After My Alpha Burned My Hand for His Mistress

The mind-link hit me sideways, jagged with panic, sometime past midnight.

*Nora.* Callum's voice cracked through my skull like a dropped glass. *He called us in. All five of us. Ivy, Marcus, the twins, me.*

I sat up on the cot, the burned hand throbbing dull and constant now, a second heartbeat under bandages that needed changing. "Slow down," I sent back. "Tell me exactly what he said."

*He said anyone caught helping you, talking to you, even standing too close — it goes to the pack council. Insubordination. He said the word* exile *twice, Nora. He said it like he liked the taste of it.*

I closed my eyes. Outside, the dormitory pipes ticked and groaned, someone's radio murmuring two rooms down, ordinary sounds from an ordinary night, while inside me my wolf paced tight, furious circles, throwing herself against the walls of a cage that had never been about my own pain until right now.

Seven years I'd absorbed every blow meant for me and called it strategy. I didn't have a strategy for this. I didn't have anything for this.

"Callum." I kept my voice even, because his was not, and one of us needed to be. "Do nothing. No visits, no notes, nothing that gives him a reason. Let it look like it worked."

*He can't just —*

"He can. He will. And you will let him think he has." I pressed my bandaged palm flat against my sternum, an old habit, holding something in that wanted to come apart. "I'll handle it. I promise you that."

The link went quiet, but I felt him there a moment longer, furious and young and loyal in a way that terrified me more than Royce's threats ever had. Then he was gone, and I lay back down and stared at the water-stained ceiling until the sky outside the small window turned grey.

I went to Royce's study before breakfast, before Khloe could arrange herself somewhere convenient to watch.

He was behind his desk again, scroll nowhere in sight this time — he didn't need it anymore. He already knew he'd won.

"I'll come to the Banquet," I said. "Visible. Compliant. You keep your hands off the young wolves. All five of them. That's the trade."

Royce leaned back in his chair, studying me the way you study a dog that's finally decided to heel. "You're negotiating," he said, almost amused. "After yesterday."

"I'm agreeing." I kept my voice glacial, flat. "There's a difference."

Something shifted behind his eyes, some small cruel calculation clicking into place. "Fine. You'll come." A pause, deliberate, savoring it before he even said it. "Not as a guest."

I didn't move.

"You'll serve," he said. "Omega uniform. You'll attend the head table personally — mine, Khloe's. Let the pack see exactly where you sit now."

My wolf came up screaming, a sound that clawed the inside of my ribs and found no way out. I let none of it reach my face.

"Fine," I said.

I turned and walked out before he could watch my hands start shaking, and they did, the whole way down the corridor, until I shoved them into my sleeves and held them still by force alone.

The uniform arrived three days later, folded in tissue paper like something worth caring for.

Plain grey, shapeless, the fabric thin enough to feel every draft in that lodge. And on top, pinned like a crown, a white headband with two soft ears standing up from it — the kind the seamstress reserved, Khloe's note informed me with cheerful precision, for the lowest-ranked servants in the pack. *So you'll finally look the part,* she'd written, her handwriting round and pleased with itself.

I was still holding it when Callum found me, sitting on the edge of my cot in the grey basement light.

"Nora." He crouched in front of me, eyes moving from my face to the ears in my lap and back. "Are you all right?"

I wasn't. I folded the uniform anyway, corner to corner, careful as if it mattered, and tucked it into my bag beside the coded frequency scrap and the empty silver locket.

"Callum." I looked up at him, and something in my face must have changed, because his fury dimmed into something sharper, more focused. "Are the others ready? For something that can't be traced back to any of you?"

He went very still.

"What do you need," he said. Not a question. A soldier taking an order.

I told him.