His Mistress Bound Me While He Rejected Our Bond

The rogues came at dusk, when half the pack was still at the supper tables and the eastern wing was full of sleeping pups.

I smelled the smoke before I heard the first scream. Something chemical under the burn — they'd used accelerant, which meant this wasn't a hungry raid. It was planned. I dropped my ledger on the table and ran.

The eastern corridor was already a throat of orange light. Heat pushed against my face like a wall. Somewhere above me, on the second landing, a woman was shouting for her son, and the sound of it went straight through my ribs.

"The stairs are clear!" I shouted. "Bring them down the main stairs, the west route is blocked!"

I took the steps two at a time. The wood was hot through my shoes. Halfway up, I could see them — three of our older wolves and a girl no older than nine, huddled at the top where the smoke was thinnest, coughing, frozen by the wall of flame eating the banister.

"Come to me," I called. "Come to my voice, keep low—"

"PAIGE. STOP."

The Alpha tone hit me like a truck.

It didn't feel like a voice. It felt like a hand closing around every muscle I owned and squeezing until my body stopped belonging to me. My foot came down on the step and stayed there. My hand, reaching up, locked in the air. I tried to turn my head and couldn't. I tried to breathe and only managed a thin whistle of smoke-choked air.

Inside me, my wolf threw herself against the command like a bird against glass. Once. Twice. Nothing. She was too thin, too starved, too quiet from months of being ignored. She had no weight left to push back with.

I could still see. That was the cruelty of it. The Moon Goddess let me keep my eyes.

Through the flames, a side door banged open, and Franco came through it.

He had Cataleya in his arms. She had one hand curled against his chest and her face tucked into his neck, and he had his whole body turned to shield her from the heat — his shoulder taking the flames, his back curved over her like a roof. He was beautiful doing it. That was the part I would remember. My mate was beautiful, saving someone.

He looked up.

He saw me. Frozen on the burning staircase with my hand still in the air.

His jaw clenched — that tell, that stupid little tell I knew better than my own heartbeat — and then he turned his head and carried her out the door.

Our warriors came pounding through after him. Derek Voss. Two Deltas from the border unit. A young one whose name I'd written into the pack roll myself. They ran past me. One of them looked. He looked right at me, and his eyes went wide, and he kept running.

The beam came down three feet to my left. The heat of it slapped my face and the sparks went up my legs and I couldn't move, I couldn't scream, I couldn't do anything but stand there and smell my own skin.

Somewhere above me, the older wolves got the girl out through the roof hatch. I heard them go. Good. That was good. I held onto that.

The command broke maybe ninety seconds later, when Franco got far enough away that it thinned. My body came back to me all at once and I went down hard on the stairs, and then I crawled — hands first, dragging my legs behind me, each step of the descent scraping burnt cloth into burnt flesh.

I got as far as the doorway before somebody finally picked me up.

---

Sofia Marsh cut my ruined slacks off with shears and didn't say a word for a long time.

Ankle to thigh. Both legs. She laid the cooling gel on in strips and her hands were shaking so badly she had to stop twice and press them flat against the table.

"Weeks," she said finally. "Luna, this is — weeks. Maybe longer, with your wolf as low as it is." She swallowed. "Your healing rate is barely above human right now. I don't understand it."

"I understand it," I said.

She looked up then, and I saw the exact moment she decided not to ask. Her eyes went back to the dressings and stayed there.

Derek Voss appeared in the doorway around midnight. Gamma of the Ironclad Pack, soot still in his hair, a burn across his forearm he hadn't bothered to treat. He stood there with his mouth half open. I watched him find the words and lose them and find them again.

"Luna, I—"

"Goodnight, Derek."

He left. He didn't come back.

When the infirmary went dark, I pulled the suppressant cloth from under my pillow and pressed it to the inside of my wrist, where the mind-link residue would settle first.

Then I reached.

*Rogue attack. Eastern wing. He used the Alpha tone to hold me on the stairs while he carried her out. Warriors ran past me. Both legs, ankle to thigh.*

Onyx answered in under a minute, and his voice in my head was so calm it made my eyes sting.

*Document everything. Names of every wolf who witnessed it. The exact wording of the command. Have the healer put the burn severity in writing tonight, before anyone thinks to ask her not to.*

A pause.

*I am preparing a formal record on my end. Do not move yet, Paige.*

I lay in the dark with my legs on fire and my mark ice-cold, and I started counting names.

Seventeen wolves saw me on those stairs.

I wrote down every single one.