After My Mate Poisoned Our Pup

I started bleeding on the highway.

I didn't say anything. I pressed my hand flat against my belly and looked out the window at the dark trees rushing past, and I didn't say anything.

My father was holding me in the back seat, one arm around my shoulders, his chin resting on the top of my head the way he used to when I was small. He felt it when I tensed. His arm tightened.

"Alyssa."

"Keep driving," I said. My voice came out wrong. Too quiet. Too steady.

He told the warrior at the wheel to go faster. Then he pulled me closer and didn't speak again, because there was nothing left to say. I could feel his heartbeat against my temple—fast, for once, not the measured Alpha rhythm I'd grown up measuring my own pulse against. My father's heart was racing.

That scared me more than the pain did.

The rest of the drive is something I don't let myself remember in sequence. Just fragments. The lights of the Silvercrest pack house. Someone opening the car door. Nora Voss's face appearing, her healer's hands already moving, her voice low and controlled. My father's arm refusing to let go until I told him to.

"Wait outside," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. Something in his face was completely undone—not the Alpha, not the strategist. Just a father who had arrived too late and was being asked to stand in a hallway and wait.

"Please," I said.

He let go.

Nora closed the door behind him.

---

I don't know how long it took. Two hours, maybe. Long enough that the pain stopped being sharp and became something else—a slow, terrible absence, spreading outward from the center of me like cold water.

When it was over, I sat up in the bed and put my hands flat on my thighs and looked at the wall.

Nora sat beside me, quiet. She didn't offer comfort. She had been a healer long enough to know when comfort was the wrong thing. She just stayed close, her presence steady and warm, and let me sit in the silence until I was ready.

I wasn't ready. But I nodded anyway.

She stood, touched my hand once, briefly, and went to the door.

I heard her voice in the corridor—low, careful, devastated in the way that people are devastated when they have to deliver the irreversible. Then a long silence.

Then my father came in.

He crossed the room slowly. Sat in the chair beside the bed. He didn't reach for me. Didn't speak immediately. He just looked at me with those Alpha eyes that had never once flinched at anything, and I watched him flinch.

My wolf surfaced briefly—I felt it in my gaze, the shift in color, the cold weight of silver replacing gold. Nora had mentioned it quietly while she worked. Your wolf's eyes, she'd said. I hadn't responded.

I looked at my father and I said, "I want him to lose everything."

My voice was low. Still. The way stone is still.

Alan didn't say that it would be all right. He didn't tell me to rest, or that I was strong, or that the Moon Goddess had a plan. He sat forward, elbows on his knees, and he said: "I'm sorry I wasn't there sooner."

No justification. No explanation. Just that.

Something in my chest moved. Not breaking open—more like a single seam giving way, just enough to let air in. I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath for three days until that moment.

"He planned it," I said. "All of it. From the beginning."

"I know." His voice was quiet. Final. "And I have already begun."

He paused.

"There is someone else," he said. "Someone whose resources go further than mine. He's been waiting a long time to be useful to you. I think it's time you let him."

I didn't ask who. Not yet. I looked at the wall and let myself feel the weight of what I'd lost, and then I set it down somewhere deep and locked it there. Not gone. Just stored. For later.

First, there was work to do.

---

Three days later, I walked into Silvercrest's council room.

I was still moving carefully. Still sore in ways that had nothing to do with the body. But I was dressed, and my spine was straight, and my wolf—silver-eyed, quieter now, colder—walked with me.

He was standing at the far end of the room.

Taller than I remembered. Broader. The years had done something to him that I hadn't been watching closely enough to track. He carried himself with an ease that wasn't arrogance—it was the particular stillness of someone who has never needed to prove anything to a room, and the room had always already known it. Even my father's senior warriors had lowered their eyes slightly when he entered. I'd heard about it afterward.

But when his gaze found mine, all of that fell away.

It was just Rhys. The boy from the woods. The one who used to chase me through the silver birches in October and let me win sometimes, and I had always known he was letting me win, and neither of us had ever said so.

He didn't cross the room. Didn't reach for me. Didn't do any of the things that would have made me step back.

He just said, "I am here. Tell me what you need, and I will make it happen."

His scent reached me before the words fully settled—warm cedar and honey, something I hadn't smelled in years but recognized instantly, the way you recognize a song you learned as a child. My wolf went very still.

Not the cold, armored stillness of the last three days.

Something different. Something I didn't have a name for yet, and wasn't ready to name.

I looked at him for a long moment.

"Everything," I said. "I want him to lose everything."

Rhys held my gaze. "Then that's what he'll lose."

Simple. Certain. No performance in it.

I believed him.