My Alpha Forgot Our Love

Word traveled fast in a pack. It always did.

By the fourth day of Arthur's tent, I already knew that Hayley had been making calls. Marcus told me over coffee on my porch, his voice careful and even, the way it got when he was delivering information he thought I needed but wasn't sure I wanted.

"Allied packs," he said. "Redstone, Ashford, the Crestwood Beta. She's telling them Arthur is mentally compromised and you're using the condition to consolidate power."

I wrapped both hands around my mug.

"She's not wrong that he's compromised," I said.

"Selene."

"I know." I looked out at the tree line. The smoke from Arthur's fire was a thin gray thread against the morning sky. "What's the pack response?"

"Mixed. The older members remember when you were building this place with your own hands. The newer ones—" He paused. "They've only ever known Hayley at the banquets. Standing where you should have been standing."

I nodded. I thanked him. I went inside and washed the mugs and thought about the particular patience required to dismantle something that had been constructed over years, one careful brick at a time.

Hayley had always been good at construction.

---

She came to his tent that afternoon.

I wasn't watching. I didn't need to be — the pack grounds had a way of transmitting information through the quality of its silences, and when the silence near the east gate changed, I looked up from the paperwork I'd spread across the cottage table and knew before I saw anything.

I watched from the window.

She was dressed for a business meeting — structured jacket, documents in a leather folder, the presentation of someone who had decided that professionalism was the correct armor for this particular encounter. She walked toward Arthur's tent with the measured confidence of a woman who had spent years moving through spaces that technically belonged to someone else.

Arthur was outside, splitting wood. He'd been doing that most mornings — some restless, physical need to be useful that his body apparently remembered even when his mind didn't. He heard her coming before he saw her. I could tell by the way his shoulders changed.

The growl was low. Involuntary. The kind that comes from the wolf before the man has time to decide whether it's appropriate.

Two pack warriors near the fence line took a step back without being asked.

Hayley stopped. She held up the folder like it was a peace offering. "Pack documents," she said. "Things that need your signature. I'm just doing my job, Arthur."

He set down the axe. He looked at her with those open, bewildered eyes — the same eyes that looked at me like I was the only fixed point in a spinning room — and said, with the earnest confusion of someone who genuinely could not understand why this kept happening: "Your scent makes me feel sick. I've told you that. Why do you keep coming?"

The silence that followed was the kind that leaves marks.

Hayley's composure fractured. Just for a second — a tightening around her eyes, a micro-expression she reassembled so quickly that anyone who hadn't spent years watching people manage their faces in difficult rooms might have missed it entirely.

I didn't miss it.

She said something I couldn't hear from the window. Then she turned and walked back toward the main pack house with the unsigned documents still in her folder, her spine very straight, her pace very controlled.

Arthur watched her go. Then he picked up the axe and went back to splitting wood.

---

Lauren came the next morning.

I heard her car on the gravel path before I saw it — a black sedan, pack-registered, the kind of vehicle that announced itself with quiet authority. Kason was at school. The cottage was clean. I had been sitting at the table with a cup of tea going cold beside me, going through the territory consultancy proposals I'd been quietly building for the last several months, and when I heard the car I set the papers face-down and went to put the kettle on.

She knocked twice. Formal. The knock of a former Luna who had not forgotten how to make an entrance.

I opened the door.

Lauren Miller looked exactly as she always had — composed, silver-haired, wearing the particular expression of gracious concern that she deployed the way other people deployed weapons. She had a small wrapped package in her hands. Something from the pack bakery, by the smell of it.

"Selene," she said warmly. "I thought it was time we talked."

I stepped back and let her in.

I poured the tea. I set out cups. I did not offer the bakery package back to her, which meant she had to set it on the counter herself, which she did with only the smallest pause. I sat across from her at the table and waited.

She was good at this. She always had been. She let the silence settle, let the warmth of the cottage and the tea and the careful staging of her visit do its work, and then she began.

It was a well-constructed speech. I gave her that. She spoke about Arthur's condition with genuine-sounding concern, about the confusion of a man who had lost eight years of himself, about the cruelty — and she used that word carefully, precisely, the way you use a scalpel — of withholding forgiveness from someone who no longer remembered the offense. She spoke about Kason needing his father. She spoke about the pack needing its Alpha. She spoke about what it meant to be a Luna, and what it cost to be one, and how the strongest Lunas she had known were the ones who chose mercy over pride.

She did not mention Hayley once.

I listened to all of it. I did not interrupt. I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist under the table where she couldn't see it, and I let her finish, and then I set down my cup.

"Lauren," I said. "I nursed you through two years of illness. I drove you to your treatments. I sat with you through the nights when the pain was bad enough that you couldn't sleep. I did that alone, because Arthur was traveling with Hayley as his diplomatic Beta Female, and I didn't tell you that because I didn't want to add to what you were already carrying."

She was very still.

"You knew," I said. "Not everything. But enough. And you pushed him toward her anyway, because her bloodlines were better and her connections were useful and I had already served my purpose." I kept my voice even. "So when you talk to me about cruelty, I need you to understand that your opinion of my choices is not something I'm prepared to factor into my decisions. Not anymore."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Lauren set down her cup. She looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn't entirely read — not anger, not shame, something more complicated than either. Then she stood, smoothed her jacket, and picked up her bag.

"You've changed," she said.

"Yes," I said. "I have."

I walked her to the door. I watched her cross the porch and take the path to her car. She moved with the same measured authority she always had, the former Luna who had never entirely relinquished the role.

But when she reached the car, she stopped with her hand on the door handle. Just for a moment. Long enough that I noticed.

Her hands were shaking.

She got in the car and drove away, and I stood in the doorway until the sound of the engine faded, and then I went back inside and picked up my tea and stood at the window and looked at the thin thread of smoke still rising from Arthur's fire.

The kettle had gone cold.

I put it back on.