My Alpha Locked Me Away for His Widow

The Harvest Banquet was the one night Blackthorn Ridge remembered what it used to be. Long tables dressed in gold linen. Antlers and dried marigold strung along the rafters. Two hundred wolves in their good clothes, laughing too loud, the air thick with roasted meat and pine smoke, and underneath all of it, the old ritual everyone expected without ever thinking about it twice: the Luna opens the feast with a howl, and the pack answers.

I had done it every year since I was marked. My howl used to be clean and high, the kind that made the youngest pups go still and press against their mothers' legs. I used to be proud of it.

I stood at the entrance for an hour greeting wolves as they filed in, my ribs still tender under a dress cut high enough to hide the fading bruises, and a water glass someone pressed into my hand between introductions. I drank without looking at it. Why would I look at it. It was water, in my own house, handed to me by a girl in a gray dress who smiled at me with her eyes wet and grateful, like she'd been waiting all night for the chance to be useful to a grieving widow's cause.

I didn't taste anything wrong. Silver that thin never tastes like anything until it's already inside you.

Asher gave the signal at the head table. The room quieted. I climbed the three low steps to the dais where I'd stood every autumn for three years, tipped my head back the way I always did, and opened my mouth to howl.

What came out wasn't sound. It was tearing.

I felt it before I heard it — a hot line splitting up through my throat, scar tissue I didn't know I had giving way to something molten. The howl caught, cracked, and came out as a wet, broken rasp that died halfway across the room. Then nothing. Then the taste of copper flooding my mouth.

I put my hand to my lips. My fingers came away red.

The silence afterward was the worst sound I have ever heard. Two hundred wolves, forks stopped halfway to open mouths, staring at their Luna standing on a dais with blood on her chin and no voice left to explain it.

Asher stood up so fast his chair scraped the floor.

"Sit down," he said, and the Alpha tone rolled under it, low and furious, aimed at me in front of every wolf in that hall. "You shame this pack standing up there gagging like you can't perform one ceremony without falling apart. Sit. Down."

I sat. My hand was shaking around the linen napkin someone shoved at me. Across the room, Clare pressed a handkerchief to her eyes, delicate, silent, the very picture of a woman too kind to say what everyone else was thinking. Not one wolf in that hall lifted their head and scented the glass still sitting on the podium where I'd left it. Not one. Silver that faint doesn't smell like anything to a nose that isn't looking for it, and nobody in that room was looking for anything except a reason to feel sorry for the widow instead of the wife.

---

My throat took six days to stop bleeding and never went back to what it was. Wren examined it once, pressed her fingers gently along my windpipe, and said the word *scarring* in a voice that already knew there was nothing to be done. "You may not get your range back," she said. "I'm sorry, Elaine."

I told her it was fine. It wasn't a lie, exactly. It just wasn't true yet.

Under house confinement — informal, Asher's word, though the guard outside my door said otherwise — I had nothing but time and a ruined throat, so I started singing anyway. Not the songs I used to know. Something rougher, lower, built for the wreckage instead of around it. It came out cracked and strange, more breath than note, and the first time I heard it come back to me off the walls of my own quarters, I sat very still, because it didn't sound broken.

It sounded like something that had survived.

I found the Moonrise Festival's open call three nights later, buried in a rogue forum on the borrowed phone, no pack affiliation required, no name required either if you didn't want to give one. I recorded four takes in the dark with a pillow over the door crack to keep the sound in, submitted them under Ellie Vane, and didn't breathe right again until the confirmation loaded.

---

The next morning I stood over the little burner where I'd brewed Jude's suppressant tonic every eleven days for three months, wolfsbane root steeping down to a bitter amber. I looked at it a long time. Then I put the lid on the jar, set it on the shelf, and didn't light the burner at all.

I opened the phone and typed the date next to Jude's blood panel photographs.

*Day one of no tonic. Let's see what recovers.*