My Alpha Chose His Luna Over Me

Twelve days into the waiting, the smell of lavender and chamomile started to make my stomach turn.

I passed Vienna in the upstairs hallway most mornings. She drifted from the Luna's suite to the bathroom and back, a silk robe loose at her shoulders, her hair pinned up. She no longer bothered to acknowledge me. I'd become furniture. A grey shape scrubbing baseboards or carrying linens, useful only as a contrast to her radiance.

That morning, I was on my knees outside the linen closet, wiping down the lower paneling. Vienna walked past me in running clothes, her braid swinging. She smelled fresh. Sharp. Lavender, chamomile—and under it, that faint, metallic green note I now recognized the way Calla had taught me to recognize it. Wolfsbane.

She didn't look down. She trotted down the stairs to join Ellis for the pack-run muster.

A minute later, the Dowager appeared at the top of the staircase.

She didn't speak. She didn't look at me. She walked to the Luna's suite, opened the door, and stepped inside.

I kept scrubbing. My heart hammered against my ribs.

She was inside for eleven minutes. I counted. I heard nothing—no drawers, no footsteps. The Dowager moved like a woman who'd spent fifty years learning to be quiet in other people's rooms.

When she came out, she crossed the hallway and stopped beside me. She crouched slowly, knees creaking, and pretended to inspect my work.

"Bone case," she murmured. "Bottom of the third drawer. Wrapped in a silk scarf." Her voice was barely louder than my brush. "I photographed the contents. I sent the request to Council Healer Mara this morning. The summit's in eighteen days."

I didn't look up. "And the case?"

"Still there. Exactly where she left it." A pause. "She doesn't think anyone's watching anymore."

I nodded once. The Dowager rose, patted my shoulder the way an old woman might pat a tired servant, and walked on.

Eighteen days.

I pressed my hand to my chest. The cold was still there. The rot was still spreading. But something underneath had started to feel less like dying and more like waiting.

---

Ellis called the winter run for that afternoon.

Mandatory. All ranked wolves, all able bodies. The mind-link command came through cold and brisk—a show of Alpha health for a pack that had begun to whisper about its leader's fading aura.

I was on the list.

I changed in the cabin behind the healer's quarters. Calla watched me with her arms crossed. "You don't have to make the full crossing," she said. "Stay at the back. If your wolf can't hold the shift, drop out at the first marker."

I didn't answer her. I walked out into the snow and tried to shift.

My wolf came up halfway. Smaller than she should have been. Thin in the shoulders. My paws sank too deep into the powder. When I looked at my own reflection in the frozen creek, I didn't recognize what I'd become—a grey, undersized thing with dim eyes and a faded coat.

The pack assembled at the tree line. Ellis at the front, his wolf still huge and black, though the silver streak at his shoulder had gone the color of old ash. Vienna ran at his flank in her sleek brown form, her tongue lolling, her tail high.

I took the last position. Behind the Omegas.

We ran.

The pack moved fast through the pines, snow spraying up behind them. I fell behind within the first mile. Within two, I'd lost sight of all but the slowest Deltas. My lungs burned. My legs shook. My wolf whined inside me, and I told her *keep going, keep going, eighteen more days.*

The river came up faster than I expected.

It was wide here. Frozen across, but the ice was thin in patches—dark grey where the current ran deep beneath. The pack had crossed in a single bounding line, each strong wolf clearing it in one leap.

I couldn't leap.

I tried to pick my way across at the narrowest point. My paws skittered. The ice held for three steps, four—

Then it cracked.

The sound was small. A clean snap. And then the world dropped out from under me.

The cold was not cold. The cold was a hand closing around my whole body and squeezing until I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't feel where my limbs ended. The current pulled me sideways under the ice. I clawed up at the surface—my paws struck solid white above me, the wrong side of the ice, no opening, no air.

My wolf surged. She thrashed. She drove me toward a darker patch of grey and broke through with my muzzle—one frantic breath, lungs burning—and then the current dragged me under again.

And then, through the cold, I felt it.

The thread.

The last thin filament of what had once been a mate bond. So faint I'd thought it was already dead. It pulsed against my chest—not from me. From the other end. From Ellis. He'd felt me.

I knew the exact second he felt it because, for one breath, the cold paused. He was listening.

*Ellis.*

The thought wasn't a plea. It was just a name. The name of the man who had been my mate.

The thread pulsed once more.

Then it went slack.

I felt him turn away. I felt Vienna's flank brush his. I felt him choose—not in words, but in the simple physical fact of his body continuing forward, paw after paw, while mine sank.

The cold closed over my head.

My wolf went still inside me. Not silent. Still. The way an animal goes still when it has decided, finally, what it is willing to die for and what it is not.

I was not willing to die for him.

I clawed upward one more time.