After My Alpha Burned My Hand for His Mistress

Training fields at Crescent Hollow smelled like cut grass and old sweat, and I'd spent seven years learning to disappear inside that smell, moving equipment while wolves twice my rank sparred and shouted around me. Today I was gathering weights back into the shed when I heard Khloe's laugh cut through the noise, bright and aimed.

I didn't look up in time.

The training weight caught the edge of my right hand — forty pounds of iron laced through with something that hissed against skin instead of just bruising it. Silver. I knew the burn instantly, a white-hot thread driving up through my palm into my wrist, and my whole arm went rigid with the effort of not screaming.

I didn't scream. Seven years had trained that out of me the way you train an animal not to flinch at a raised hand.

I went white instead, swaying once, my vision narrowing to a tunnel with my own hand at the end of it, blistering, smoking faintly where the metal had kissed skin too long. Somewhere behind me, Callum was already moving, already shouting for the Healer, his voice cracking with a panic he hadn't learned to hide yet.

"Oops." Khloe's voice, syrup-sweet, didn't even bother to sound sorry. "These weights are so heavy. I don't know my own strength."

Royce was there before Callum made it three steps. He didn't look at my hand. He looked at Khloe's fingers, at the thin red line where her claw had chipped against the weight's edge, and something in his face softened the way it never softened for me.

"Get the Healer for Khloe," he said. "Now."

Callum froze. "Nora's hand — it's silver, Alpha, it's burning —"

"I said now."

Alpha-tone, thin but enough. Callum's jaw worked, fury and obedience warring behind his eyes, and I gave him the smallest shake of my head. *Not yet. Not for me.* He went, because I asked him to, and hated himself for it the whole way.

I wrapped my own hand in the equipment shed, alone, with a first-aid kit that hadn't been restocked since spring. The gauze stuck to the raw parts. I bit down until my jaw ached and kept winding, and somewhere between the second and third loop I sent the pulse east, careful, coded, steady even though my hand wasn't: *Position compromised. Hand. Cannot hold much longer.*

The reply came that night, in the dim of the Omega dormitory, while I stared at the blistered lines mapping my palm like a burn victim reading her own future.

*Bond-memory is surging — closer to surface than ever,* Elena's voice said inside my skull, careful, urgent in the way she never let herself sound. *He wakes at night asking his Beta if anyone can smell wildflowers. Hold if you can. Flee east if you cannot. Do not let him touch you before the memory breaches.*

I closed my eyes. Wildflowers. That had been my scent, once, before seven years of suppressant vials buried it under nothing at all.

He was close. And I was running out of hand, out of cover, out of time to be both things at once.

Royce summoned me the next morning. Khloe must have mentioned the tree line, because his study door was closed this time — no witnesses, which should have comforted me and didn't.

He didn't ask about my hand. He didn't look at it at all.

"You've lived in Crescent Hollow over five years," he said, already pulling an old scroll from the shelf like he'd rehearsed the motion in a mirror. "Which means you fall under a very specific piece of pack law." He unrolled it with theatrical care and read, voice smooth with satisfaction: "'An unclaimed she-wolf residing in pack territory for a period exceeding five years is subject to the binding authority of the resident Alpha, and may not unilaterally withdraw from an established arrangement without formal release.'" He looked up. "I haven't released you."

My wolf came up snarling, so loud in my skull I pressed my burned hand hard against my thigh just to have somewhere to put the pain instead of my face.

"You'll comply," Royce said, "or you'll face the consequences."

I kept my voice glacial, level, a blade laid flat instead of swung. "What consequences."

He smiled, and it was the smile of a man who had never once in his life been told no and meant it. "You'll find out," he said, "at the Pack Banquet."

I didn't answer. I turned and walked out with my spine straight and my ruined hand throbbing in time with my pulse, and behind me I heard him roll the scroll back up, satisfied, already certain he'd won something.

He had no idea what was already moving east to meet him.