After My Mate Chose the Other Woman

The patrol came through the gate at 4:07 in the morning, and my father was the one they carried like something already dead.

I smelled it before I saw him — wolfsbane, sharp and green under the copper of blood, soaked clean through the deltas' jackets. Duncan Reed lay across two shoulders, his face gray, his breath coming in small wet pulls. I ran barefoot across the frozen yard and got both hands on his chest before anyone told me to move.

"Sienna." Edric Voss met me at the healer's wing door, his hands already red to the wrist. He didn't waste time on softness. "Three arrows. Rogue-forged, wolfsbane-tipped. It's in his blood now, moving fast." He looked at me, and I already knew what he was going to say before he said it. "Only Alpha blood burns this out. I can slow it. I can't stop it."

I pressed two fingers to my left temple and reached across the bond that had never been finished, never been sealed, never been anything but a thread I'd kept alive out of stubbornness for five years. *Lance. My father is dying. I need you off the ridge. Now.*

His voice came back cold, unhurried, like he was answering a question about the weather. *The seclusion is sacred. Mourning doesn't break for anything.*

*He carried this pack for thirty years and you never once had to carry him.* My throat closed around the rest of it. *Please.*

Nothing. The thread went taut and then simply — indifferent. Not cut. Worse than cut. Ignored.

I knelt at my father's cot and held his hand while it grew heavier in mine, hour by hour, and somewhere under my ribs something old and starved turned over once, like a held breath, and went still again. I didn't have time to wonder what it was.

The doors opened at half past five. Not for Duncan.

Lance walked in with Makenzie Harper cradled against his chest, her paw wrapped in white gauze, her face tucked into his throat like she belonged there. "A wolfsbane scratch," he told Edric, and his voice had none of the ice it had carried across the bond an hour ago — it was warm, almost gentle. "Attend her first."

Every border warrior in that wing turned to look. I watched Lance set her down on a clean cot four feet from my father's deathbed. He did not look at Duncan. He did not look at me. He turned and walked back out into the cold he'd broken his sacred mourning for in under an hour.

My father died at dawn.

The pack filed past his body in a slow line, and not one of them looked at my bare neck, unmarked after five years, while they murmured what they thought passed for grief.

At the funeral run Lance stood at the head of the pack and said Duncan held no formal title, so his ashes could not rest in the pack cairn. "Bury him where you like," he said, already turning away. I chose the eastern ridge. I ran the whole route on two human legs while the pack shifted to wolf form around me, and not one of them fell into stride at my side. I built the cairn myself, stone by stone, in the rain, my palms split open on the granite, and Makenzie watched from the pack-house steps the entire time like a woman counting something.

That evening I came back to find the great hearth still smoking. My father's scent-marked pelt. His last letters to me. Burned during the evening meal while I was on the ridge. The smell of cedar and iron curled up through the chimney and no one in that hall would meet my eyes.

I made it as far as the corridor before my knees went out from under me, wolfsbane and grief hollowing me from the inside. Callum found me there on the stone floor.

"I'm dissolving the ceremony," I told him. My voice didn't shake. "The one that was never finished."

He stared down at me for a long moment. I said it again, slower, so there'd be no mistaking it.

He stood up and walked away without a word.

I dragged myself upright and went to my rooms to pack what little was still mine — and found sprigs of wolfsbane arranged on my windowsill, same compound, same weight as the antiserum I'd bled myself dry to supply. Not accidental. Staged. Someone wanted this found, wanted it to look like hoarding.

I didn't call for anyone. I picked up a single sprig with two fingers, folded it inside the cuff of my father's last letter, and sealed the fold shut.

Down the hall, soft and unhurried, I heard Makenzie humming to herself as she passed my door — a woman who had no reason at all to be walking this corridor tonight.