After My Alpha’s Mistress Took My Luna Seat

I've always been good at waiting.

Not the patient kind of waiting, where you sit with your hands folded and trust that things will work out. The other kind. The kind where you hold yourself very still because moving might make it real.

Dr. Stephen Turner set the lab results on the table between us like he was placing something fragile. His voice was steady — it's always steady — but his eyes stayed on my face a half-second too long when he said the words. Voss-Hemolytic Syndrome. Progressive. Advancing faster than the initial markers suggested.

The fluorescent light in the clinic hummed. That was the only sound for a while.

I looked at the papers. Rows of numbers I mostly understood and one I didn't want to. I pressed my fingertips against the inside of my wrist and felt my pulse moving, steady and small, and I thought: okay. Okay. It's just information. You can work with information.

"How long?" I asked.

Stephen didn't hesitate, which I appreciated. He never softened things to make them easier to swallow. He told me. He talked about treatment options, about the pup, about timelines. I nodded in the right places. I kept my fingers on my wrist.

When I walked out to the clinic's waiting room, I sat down in one of the hard plastic chairs and stared at the scuffed linoleum floor for a moment. Then I took out my phone and called Damien.

It rang twice.

A woman answered.

"Hello?"

Smooth voice. Unhurried. A little amused, like she'd been expecting the call.

I knew the voice. Everyone in Crescent Hollow knew that voice, even those of us who'd never met her. Mariah Reynolds. The name Damien's mother said with a particular softness she never used for mine.

"He's just pulling the car around," Mariah said pleasantly. "JFK is a mess today. Can I take a message?"

I sat there with the phone at my ear for three seconds. Maybe four. I counted them without meaning to.

Then I ended the call.

I sat in the plastic chair for a little longer. The clinic smelled like antiseptic and old coffee. A toddler across the room was trying to pull a magazine off the table. Normal things. Everything was normal-shaped except the inside of my chest.

I put my phone in my pocket and went home to wait.

---

The pack house at midnight is a different place than it is during the day. During the day it's full of noise and motion and the low-level hum of pack life — voices down the hall, the kitchen always used by someone. At midnight it's just space. Just rooms.

I sat at the kitchen table with chamomile tea I'd made and didn't drink. My notebook was open in front of me, the page blank. I had things I meant to write. I couldn't find where to start.

By two in the morning the tea was cold.

By four I'd stopped pretending I was going to write anything.

He came in just before dawn. I heard the front door, then his footsteps — that particular unhurried pace he has, Alpha-certain, like the floor owes him its steadiness. He came into the kitchen and stopped when he saw me.

"You're up early," he said.

He looked tired. Distracted. His jacket was still on and I could smell it from across the table — something expensive, floral, the kind of scent you'd pay a lot of money for. Not my chamomile. Not anything I kept in this house.

He didn't ask why I was sitting at the kitchen table at five in the morning. He didn't look at the cold tea or the blank notebook or the bruise on the inside of my elbow from the IV Stephen had run that afternoon. He opened the refrigerator, stood in its pale light for a moment, then closed it again.

"I'm going to get a few hours," he said.

"Damien."

He paused in the doorway.

"I want to dissolve the bond," I said. My voice came out quieter than I'd intended, but it was steady. I kept my hands flat on the table. "I want to talk about dissolving the bond."

He turned around slowly and looked at me the way he looks at things that don't make sense to him. A slight narrowing. An impatience he doesn't bother to conceal.

"Zora."

"I mean it."

The Alpha tone hit me like a hand pressed flat against my chest. Not violent — he never needs to be violent about it. Just a weight, sudden and absolute, that filled the kitchen and made the air feel smaller.

"You're being hormonal," he said. Not unkindly. That was almost worse. "She's an old situation. You know that. You're turning a pickup into something it isn't, and I'm not going to have this conversation at five in the morning."

He turned and walked toward the hallway. I heard the shower start a minute later.

I didn't call after him.

I pressed my fingertips against my wrist and sat very still and listened to the sound of water running through the walls of the house we shared, and I thought about how a body can keep its pulse so quietly, so persistently, even when everything else has gone silent.

---

I don't remember deciding to go to the bathroom. I just found myself there.

The tile was cold through my socks. The light was the same harsh fluorescent as the clinic, which felt appropriate in a way I didn't examine too closely. I sat down on the edge of the tub and waited, and then I wasn't waiting anymore — I was in a different kind of pain, the kind that doesn't ask permission, and I bit down on my knuckle hard enough to leave a mark.

No sound. I was very careful about no sound.

I don't know how long it took. Long enough. I cleaned up. I changed clothes. I folded everything small and put it in the bottom of the trash and tied the bag.

Then I sat on the edge of the bathtub again and waited for my legs to stop shaking.

Through the wall, I could hear Damien sleeping. His breathing, slow and even. A man who had come home at dawn smelling of someone else's perfume, called me hormonal, and gone to sleep without once asking what was wrong with my face.

I pressed my fingertips against my wrist.

Still there. Still moving.

Okay. I thought. Okay.

I had things to do.