After My Mate Poisoned My Wolf

The silver burned through my ribs at 104 degrees, and I kept walking.

Seven years. Seven years of Alaska's rogue borderlands, of missions that should have killed me, of wolfsbane rations I swallowed because they told me it was standard medicine. The debt was cleared. The radio crackled confirmation an hour ago: five million dollars, paid in full, blood-oath satisfied. I was going home.

I was going to see Zayden's Come of Age Ceremony.

The border trader pressed something into my hand as I passed his post—a crumpled gazette, West Coast edition, traded for the last tin of rations in my pack. I almost didn't look. But the photograph on the front page stopped me cold.

Leon. My mate. Alpha of the Ironveil Pack.

The headline read: "Ironveil Alpha Dominates Pacific Northwest."

I stood there in the snow, blood seeping through the field dressing wrapped around my ribs, and read it twice. Then I found the sidebar. Small text, easy to miss if you weren't looking.

"The Moon Goddess relic shattered seven years ago in the Ironveil shrine has been confirmed as a decorative replica, never catalogued in the shrine's official inventory. Estimated value: $47."

Forty-seven dollars.

Not five million. Forty-seven.

My wolf stirred inside me for the first time in months—a weak, muffled sound, like something trying to claw its way out from under a heavy blanket. The wolfsbane kept her down. It always did.

I folded the paper. Put it in my pocket. And started walking south.

Because I needed to hear it from Leon's mouth before I would let myself believe it.

---

The Ironveil pack house looked exactly the same. Stone and timber, built into the hillside, smoke rising from the chimneys. I used to love this place. I used to think it was home.

I was filthy. My patrol gear was caked with mud and blood. My hair hung in matted tangles. The fever made everything too bright, too sharp. But I walked through the front gates anyway, because I had earned the right to walk through them.

Zayden was in the courtyard.

My son. Taller now. Broader in the shoulders. Thirteen years old, almost fourteen. His wolf should have awakened by now. That's why I pushed so hard to finish early—I wanted to be there when it happened.

I took a step toward him. "Zayden—"

He recoiled like I'd burned him.

"Don't touch me," he said. His voice cracked on the words. "Filthy rogue."

I froze.

He turned and ran—straight into the arms of a woman standing in the doorway. She was beautiful. Elegant. She wore a pale blue dress that probably cost more than every piece of clothing I'd owned in the last seven years combined.

And around her neck, she wore my Luna pendant.

The one Leon clasped there on our mating night. The one that was supposed to stay with me, with us, forever.

Fiona. I knew her name from the letters Leon sent. His "Beta advisor." His "pack liaison."

She wrapped her arms around Zayden with the easy, practiced grace of a woman who had done it a thousand times before. He buried his face in her shoulder. She stroked his hair. She looked at me over his head, and she smiled.

My nose did the rest.

Leon's scent was everywhere—on the doorframe, on the stone steps, layered into the wood itself. And woven through it, so deep it had become structural, was hers. Fiona's mark. Not fresh. Not new. Years old.

My thumb found the mate mark on my neck. The bond was still there—thin, cold, barely a thread. I pressed it once.

It felt like pressing a bruise that had never healed.

My wolf let out a single, strangled sound inside my skull.

Then she went silent.

---

I found the pack's junior herbalist in the supply annex. The main healer was busy, someone said. Attending the Alpha's pre-banquet preparations.

Of course she was.

The herbalist was young. Nervous. She examined my wound with careful hands, her face going pale when she peeled back the field dressing.

"This needs proper treatment," she said. "Silver poisoning. You should have come in days ago."

"I was in Alaska," I said.

She nodded and reached for a tin on the shelf—standard rations, the kind I'd been swallowing for seven years. Then she stopped. Read the label. And went very, very still.

"What is it?" I asked.

She looked at me. Her hands were shaking.

"This isn't border medicine," she whispered. "This is a wolfsbane suppression compound. Pharmaceutical-grade. It's… it's manufactured here. In Ironveil's own dispensary."

The room tilted.

"How long?" I asked.

"The production logs go back seven years."

Seven years.

My wolf didn't rage. She went still. Like the full weight of those seven years had just settled onto her spine all at once.

I took the tin. Put it in my pocket next to the gazette.

"Who ordered it?" I asked.

The herbalist hesitated. Then she pulled up the requisition log on her tablet and turned it toward me.

The name at the top was Fiona's.

---

I didn't get a chance to act.

Two Deltas appeared at the annex door before I could move. They were polite. Professional. The Alpha requested my presence at his birthday banquet, they said. Already in progress. A courtesy to a former pack member settling outstanding matters.

I understood exactly what was happening.

Fiona had arranged this. She wanted me to walk into that banquet hall looking like this—filthy, fever-bright, dressed in blood-stained patrol gear. She wanted the entire pack elite to see me exactly the way Leon had spent seven years telling them I was.

I should have refused.

But the wolfsbane tin was in my pocket. The gazette was in my pocket. And I had decided I would not leave this territory without being heard.

So I went.

My wolf stirred again as I walked through the hall doors—just enough to straighten my spine, just enough to lift my chin.

Just enough to make sure that when Leon finally looked at me, he would see exactly what he had done.