Right before I lost consciousness, I had seen everything clearly.
The car.
Salveth in the passenger seat.
And the she-wolf he had just kissed. She was the one behind the wheel.
He hadn't given me a chance to question him. Not even a single second. He had simply brushed it off, thrown out an excuse about the pack being too busy, and left as if I had imagined the entire thing.
At the time, I thought he was avoiding me because he didn't know how to face me after striking me with the car.
But the truth was even more pathetic than that.
I didn't matter enough to him.
Not even enough for him to feel guilty.
Still a little dizzy, the scent of antiseptic and stone thick in the air of the Healing Hall, I forced a polite smile onto my face, as if everything was perfectly normal.
"Guess I was still a bit foggy when I woke up," I said lightly. "Didn't recognize you, Alpha."
The word slipped out naturally, but it carried none of the warmth it used to.
He barely reacted. The silver lighter kept moving over his knuckles, steady as a heartbeat.
And I kept going along with it, as if this distance between us had always existed. As if there had never been anything more.
He finally looked at me again, his brows drawing together slightly, confusion flickering in his eyes.
The girl who used to cling to him over the smallest things, who would demand to be nuzzled over something as trivial as a scraped palm, was gone.
In her place was someone quiet.
Still.
Unreachable.
Salveth glanced around the room, making sure no one else was there. Even in a Healing Hall that answered only to his pack, old habits held. Only then did his expression soften a fraction, his voice dropping lower.
"Selene," he said, almost gently, "these places are full of wolves. And whispers travel faster than scent on the wind." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "We can't risk anyone catching us like this."
Like this.
What we were had to stay hidden. Even now. The pack's code of silence didn't just govern secrets about blood and territory. It governed me.
"Just rest," he continued. "Focus on healing. Once you're back at the den, I'll make it up to you."
I looked at him, then gave a small, composed smile.
"Thank you… Alpha."
I used to call him that as a joke, a teasing name when we were alone, our scents tangled in the dark of his study. Back then, it had been playful, intimate, filled with something unspoken between us.
Now, it felt completely different.
Cold.
Distant.
Like a wall had been built between us, brick by brick, until there was nothing left to cross.
He frowned slightly. He noticed it.
Of course he did.
Just as he was about to say something else, the door opened again and the moon-healer walked in for a routine check.
In an instant, Salveth changed.
The softness disappeared as if it had never existed. His posture straightened, his expression cooled, and the distance returned. His Alpha aura settled back over the room like a dropping temperature, untouchable and controlled. The silver lighter went still in his hand for one beat, then slipped into his jacket pocket.
After exchanging a few brief words with the healer, he turned to leave.
At the door, he paused.
Then he looked back at me one last time.
"Get some rest," he said.
There was a slight pause before he added, his tone firm, almost like a warning.
"And don't think your… special arrangement gives you any privileges inside my pack."
His eyes held mine, steady and unreadable. Beneath my skin, my wolf paced once, low and uneasy, catching something in his scent of obsidian and cold ash that didn't sit right.
"Everyone is treated equally. Everything follows the code."
With that, he walked out, the door closing softly behind him, leaving the room colder than before.
The moon-healer glanced at the smile I was forcing onto my face and let out a light, teasing chuckle, like he could see straight through it.
"Your Alpha already left," he said casually. "No need to push yourself to keep smiling like that anymore."
I didn't respond.
"But I'll give him this," he added with a grin, flipping through my chart. "Stubborn mouth, soft heart. He already settled every last moon-credit of your healing fees."
My smile didn't disappear, but it shifted, subtly, almost imperceptibly, into something bitter.
Salveth really did deserve an award for his performance.
To everyone else, he was just a responsible Alpha who ran the outer trading-post, a wolf who took care of his own out of basic decency. A male with principles. No one knew the truth. No one knew that behind the locked door of his private study at the ancestral den, I had been with him for five years. Five entire years of secrecy, of compromise, of waiting.
No one except a handful of his closest wolves. His inner circle. The ones bound by the same silence that bound me.
I had asked him more times than I could count, always carefully, always hoping for a different answer.
"When can we stop hiding?"
Every single time, he brushed it off with the same vague excuse.
"The timing's not right."
I used to believe him.
I used to tell myself that there was a reason, that the pack's politics demanded patience, that one day things would be different.
But today, I finally understood.
When he thought I had lost my memory, the first thing he did was draw a line between us.
I'm your Alpha.
That was the truth.
That was all I had ever been to him.
