After My Alpha Burned My Hand for His Mistress

Eight seconds. That's how long Royce's Alpha-tone pinned me before I forced my knees to stop shaking on my own terms.

"Come forward, Nora." His voice rolled over the great hall like a held breath finally released, dropping into that low, layered register that no wolf in Crescent Hollow could refuse. My feet moved before my mind agreed to it. Two hundred wolves watched me cross the floor, and I heard the same soft murmur I'd heard every year for seven years — poor thing, still hoping, still kneeling.

Khloe was draped across his other arm in gold silk, her chin tilted so the light caught her throat, unmarked and radiant, the throat he'd never once touched with his teeth either. She smiled at me the way you smile at something you've already won.

"Bare your neck," Royce said. Alpha-tone again, softer this time because he didn't need much — I was already there, already tilting my head, already giving the pack exactly what it had come to see.

I didn't lower my eyes.

That was the only thing I kept for myself. Everyone expected me to stare at the floor, small and grateful. Instead I looked straight at him while I bared my throat, and something in his jaw ticked, some flicker of confusion he covered fast. Khloe's smile thinned by a fraction. Small. Mine.

Then I did what I came to do. I breathed him in — one long, deliberate pull of air, holding his scent in my chest like a signal fire lit for a man a thousand miles away. Not love. Never love. A frequency I was keeping tuned.

My wolf stirred low in my ribs, mournful and recognizing, the same ancient ache she always gave when that scent moved through her. *Still there,* she seemed to say. *Still close enough.*

Royce didn't mark me. He never intended to. He dropped his hand, turned back to Khloe, and the hall exhaled with him, already moving on to gossip and wine. I straightened, expression smooth, and walked myself back into the crowd like nothing in me had cracked.

Something had.

In the corridor behind the hall, out of sight, I pressed my bandaged hand flat against my sternum and felt it — not Royce's presence, but a thread pulling taut somewhere east, ancient and restless, twitching against its own silence like a hand knocking from inside a locked room. My wolf didn't whimper this time. She snarled, sudden and furious, a sound that vibrated up through my throat before I swallowed it whole.

*Not yet,* I told her. *Not until he wakes.*

She didn't like it. Neither did I anymore.

I found Callum where he always waited, in the служебный corridor with three of the younger ones clustered behind him, arms crossed, jaw tight with the particular fury of a boy who'd watched the whole ceremony from a doorway he wasn't allowed past.

"You didn't have to do that," he said.

"I did." I checked the fading bruise along his forearm from training, the split knuckle on Ivy beside him, pulled bread and cold chicken from beneath my shawl and pressed it into their hands. "Eat. All of you."

"Anger without timing gets people hurt, Callum. Remember that." I said it quietly, the way I said everything that mattered. "I'm closer to the end of this than any of you know."

He didn't ask what that meant. He never did. He just nodded, jaw still tight, and let me go.

Three days later, the eastern border screamed with rogues, and Royce came back from it with a wolfsbane slash carved deep across his ribs, torn open by claws that had been dipped in something meant to scar, not heal. I heard about it the way I heard everything — secondhand, in passing, from wolves who didn't know what it would cost me.

I went to the infirmary anyway. I told myself it was duty.

I stopped in the doorway and the air hit me wrong.

Under the antiseptic, under the blood, his scent had changed. The precise, uncanny echo that had shadowed Christian's for seven years — gone. In its place sat something acrid, curdled, permanently wrong, like a door slamming shut in an empty house.

The thread in my chest didn't fade. It snapped. Clean. Final.

Khloe was perched on the edge of his cot, fussing over gauze he didn't need fussed over, laughing at something he murmured. Neither of them looked up.

I turned and walked back to my room without a sound.

I pulled the case out from under my bed — the one with seven years of rationed suppressant vials, the folded scrap of paper with Elena Marsh's coded frequency, the small silver locket with nothing in it but a strand of hair too pale to be mine. I set them on the bed one at a time.

Then I started to pack.