After My Mate Ordered Me to Burn

The mind-link snapped open at 11:47 p.m., and it was not for me.

I felt it the way you feel a door opening in a house you thought was empty — a rush of air where there should have been walls. Princeton stood beside me at Avery's pyre, close enough that our sleeves touched, and through the mate bond I heard her. Camilla. That breathy, staged little gasp. *Alpha, I can't breathe — please —* The bond carried her voice like smoke under a doorframe, and my mate's jaw tightened not with grief but with focus.

I held the urn tighter. The carvings bit into my palms. My son's ashes were still warm inside it and my mate was already somewhere else.

"Emergency," Princeton muttered. He did not look at me. He did not look at the fire. He turned, and the pack parted for him in a silence that had teeth, and I finished the howl alone.

My throat gave out halfway. I made myself keep going. Two hundred wolves watched their Luna sing her pup into the moon without her Alpha, and the mark on the side of my neck — the one he put there five years ago — went thin. Not cold yet. Brittle. Like glass held too long over a flame.

Avery, I whispered inside my own head, since there was no one else left to hear. *I'm sorry your father didn't stay.*

---

Three days later I came home to the smell of braised lamb.

I knew that smell. I had smelled it in my son's small, dying mouth when he begged for it, when he pushed his cheek into my hand and asked, *Daddy make it?* and I had to lie and say Daddy was busy. Daddy was always busy. Alpha duties. Alpha duties. Alpha duties.

I followed the smell to my own kitchen.

Princeton stood at the island julienning carrots with the same careful, patient hands that had never once cracked an egg for our son. A pot simmered behind him. He was plating for two. He was plating it beautifully. There were rosemary sprigs. There was a folded linen napkin.

He glanced up and did not stop cutting.

"Camilla's been under strain," he said, like he was explaining the weather.

I did not scream. I did not cry. I walked past the kitchen and down the hall to the nursery and closed the door behind me, and I sat down on the floor beside a small empty bed that still had the imprint of a small head on the pillow.

Something moved inside my ribs.

Not warmth. I had been told for sixteen years that my wolf would come as warmth, as light, as a soft second heartbeat. What moved in me now was heat. A dry, red heat, low and awake, pressing at the cage of my chest like a fist that had been waiting a very long time to open.

I put my hand over my sternum and felt it push back.

*Hello,* I thought, and I did not know who I was talking to.

---

The healer's ward was supposed to help my migraines.

I pushed open the door on the second floor and there they were, in the little sunlit landing above the stairs — Princeton with his arms around her, Camilla with her face tucked against his chest. She saw me over his shoulder. She smiled at me, small and slow, like a cat setting down a bird.

Then she ripped herself out of his hold and threw herself backward down the stairs.

She screamed all the way down. When she hit the landing she was already sobbing that I pushed her.

Princeton turned.

I did not have time to say a word. His hand came across my face so fast the wall met my shoulder before the pain registered. Then the Alpha aura hit me — a physical weight, shoving my knees to the floorboards — and he caught my wrist and wrenched it until something inside it popped like a wet stick.

The healer, Elara Vance, stood frozen in her doorway with both hands over her mouth. Her eyes did not leave my face.

Princeton scooped Camilla up and carried her past me to the exam table.

"Get out," he said, without looking at me.

Through the bond I reached for him — a reflex, a wife's reflex, thirteen years of habit — and found nothing on the other end. Not guilt. Not fury. Not even irritation. A cold, blank room.

I walked out cradling my wrist. In the corridor my wolf slammed the inside of my chest so hard I stumbled. *Not yet,* I told her. *Not yet. Soon.*

---

Elara came to my rooms that night with a splint, a signed witness statement, and a thin folder of papers I recognized on sight.

Rejection documents. Pre-filled with his name.

She did not speak. She set them on my nightstand, squeezed my uninjured hand once, and left.

One week I gave him. One week to see the witness statement on his own desk and understand what he had done. He slid it aside without reading the pages beneath.

"You want to make a scene, Valerie?" His Alpha tone brushed my skin like a warning. He pushed the rejection forms back across the desk. "Sign those if you want. Either way, you are still my Luna. And my Luna does not file paperwork against her Alpha."

I held his eyes.

I picked up the papers. I folded them into quarters. I slid them inside my shirt against my bare stomach, where the skin was still smooth and unmarked, and I walked out.

---

She moved into my rooms that evening.

By nightfall Camilla was drifting through the common hall in one of my old silk robes, his scent smeared up and down her throat like paint, one hand pressed lightly, endlessly, to her own unmarked neck. Six Omegas were folding linens near the archway. She cornered me in front of every one of them.

"You look exhausted, Luna," she whispered, sugar-thick. "Let me handle the Alpha's needs from here. You've done enough."

The Omegas dropped their eyes to the floor.

I did not answer her. I walked out the front doors and across the gravel to the perimeter post, where Gideon Cross stood watch with his arms folded and his face carefully blank.

"Gideon," I said quietly. "If I needed to move Avery's urn out of the pack house tonight — could you keep it safe?"

He looked at the splint on my wrist. He looked at the thin silver line of pain still humming under my jaw. He looked, for a long moment, at the folded shape of the papers hidden against my ribs.

He nodded once.

"Tell me when," he said.