Three days after the ceremony, I was on my hands and knees in the east corridor, scrubbing a floor I had walked as a senior member of this pack for ten years. The water was cold. My knuckles were raw. The man who had been my fated mate had not looked at me once since he read out my new duties like a list of inventory. Kitchen. Laundry. Grounds. I had taken it without a word, because the mark on my neck was still cold, and I was still learning how to live next to that absence. It felt like the space where a tooth used to be.
The floor had a stain I couldn't get out. I pressed harder with the brush. That was when I heard it.
A scream. High, sharp, and then a second one. Coming from the Alpha's private wing at the end of the hall. It was not my name, and it was not a sound I had ever heard from that wing before. Kayla's voice. Shrieking that she was bleeding. That she was losing the pup.
The pack healer rushed past me without a word, her white coat snapping, her boots leaving damp prints on the floor I had just scrubbed. I sat back on my heels, the brush still in my hand, and told myself this was not my problem. Whatever was happening in that wing was not mine. I had no pup. I had no bond. I had no claim on any of it.
Donovan came down the corridor fast. Before I could stand, his hand closed around my arm and yanked me upright. His grip was iron. His eyes were flat and blazing, and I felt the shift in the air before he even opened his mouth. The Alpha tone. It came out of him like a force of nature, low and vibrating, and it hit the frayed remnant of our bond — still alive, still threaded through me, I had not been able to sever it — and went straight into my skull.
Come.
My legs moved before I decided anything. I felt my body turn, felt my feet carry me down the corridor, felt every muscle in me obey a command I had not given. My own bones betrayed me. My knees buckled at the healer's door before I could form a word of protest, sliding through the gap he hauled me past, dumping me onto the cold floor of the treatment room like a sack of something heavy. I looked up. I was on my knees. I had not chosen to kneel.
The room was bright and smelled of antiseptic and blood. Kayla lay on the bed, pale, red soaking through her sheets, her eyes rolled back. The healer's hands were already on her. Donovan stood over me, blocking the light.
"She's bleeding out," he said. "Your blood is the only thing that holds her. The healer says your factors are rare. You will give it."
Elara Vance looked at me then. The pack healer had attended me for ten years. She had held my hand when the pup died. She had watched me burn in that helpless fever three winters ago, and she had kept the records I had found, and I had never fully understood the look she gave me that night — the one that followed me around for years. She looked at me now with the same expression, worse. Helpless. Complicit. Her mouth opened and closed, and no sound came out, and I understood she was already being commanded too.
"Do it," Donovan said. Not to me. To her.
The needle went into my arm. I felt the tube, the cold rush, the slow drag of something leaving me that I had never understood the value of. The way he said it — the only thing that holds her. I was not a person in that room. I was a reserve, a supply, a storehouse that had been opened because the rightful owner of the bleeding needed more than what she had.
I watched my own blood leave my body in a dark line. I felt the room tilt. The ceiling went out of focus, then snapped back into terrible sharpness. My veins were burning, a fire running up my arm and across my chest, and the volume kept going. He did not tell her to stop. He did not say when enough. He just stood there with his arms crossed, watching Kayla's color come back, and I understood, in the slow white noise behind my eyes, that he would let her take everything I had.
Kayla's breathing steadied. The red on the sheets stopped spreading. Moments. It took moments.
Donovan left without looking at me. His footsteps receded down the corridor, and then the door clicked shut, and I was alone on the floor of the treatment room with my veins still burning and my vision going gray at the edges. I could not lift my hand. I could lift nothing.
Something warm touched my forehead. Cloth. Damp. Elara's hands, trembling. She knelt beside me on the floor and pressed it there, and her voice was so low I almost did not hear it, a whisper meant not for the empty room but for the ears of a dead thing.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I've been sorry for three years."
Three years. My heart had been beating too slow to feel much by then, but the words landed anyway, and I filed them away in the one place in me that was still sharp. Three years. That was not a woman sorry for a hard day's work. That was a woman sorry for something she had done or let be done to me a long time ago. I kept my eyes partly open and watched her, and I let the burn in my veins carry me down into the dark, and I did not lose the words.
I did not lose them.
On the table, she must have thought I had passed out. I had. Partly. But the part of me that kept count, that kept record, that had never stopped reading that old healer's file in the dark, that part stayed awake, and it pressed the two words into me like a stitch.
Three years. I had a new question to answer.
And under the hollow cold of my mark, beneath everything, faint and unnameable, something pressed once against my ribs again — stronger this time, like a hand, like a fist testing a wall from the inside.
