After My Alpha’s Mistress Took My Luna Seat

Four days.

I knew because I'd watched them pass through the narrow window above the treatment chair — the light changing from pale morning grey to afternoon white to the particular amber of early evening, then back to grey again. Four times. The clinic had its own rhythm, unhurried and indifferent to whatever was happening in the pack house across the grounds. Carts in the hallway. The IV pump ticking. The nurse who always said 'good morning, Luna' like she was reminding herself of something.

I let her remind herself. I had stopped correcting it.

---

Caleb came on the fourth evening.

Not to the clinic. I heard about it the way I heard about most things now — secondhand, through Stephen, who gave me the relevant facts in the same tone he used to deliver blood counts. Clinically. Without editorializing, because he knew I'd hear the editorializing anyway.

Caleb had waited until the dining room was almost empty. Mariah had been refilling Damien's glass — my glass, the one on the Alpha's left — and she'd said something about 'our plans' for the upcoming pack run, the possessive pronoun landing in the room like it had always belonged there. Caleb had watched. He was good at watching. Beta wolves mostly are.

After she left, he sat down across from Damien.

Stephen relayed the exchange in four sentences, which was about how long it had apparently taken.

Caleb told Damien that Zora had been at the clinic for four days.

Damien said she chose to go.

Caleb said, equally carefully, that she hadn't had a single visitor from the pack house.

Damien poured himself another drink.

The conversation ended there.

---

I pressed my fingertips against my wrist while Stephen talked.

Still there. Still moving.

He finished and picked up his pen, and I looked at the window, at the darkening sky, at the way the evening was settling over the pack grounds like something being gently put away.

Caleb had tried. I filed that away somewhere — not as comfort, exactly, but as a fact worth keeping. He had said the one true thing in a room full of people pretending the true things weren't there, and Damien had poured himself a drink.

I understood. I did.

He had decided what kind of situation this was — a sulk, a tantrum, a chosen mate requiring management — and once Damien decided the shape of a thing, the actual shape of it stopped mattering. I had watched him do it with pack problems for years. He was exceptionally good at it. It was one of the things that made him an effective Alpha and an impossible husband.

Four days. Not an emergency.

The IV pump ticked.

---

She came on the fifth morning, just after the first cycle of the day had started.

I knew her footsteps the way I knew the clinic lights — by the particular discomfort they produced. Heels on linoleum, deliberate, the pace of someone who has decided in advance that what they are doing is reasonable.

I didn't look up from the line in my arm.

The treatment room door was open. It was always open in the mornings — Stephen kept it that way so the nurse could monitor from the hall station during the first hour, when my pressure tended to do things it shouldn't. I could hear everything in that hallway, and everyone in that hallway could see me, which was not a fact I usually minded and was now, very suddenly, not a fact I could change.

The footsteps stopped.

Not at my door. Just past it, in the corridor, at a distance calculated to carry a voice while maintaining the posture of someone in transit.

Then Mrs. Hughes spoke.

"The Luna's absence from pack duties is becoming embarrassing."

Not to me. To the Omega nurse — the young one, barely eighteen, who was small and earnest and had the terrible luck of being in the wrong stretch of hallway at precisely that moment. I heard the nurse go still. The sound of her cart stopping. The specific silence of someone who has just been handed something they don't know how to put down.

The voice continued, unhurried, the cadence of a woman making an observation rather than an attack.

"A Luna represents the pack. Whatever personal adjustments she may be working through, the pack does not pause for adjustments. Damien's grandmother maintained full duties the week after losing a pup. That was the standard."

A pause.

"It remains the standard."

The heels resumed. Down the corridor, away from my door, not once breaking rhythm.

I kept my eyes on the line in my arm.

The blood moved through the tube in its slow, steady way. The IV pump ticked. Through the window, the morning light was doing what morning light does — coming in whether you want it to or not, touching everything equally, not caring what it illuminates.

The Omega nurse appeared in my doorway a moment later. Her face was very young and very carefully arranged. She was holding her clipboard like something to grip onto.

"Luna," she started. "I'm sorry — "

"It's all right," I said.

My voice came out even. I was glad about that.

"She shouldn't have — "

"It's all right." I looked at her. Not unkindly. "Come check the line. I think the tape's lifting on the left."

She came in. She checked the tape. Her hands were slightly unsteady and she pressed the edge down twice more than it needed, and I let her, because sometimes the useful thing is to give someone something small to fix.

She left quietly a few minutes later. I heard her cart start moving again in the hall — slower than before, careful, as though she was trying not to make any noise that might attract anything further.

I lay still in the reclined chair and looked at the ceiling.

Damien's grandmother maintained full duties the week after losing a pup.

I pressed my fingertips against my wrist.

Still there. Still moving.

The morning light came in through the window. The pack grounds were visible in the lower pane — the long grass near the east fence, two Delta wolves jogging the perimeter in the distance, the roof of the pack house just visible above the tree line.

My house. For four more days or four hundred — it was still the place I had made tea at two in the morning and left birthday envelopes outside other people's doors and kept a notebook of unsaid things in the bedside drawer.

Still my house.

Still my pack.

For now.