My Alpha Called Me Wolfless to Protect His Mistress

I did not sleep that night.

I sat on the edge of Ava's bed until her breathing evened out, then walked down the hall to the kitchen and set water to boil for tea I did not drink. The moonstone pendant sat on the counter beside my hand, catching light from the hood lamp above the stove. I looked at it for a long time.

Then I opened the small battered journal I kept beside the flour tin, and I wrote.

Not a diary. A request.

*To the office of the Beta, Ironveil Pack. I am submitting a formal request for an assembly of the ranked wolves of Ironveil at the earliest available hour, on a matter of pack household records requiring Alpha review.* I read it twice. The language was clean. Bureaucratic. The kind of phrasing Jayson himself used when he wanted a thing done and did not want it questioned. It gave him no ground to refuse.

I signed my name at the bottom. Luciana. No title. I had never had one to sign.

At six in the morning I walked the request to the Beta's office and handed it to him myself. He was a heavy-shouldered wolf named Corwin who had never spoken more than ten words to me in six years. He read it standing up. Then he looked at me.

"You want an assembly."

"I do."

"For what."

"It's on the form."

He folded the paper along its crease. "I'll bring it to the Alpha."

"Please retain a copy for the Beta's file. I've kept one for mine."

Something in his face shifted a quarter inch. Not sympathy. Something closer to a scent he could not yet name. He nodded once.

I went home. I braided Ava's hair for school. I changed Paula's linens and helped her into the chair by the window where the morning light warmed her hands.

At ten, Corwin came to the pack house door with a slip of paper confirming the assembly for tomorrow evening at seven. I took it, thanked him, and closed the door before he could say anything else.

I heard, later, that he stood on the porch for a full ten seconds before he walked away.

---

Elise arrived at two in the afternoon.

She let herself in through the side door as if she had always had a key. Perhaps she had. I was in the care wing folding Paula's clean linens into the cedar chest at the foot of the bed when I felt her scent enter the room before she did — bergamot, something floral, the faint copper undertone of Jayson's mark on her skin.

"Luciana." Her voice was light, delighted, the tone one might use to greet a friend at a market. "I was hoping to check on Paula's welfare. It's been on my mind."

I folded a pillowcase. I did not turn.

"She's sleeping."

"Oh good." She stepped further into the room, and I heard her draw in a small delicate breath through her nose. "Goodness. This room does carry, doesn't it. Heavily. So much of Paula in the air."

I folded another pillowcase.

"Though I suppose," she said, tilting her head — I did not have to see it to know she was tilting her head — "it must be difficult for you to tell. You carry so little scent of your own. Even the omegas, honestly, could mask you in a crowd. It's such an odd quirk of the Goddess, isn't it. Some wolves just don't take."

I set the pillowcase in the chest. I closed the lid. I turned.

She was standing in the doorway in a cream-colored coat that cost more than my quarterly household budget. Her eyes moved over my dress — the gray one, three years old, the hem I had let out twice — and softened into something like pity.

"Jayson mentioned," she said gently, "that he's arranging resources for the New Moon marking. I told him he ought to set aside a bit for you. A decent set of things. For your departure. It's the least we can do."

She smiled. She waited a beat, in case I wanted to respond.

I did not.

She left the way she came.

I stood in the middle of the care wing with the smell of her still hanging in the air, and something under my ribs — something I had stopped listening for years ago — made a small, low sound. Not a growl. Not quite. The scrape of a thing waking against its own restraint.

I put my hand on the cedar chest and waited until it passed.

---

Paula was clearer in the evenings sometimes. Not often. But sometimes.

I sat on the edge of her bed after the sun went down and took the moonstone pendant from my pocket. I let it rest on my open palm where the lamplight could catch it.

"Paula. Do you remember this?"

She blinked. She looked. And something behind her eyes — the woman who had governed this pack, the Luna who had walked into rooms and made them straighten — came up to the surface for one complete breath.

"That belongs to the firstborn," she said. Her voice was low and exact. "It always goes to the firstborn."

I did not move.

"Always," she said again. And then her eyes drifted past me, past the lamp, past the wall, and she began telling someone I could not see about a garden she had planted a long time ago.

I closed my hand around the pendant. It was warm. It had been warm since the moment Max dropped it into my palm.

The heirloom passed only to firstborn heirs. Placed by a former Luna's dying instinct into the hands of a boy whose mother had taught him to call himself the real one.

I sat with Paula until she slept.

Then I went to the kitchen and poured out every leaf of tea in the tin.