After My Mate Chose the Other Woman

I heard what happened to Makenzie the way you hear most things when you're no longer inside a pack's walls — in pieces, carried by wind and rumor and the occasional border wolf who talks too much.

Willow told me three days after she dragged me across the line. She sat at the foot of the cot in the Moonveil outpost and said it the same way she said everything — flat, fast, no softening. Makenzie's brothers had a blood-debt to the Ashfall rogues. Lance had known. He'd used it.

Her legs were shattered. Her wolf was broken. She was cast out to rogue territory to scavenge for whatever she could find.

I lay there with silver still threading through my blood and my face bandaged from jaw to cheekbone and I waited to feel something about that. Relief, maybe. Or satisfaction — the clean kind, the kind that comes when a truth finally lands where it belongs.

I felt nothing. Not because I didn't care. Because Lance hadn't done it for justice. He'd done it because Makenzie had become inconvenient, and inconvenient things got disposed of in Ironcrest the same way everything else did — quietly, efficiently, and with no record kept.

He hadn't done it for my father. He hadn't done it for me. He'd done it for himself, the way he did everything.

I turned my face toward the wall and closed my eyes.

---

Two weeks after the exile, a border warrior named Bryn died.

Willow brought me that news too, and this one I did feel — a slow, heavy thing settling into my chest like a stone into water. I knew Bryn. Not well. He'd never once looked at me when I brought food to the eastern post, never said thank you, never asked whose hands had made what he was eating. But he'd survived three rogue ambushes in the years I was dosing. His blood had carried my antiserum through a dozen wolfsbane strikes.

He died because there was none left.

I'd poured it into the fire myself.

I pressed two fingers to my left temple and held them there until the pressure steadied.

I had no regrets about what I'd done in that hall. I'd meant every word, every vial. But Bryn was dead, and the math of that sat in me clean and cold and would not be moved.

The second death came a week later. Gamma Reece. Wolfsbane arrow to the shoulder, no antiserum, no Luna aura to hold the pack steady while the healers worked. The pack's emotional core doesn't hold without a Luna — I'd known that for five years, had been quietly filling the gap with every meal I cooked, every border I stood at, every morning I got up and put on a title that was never finished. Now the gap was just a gap.

Willow told me the patrols were thinning. Wolves deserting. The Ashfall rogues pushing harder at the eastern line every night.

I said, "Good."

She looked at me.

"Not for Bryn," I said. "Not for Reece. But for what comes after."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded, once, and didn't push.

---

Lance was searching.

I didn't know this directly. I pieced it together from what Willow heard at the border crossings — a lone Alpha, no Beta escort, asking at healer's stations and rogue outposts. Same description at four different territories. Same result: nothing.

He was looking for my scent.

He'd severed it himself. Cut it loose with a silver blade and a vow spoken out loud in front of his whole pack, and now he was walking through four territories looking for something that no longer existed. The rejection-bond was eating him from the inside, phantom-scenting me in cedar, in iron, in the warmth of a pack house after someone had been cooking.

I thought about Callum Reyes watching him come back empty-handed from the third territory. Callum, who had found me hemorrhaging in the corridor and walked away without a word. Callum, who had stood in the healer's wing the night Lance carried Makenzie in over a scratched paw and watched Duncan die at dawn and said nothing for months because he didn't believe anyone with authority would listen.

I wondered what he was thinking now, watching Lance search.

I wondered if he was finally starting to believe that someone might.

Willow came in from the cold that evening and set a sealed document on the table beside my cot. Moonveil letterhead. The royal crest pressed into dark wax.

"He'll see you," she said. "Prince Kieran. Day after tomorrow, when you're stable enough to stand."

I looked at the seal. Duncan's name was in the letter — I could see it through the paper, the ink pressing through. His name, and a debt, and a date twenty years old.

"Tell him I'll stand tomorrow," I said.