My Alpha Chose His Mistress Over His Injured Luna

The morning after, I wore a turtleneck.

It was eighty-two degrees outside, and the ward's old air conditioning rattled like a dying thing, and I wore a soft black turtleneck under my white coat and rolled the sleeves of the coat down past my wrists.

Lucia noticed. I knew she noticed because Lucia notices everything, the way good Healers do — the way I do, when I am not the patient.

She didn't say a word about it.

What she did, instead, was set a paper cup of black coffee on my instrument tray at 7:14 a.m., the way she always did, and slide a blueberry muffin next to it that she had not brought before.

"You skipped breakfast," she said.

"I had toast."

"You had half a piece of toast and you left it on the counter. I saw it on my way in."

I looked at her.

She looked back, mild and unbothered, and tapped the muffin with one finger. "Eat."

I ate the muffin.

By the end of the week, the schedule on the ward whiteboard had quietly rearranged itself. My back-to-back surgical rotations were broken up with shorter consults. Lucia had given herself the heaviest cases on Monday and Thursday, which were the days I usually ran myself flat. When I asked her about it, she shrugged and said, "I'm bored. Give me the bleeders."

She was not bored.

I pressed two fingers to the inside of my wrist while she pretended not to look, and I felt her not-looking like a hand at the small of my back.

Once, mid-shift, I caught her watching me from across the prep counter — just a flicker of her eyes, gone before I could be sure — and I knew. Not by what she said. By what she didn't ask.

She didn't ask why I'd stopped wearing my hair up.

She didn't ask why I winced when I rotated my left shoulder.

She didn't ask, when I bent over a patient one afternoon and my collar slipped a half-inch, and her face went very still for one breath before it smoothed back to professional, why the skin of my neck had gone the color of cold ash at the edges.

She just kept refilling my coffee.

It should have made me cry. It didn't. It steadied me, the way a hand on a wound steadies a wolf bleeding out. She was holding the pressure. She was letting me move at my own pace.

I loved her for it more than I had words to say.

So I said nothing back.

---

The mark woke me at two in the morning.

It wasn't pain, exactly. It was the absence of warmth where warmth had lived for five years — a cold spot pulsing on my neck like a second, off-rhythm heartbeat. I lay in the dark and listened to Xander breathing beside me and tried to slow my own breathing to match his, the way I used to when we first mated and I couldn't believe my luck.

It didn't work.

I slid out from under the duvet without disturbing him. He sleeps deeply. He always has. I padded down the hallway in bare feet, one hand braced light against the wall, telling myself I just wanted water.

At the top of the stairs, I stopped.

His office door, two flights down across the foyer, was open a hand's width. The light inside was low — the warm desk lamp, not the overheads. And his voice was drifting up the stairwell in that particular register I had not heard in a long time.

Low. Rough at the edges. Laughing.

"Stop," he was saying, quiet, amused. "Stop. You're going to get me in trouble."

A pause. Then a softer sound from him — not words. A breath of a laugh. The kind of laugh that lives in the throat.

I did not mean to move. My feet moved.

Halfway down the first flight, I could see the angle of his desk through the gap in the door. The screen of his laptop was tilted toward him, but the side of his face was lit by it — half-gold, half in shadow, and the expression on him was something I had not seen on his face in I could not remember how long.

His mouth was soft. The line between his brows was gone. His shoulders had dropped. He was leaning toward the screen on one elbow, his thumb pressed absently to the mate mark on his own wrist — the private tell, the one only I had ever known about — and he was smiling at whatever was on the screen the way a man smiles at something he has decided is his.

On the screen, in pixelated warmth, Raelynn was laughing back at him.

I heard her voice through the small speakers, tinny and bright. "Then come down here and stop me."

He huffed. "Tomorrow."

"You said that yesterday."

"Tomorrow, Rae."

My hand was on the banister. I remember that. I remember the cool wood under my palm and the way my fingers tightened and then, somehow, didn't.

The mark on my neck pulsed cold.

My knee buckled.

I don't remember falling so much as I remember the sound — the soft, stupid thump of a body hitting carpeted stairs, the dull crack of my hip against an edge, my elbow striking the runner, my shoulder rolling, the world tilting in slow, quiet pieces. I bit down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper because I would not, I would not make a sound.

I landed on the half-landing. Curled on my side. Winded.

From the office, his laugh again. Low. Easy.

"What was that?" Raelynn's voice, faint.

"House settling," he said. "Old wood."

"Mm. Come back to me."

The door did not open. The light did not change. He did not come.

I lay on the half-landing in the dark and counted my breaths the way I count a patient's. One. Two. Three. The pain in my hip was bright and clean. My elbow was already swelling. Something in my shoulder had pulled, not torn — I could tell the difference; I have catalogued it on a hundred other bodies.

Four. Five. Six.

His voice through the door, softer now. Saying something I could not make out.

Seven.

I rolled onto my good side. Got my hand under me. Pushed up.

The climb back up the stairs took a long time. I went slowly because I had to, and silently because I would not give him the dignity of hearing me. At the top, I paused, pressed two fingers to the inside of my wrist, and waited until my breath was steady.

Then I went back to our bedroom, lifted the duvet, and slid in beside him.

He did not stir.

I lay on my back in the dark and stared at the ceiling and felt the bruise on my hip begin to bloom in slow, hot petals beneath my skin. My wolf was very quiet. Watching, the way she had been watching for days now.

In the morning, I told Garrett I had tripped on a night shift, missed the last step coming out of the ward.

He winced in sympathy. "You should be more careful, Luna."

"I will," I said.

I rolled my sleeve down over the elbow. The bruise joined the others.

And I started, that morning, on the box.