps from the entrance when I saw him.

Beta Eric stood greeting arrivals, his hand extended for shakes, his smile the practiced kind that never touched his eyes. And on his right hand, catching the chandelier light in a way that made my stomach drop through the floor, sat a claw-ring—black metal, grooved, the grooves darker than the rest.

My nose found it before my mind caught up. Three years of wolfsbane had ruined my throat, ruined my wolf, but it had sharpened something else in me, something raw and animal that no amount of poison could dull. I smelled it from six feet away. Old. Embedded. Soaked in over years of handling something concentrated enough to leave residue in metal.

I knew that ring.

I had stared at it for three years, chained to a floor, watching it catch firelight while a man twisted it on his finger and decided how much poison I could survive that day.

The tray shook. Glasses rattled, one nearly tipping, and I locked my elbow to stop the sound from carrying. My pulse roared in my ears louder than the string quartet.

Across the hall, I felt it—the bond, frayed and half-dead, gave one violent lurch, like something clawing at a door it no longer had the strength to open. Kamden's head turned. Just slightly. His eyes found me over the shoulder of the Alpha he was speaking with, and for one breath I thought—stupidly, treacherously—that he might come.

He looked away.

"Her usual dramatics," I heard him say, low, amused, and the Alpha beside him laughed.

I set the tray down on the nearest table before my hands could betray me further. I walked. Not fast—fast would draw eyes—just steady, servant-quiet, until the kitchen door swallowed me and the noise of the gala dropped to a murmur behind glass.

My notebook was tucked against my ribs, always. I opened it with fingers that wouldn't quite stop trembling and wrote one word, pressing hard enough to tear the page.

*Eric.*

I stared at it. Two syllables, and underneath them, an avalanche.

If Eric wore that ring—if Eric had been the one to *choose* it, to hand it down to whoever ran the operation that gutted me for three years—then someone above him had known. Someone above him had signed off. And there was only one someone in Shadowvale whose signature meant anything.

Kamden.

The thought didn't come as grief. It came as ice, clean and total, filling every hollow place three years of captivity had carved into me. I couldn't stay in this house another night and call it survival.

I slipped out through the servants' passage while the gala roared on without me, down to the Omega quarters, and pried up the loose board beneath my cot with fingers that had done this a hundred times in the dark. Eloise's letters were still there, wax seal cool against my palm. I pressed them flat beneath my uniform, against my heartbeat, the way I had every night since I'd taken them.

I tore a fresh page. Wrote fast, before the ice in my chest could turn back into fear.

*Tonight. The fire will be my cover—or I will make one.*

I didn't know yet how true that sentence was. I sealed it into the stone outside the wall where Maren's people would find it, and I went back inside, back into my collar and sleeves, back into the shape of a woman who disappeared.

I was pouring wine in the east corridor twenty minutes later when I smelled it.

Accelerant. Sharp, chemical, wrong under all that perfume and roasted meat.

By the time I understood what my nose was telling me, the fire was already climbing the curtain rigging in the main hall, already licking out from the kitchen doorway, already eating through the east corridor behind me in a line too straight, too fast, to be anything but planned.

Screaming. Wolves shifting mid-stride, fur tearing through silk, warriors shoving toward exits over bodies that hadn't moved fast enough. I shoved my notebook deeper into my uniform and pressed my back to the wall, and through the smoke thickening like a curtain of its own, I watched.

Lucy's hand flew to her belly. She swayed, crumpled, fell backward into Kamden's arms like she'd rehearsed it—because she had.

Kamden's face, in the space of that single breath, ran through every calculation he'd ever made about me. I watched it happen. I watched him decide.

Then he turned, across the burning hall, and found me standing still in the smoke.

I held his gaze and didn't move.

I already knew.