After My Mate Named Another Woman His Luna

I didn't sleep that night.

I lay on the cot for a long time with the green scarf still wrapped on my lap, and when my back started to ache from the thin mattress, I got up and walked the length of the room. Twelve cots on each side. A drain in the floor near the far wall. The light from the high window was thin and blue and didn't really reach the corners.

I pressed my palms flat against the stone wall.

It was a habit I didn't remember starting. Cool surfaces. Something steady to push against when nothing else was. My hands felt hot, even though the room was cold, and the stone took the heat out of them slowly, the way a healer's poultice was supposed to draw out a fever.

I tried to think.

Distant packless relative. Assisted with my mother's care.

I tried to fit those words into the shape of the man who had written me letters every month for three years. Letters about how he missed me. Letters about how he couldn't wait to bring me home. Letters that I had folded and re-folded until the creases went soft.

The shape would not hold. The words slid off it.

I pressed my forehead against the wall too, and that was when I noticed it.

A scent.

It was so faint I almost missed it — threaded through the cold air the way a single strand of yarn is threaded through a piece of cloth. Clean. Cool. Something like pine, and something like rain on stone. It moved past me and then it was gone, as if the air itself had only been carrying it through on its way somewhere else.

My chest went warm.

I didn't understand it. There was no reason for it. The room was concrete and dust and the faint sourness of old laundry, and yet for one breath I felt something settle in me that I hadn't felt all day. Something small and steady and inexplicably kind.

My wolf lifted her head.

It was the first time she had moved since the study. Just a slow lift, like a dog stirring in deep sleep at a familiar footstep. She turned toward the scent. I felt her reach for it, weak and unsure.

Then the air shifted, and the scent was gone.

She lay down again.

I stood there with my forehead against the stone and my palms flat beside it and tried to catch the smell back. I breathed in slowly. I breathed in again. Nothing. Only the cold and the laundry and the faint copper smell of old pipes.

"Who was that," I whispered.

My wolf didn't answer. She hadn't really answered me in a long time, I realized. I just hadn't noticed until now.

---

The next evening, they came for me.

A woman in a black uniform — kitchen staff, I thought, though I didn't know her — opened the door and looked at me without any expression at all. "You're serving tonight," she said. "Banquet hall. Tea tray."

I was still in the cream wrap dress from the day before. I'd slept in it, what little sleep there was. There were creases across the front and a smudge of dust on the hem from the wall.

I didn't ask if I could change. I already knew the answer.

The banquet hall was full when I came up the back stairs with the tray. Long tables, candles, the green-and-black bunting strung between the rafters. Allied Alphas and their seconds along the side tables. At the head table, Damian sat in the center with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a glass of dark wine in his hand, laughing at something the Gamma to his right had said.

Natalie sat beside him.

In white.

Not the kind of white you wear by accident. The kind that's cut and fitted, with a high neckline and long sleeves, the kind a woman wears when she wants the room to know she is about to be claimed. Her hair was pinned up. Her shoulder — the bare line of her collarbone — caught the candlelight when she turned her head.

She saw me come in. She smiled.

"Tea, please, dear," she called, in a voice pitched perfectly to carry.

The room shifted slightly toward us. Not everyone — just enough heads to make it a small audience. I walked the length of the hall with the tray balanced in both hands. The cups rattled once when I crossed the threshold and I steadied them. My wolf was still and quiet. I was very aware of how loud my heels sounded on the wood.

I set the tray down on the head table beside Natalie's place.

"Thank you," she said warmly. She smiled up at me — a real smile, with her eyes and her teeth and everything — and lifted the small white teapot herself. "Let me, sweetheart. You've been on your feet."

I didn't move.

I didn't have time.

She poured the tea — not into a cup. Over my hands. Both of them. Held flat at the edge of the tray.

The smell hit me before the heat did. Sharp, metallic, bright. Silver. The water was scalding and it was laced and my skin reacted before my brain did — a hiss like fat on a pan, and a smell like singed hair, and a pain so clean and bright that for a second I couldn't feel anything else in my whole body.

I didn't drop the tray.

I don't know how. I know I didn't, because Natalie was already setting the teapot back down with the same careful sweetness, already saying, in that warm carrying voice: "Oh, sweetheart. How clumsy of me. I'm so sorry — did I get you?"

My palms were already blistering. I could see the skin lifting at the edges in pale, wet ridges.

I looked at Damian.

He was looking at me.

For one second, his eyes met mine across the candles. Not surprise. Not concern. Something flat and assessing — the look of a man checking whether a problem is going to make noise.

I didn't make noise.

He turned his head. Said something to the Gamma. Laughed once, low in his throat, and lifted his wine.

The Gamma laughed too.

I took the tray and walked back the length of the banquet hall with my hands burning and my face very, very still. Behind me, Natalie was already pouring tea for someone else, murmuring an apology about her clumsy little helper.

---

No one came.

I sat on the cot in the Omega quarters with my hands held out in front of me, palms up, and waited for someone to bring a healer. The skin had gone from pink to red to something darker. The blisters had broken open in places. The silver had eaten in past the surface — I could feel it, a deep cold ache underneath the burn, like the marrow of my bones had been touched.

No one came.

After an hour I understood that no one was going to.

I went to the small basin in the corner and ran the cold water over my hands until I could think again. Then I tore a strip from the spare shift folded at the foot of the cot, and I wrapped my left palm with my teeth and my right hand, and then I wrapped my right palm using my left, slowly, badly, with the cloth slipping every few turns.

My wolf made a sound.

It was small. A whimper, barely a breath. The first clear thing I had heard from her in — I tried to count, and stopped, because the answer frightened me.

Years.

Not months. Years.

I sat back down on the cot with my bandaged hands flat on my thighs and stared at the strip of gray sky in the high window, and I tried to remember the last time my wolf had spoken to me with any real voice. The last time she had said a full sentence in the back of my mind. The last time she had told me what she wanted, or what she was afraid of, or who she loved.

I couldn't remember.

Three years, I had told myself the dullness was the distance. The faint mind-link, the quiet wolf, the muted pull when I thought of him — I had folded all of it into the same explanation. Fourteen miles. A partial bond. The cost of being apart.

I looked down at my bandaged palms.

A bond, I thought, would have answered me tonight.

A bond would have screamed.