When the Alpha Chose Her Over Me

The pack house corridors felt different now.

Not louder. Not crueler. Just different in the way a room feels different after the furniture has been rearranged — everything technically in the same place, but nothing where you expect it.

I walked the east wing at seven in the morning, the way I always had, and the pack members moved aside the way they always had. But the eyes were wrong. Before, they stepped back because I was the Healer. Now they stepped back the way you step back from something you're not sure about — a dog that might bite, a wire that might be live.

In the training yard, I heard them before I saw them. Three young Deltas, maybe nineteen, twenty. The kind of age where cruelty still feels like honesty.

"Forbidden practice." One of them said it loud enough to carry. "Eight years behind a locked door. You have to wonder what she was actually doing in there."

A second one laughed. "Alpha said she was hoarding pack resources. Keeping things for herself."

"Keeping things from the pack, more like."

I walked past them without slowing. My bag was on my left shoulder, the Healer's sash folded inside it, and I kept my hand loose at my side and my chin level and I did not look at them. Not because I was afraid of what I'd say. Because I was afraid of what I'd feel if I said it and it didn't matter.

Wren was quiet. She'd been quiet for three days, which was worse than when she howled.

*Let them talk,* she said finally, when the training yard was behind us.

They're going to anyway, I told her.

*Yes. But you don't have to carry it.*

I shifted the bag on my shoulder and kept walking.

---

My father's quarters were on the second floor of the east annex, away from the main pack house traffic. He'd chosen them himself when he retired from Beta service — close enough to feel the pulse of the pack, far enough to pretend he'd let it go.

He was sitting up when I came in. Good morning. I noted it the way I noted everything now, clinically, because clinical was the only register I had left that didn't hurt.

"Little wolf." He looked at me the way he always looked at me, which was too carefully. "You're early."

"I had a free morning." I set my bag down and took out the small kit I'd been keeping in my room since the den was locked. Salvaged materials. A portable burner, two glass vials, the tincture I'd been compounding on my desk at midnight with the window cracked. "Sit forward for me."

He sat forward. I listened to his breathing. It was slower than last week, and there was a catch in it, very faint, that hadn't been there before. His wolf's presence, which I could feel the way all Healers feel the wolves of their patients — like a second heartbeat just beneath the skin — was dimmer. Greyer at the edges, the way he'd described it himself once, though I hadn't told him I could feel it too.

"The tincture is the same formulation," I said. "Two drops. Hold thirty seconds."

He took the dropper. His hand was steadier than last week, which meant the compound was still working on the inflammation markers. The underlying disease was another matter.

"Maya." He said my full name, which meant he was being serious.

"The data I submitted to the Lycan Royal Healing Circle is still under review," I said, before he could get there. "Sera Voss confirmed receipt. Validation takes time, but the methodology is sound. I know it's sound."

"That's not what I was going to say."

"I know what you were going to say."

He was quiet for a moment. Outside, a bird was doing something persistent and cheerful in the eaves. I focused on his pulse under my fingers and let the bird be someone else's problem.

"You look thin," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You look thin and you're not sleeping and you've lost your rank and you're still coming here every morning to give me drops under my tongue." He paused. "My life is not worth this, Maya."

I pressed my fingertips together. Once. The way I do when a problem is about to break open and I need to hold it together for one more minute.

"The validation is coming," I said. "I'm close. The secondary sample is still intact. As long as that holds, the clinical pathway is still viable."

He looked at me — thin, hollow-eyed, stripped of rank, sitting on the edge of his bed with a portable burner in my bag and a sash I couldn't bring myself to wear — and he didn't say what he was thinking. He never did, when what he was thinking would cost me something.

That was how I knew he loved me. Not because he said it. Because he knew when not to.

I stayed an hour. I changed the dressing on his left forearm where the Bloodfade had started to surface through the skin — small lesions, dark at the center, the kind that didn't hurt yet but would. I told him the weather. I did not check my phone.

When I left, I kissed his forehead and told him I'd be back at supper, and I closed the door very gently, and I stood in the corridor for exactly four seconds with my eyes closed.

Then I walked.

---

I found out about the wolfsbane acid the way I found out about most things now — too late, and from the wrong direction.

It was Lena, one of the kitchen Omegas, who told me. She caught me in the stairwell at midafternoon, her eyes wide, her voice dropped to almost nothing.

"Healer Scott." She still called me that. I didn't correct her. "I heard Calla Reyes talking this morning. In the supply corridor. She was telling someone — I think it was one of the new trainees — that Brynn found your other storage. The one in the east utility room."

I went very still.

"She signed out a vial from the restricted cabinet," Lena said. "Wolfsbane acid. Under her new credentials."

The east utility room. The secondary location. The last raw Bloodfade blood sample in existence, the one I had moved there three weeks ago when I first felt the den becoming unsafe, the one I had been protecting with the same quiet, invisible ferocity I had been protecting everything for eight years.

Wren was on her feet before I finished the thought.

*Run.*

I was already moving.