My Alpha Has Ninety Days to Make Me Hate Him

LENA'S POV

The last box was the hardest one, because it didn't hold anything useful.

It held three years of marriage. Ticket stubs from the river festival where Noah had won me a stuffed fox and then pretended he hadn't tried. A dried corsage from the Eastwood gala. The wooden spoon he'd burned the first time he tried to make me pancakes, which I'd kept because he'd looked so wounded when the smoke alarm went off.

I sat on the floor of the guest room, where I'd slept since the night of the ring, and went through it piece by piece.

Most of it went into the trash bag beside me. I didn't let myself linger on any of it.

At the bottom was our wedding photo in a silver frame. We were standing under the old oak at the edge of the Pack House grounds. My veil had caught in the wind, and Noah was reaching to fix it, laughing, his eyes on me instead of the camera.

I'd always loved that picture because he looked like a man who couldn't believe his luck.

I set it face-up on the dresser and left it there. Let him decide what to do with it. I wasn't carrying that man out of this house when he'd already walked out on me.

The only thing I took was the velvet pouch tucked into the corner of the box. Inside was my mother's moonstone necklace, a pale oval stone on a thin silver chain. She'd worn it every full moon until the day she died. I fastened it around my neck, and the stone settled cool against my skin, just below the gray edge of the mark.

"You're wearing that again."

I didn't jump. I'd felt him in the hallway for a full minute, the bond humming like a live wire.

Noah stood in the doorway with his bandaged hand at his side and a bundle of envelopes in the other. They were tied with a faded blue ribbon. I knew that ribbon. I'd bought it at a craft store when I was twenty and thought I was being romantic.

"It was my mother's," I said. "It's the only thing in this house I actually want."

His eyes flicked to the wedding photo on the dresser, then away.

"You forgot these." He tossed the bundle onto the bed like it was junk mail. "Figured you'd want them back."

The letters. The ones we'd written each other the year before the wedding, when he was off training with the border patrol and I was finishing my healer certification three hundred miles away. We'd promised not to call. Letters only, because his grandmother had said real mates should be able to fall in love with words.

I'd kept his in a shoebox for years. Apparently he'd kept mine too.

"You held onto them," I said.

"They were in a drawer. I was cleaning it out." He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. "Do whatever you want with them. Burn them. I don't care."

I picked up the bundle. The ribbon was soft from handling, frayed at one end like someone had untied and retied it more than a few times.

I didn't point that out. I'd learned what happened when I pointed things out.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You're going to anyway."

"Six months ago. When Serena started sitting in on my meetings, when you started coming home late, when you stopped touching me in your sleep." I looked up at him. "Is that when it started? Were you already in love with her by then?"

He didn't answer right away.

The silence stretched long enough that I could hear the clock in the hallway and a truck downshifting somewhere on the road. His jaw tightened. For a second, his gaze dropped to the letters in my hands.

Then he looked straight at me.

"Longer than you think," he said.

It landed somewhere under my ribs, quiet and heavy, and stayed there.

Longer. So every time he'd kissed my forehead before a council meeting, every anniversary dinner, every night he'd pulled me close and murmured my name against my hair, there had already been someone else.

I waited for the tears. They didn't come. Maybe I'd used them all up in the kitchen with the broken glass.

"Okay," I said.

He frowned. "Okay?"

"Thank you for being honest. Finally." I stood and tucked the letters into my coat pocket instead of the trash bag. I wasn't sure why. Maybe because the girl who wrote them deserved better than a garbage can. "That makes this easier."

"Lena—"

Outside, tires crunched on gravel.

---

Julian had come himself.

He didn't honk or wait in the car. He got out of the black SUV and came up the walk, and when he saw me at the top of the porch steps with my suitcase, he stopped at the bottom and let me come to him.

"That everything?" he asked.

"Everything I want."

He took the suitcase and loaded it into the back with the boxes his Beta had picked up that morning. Then he walked around to the passenger side and opened the door for me.

He didn't offer his hand. He didn't touch my elbow or the small of my back. He simply stood there holding the door, giving me all the space in the world to decide.

I was grateful for that in a way I didn't know how to say.

Behind me, I felt Noah step onto the porch.

I hadn't meant to turn around. I'd told myself on the stairs that I wouldn't. But the bond pulled, the mark flaring hot under the cool weight of the moonstone, and I looked back before I could stop myself.

He was standing in the open doorway with one hand braced on the frame. He wasn't wearing a coat. The wind tugged at his shirt, and his face was pale in the gray afternoon light, paler than I'd seen it in weeks.

He looked at me, and I looked at him.

Six years since the river. Three years since the oak tree. Ninety days, minus however many I'd already lost.

He didn't say my name. He didn't move.

So I turned away from him and got into the car.

Julian shut my door gently and came around to the driver's side. He started the engine, then sat with his hands on the wheel for a moment, watching me out of the corner of his eye.

"You sure?" he asked quietly.

The house sat in the side mirror, small and white and framed by pines. Noah was still in the doorway.

My fingers closed around the moonstone.

"Drive," I said. "And Julian?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't stop the car. No matter what."

He studied me a second longer, then nodded once and pulled out of the driveway.

I watched the mirror. Noah didn't come down the steps. He didn't wave. He just stood there, getting smaller, until the road curved through the trees and the house disappeared behind a wall of green.

The mark on my neck gave one last hard throb, like a door slamming somewhere inside me.

Then it went quiet.

---

NOAH'S POV (THIRD PERSON)

He stood in the doorway long after the SUV was gone.

Long after the sound of the engine faded into the trees. Long after the wind shifted and carried the last trace of lavender and cedar down the hill and away, until there was nothing left on the air but pine and cold and wet earth.

Only then did his hand slip from the doorframe.

He caught the wall instead, palm slamming flat against the siding. His knees hit the porch boards hard. He bent forward, shoulders heaving, and his bandaged hand clawed at his chest as if he could tear out whatever was rising in it.

The cough ripped up from somewhere deep.

Blood spattered across the white-painted steps. Thick and black as tar, steaming faintly in the cold.

Exactly like hers.