My Mate Kept Me Weak to Protect His Mistress

The healer told me what happened at the midweek assembly. Not because I asked. Because she needed to say it out loud to someone, and I was the only someone available.

She described it in the same flat clinical voice she used for the bloodwork — dates, sequence, outcome. But underneath the precision I could hear something else. Something that sounded almost like relief.

Lina had stood at the head of the assembly room. My assembly room. The one I'd run every Wednesday for ten years, learning early on that Wednesday was when the delta warriors were most restless and the border reports most likely to carry bad news, so Wednesday required a particular kind of stillness from the person at the front. Not authority exactly. Something quieter. The ability to make a room feel held.

Lina raised her voice when a delta warrior named Holt reported that his shoulder wound from last week's training hadn't closed. Three days. A wound that should have healed overnight. Holt wasn't complaining — he was reporting, carefully, the way warriors do when they're worried but don't want to seem worried. Lina told him to see the healer.

The healer was sitting in a safe house on neutral territory. But that wasn't the point.

The point was that Holt had needed the room to acknowledge something was wrong, and Lina had closed the door on it instead. The assembly moved on. The border dispute from the eastern ridge — the one Margot Voss had flagged twice already — was marked resolved when Lina misread the silence in the room as agreement.

Margot's body language had said otherwise. But no one was reading Margot.

Afterward, the warriors clustered in the corridor in groups of two and three. Low voices. The kind of conversation that stops when an authority figure walks past.

I knew that sound. I'd heard it once, years ago, during a week when James had been away at a territorial summit and I'd run the pack alone for seven days. The difference was that when I'd walked past those clusters, the conversations hadn't stopped. They'd included me.

Lina went back to the Luna suite and found my scent still in the bedding.

The healer heard the sheets hit the floor from down the hall.

I sat with that image for a moment. Lina standing in the room that had been mine, pulling linen off a mattress with her bare hands because the ghost of me wouldn't leave. There was something almost satisfying about it, and I let myself feel that for exactly three seconds before I filed it away and reached for the next folder.

Selene was quiet inside me. Watching. She did that — went still when I was processing, like she understood I needed space to think. The warmth of her presence had become familiar already, in the way that a sound you've been straining to hear becomes obvious the moment you finally catch it. I couldn't believe I'd lived thirty-two years without it.

*He's moving,* she said, just as I turned the page.

I looked up from the file. "James?"

*He filed something. I can feel the edges of the old bond — what's left of it. There's a pulse through the pack channels. Official. Formal.*

I set the folder down.

The healer was watching me from across the table. She'd learned, in the past day, to read my silences.

"He filed a warrant," I said.

She went still. "How do you—"

"Selene." I pressed my fingers flat against the table. "He's calling me a rogue. Theft of pack resources." I almost laughed. The files. He was calling the evidence of what he'd done to me *stolen pack resources.* "He's sending warriors."

The healer's face went carefully blank in the way of someone controlling fear. "How many?"

"I don't know yet."

I stood. My ribs still protested. The ache in my neck was a constant low throb, the hollow scar tight and tender. I crossed to the window and looked out at the tree line — pine and shadow, the neutral territory stretching in every direction, no pack markers, no ward lines. No protection.

He'd framed it as a welfare matter. I knew that without Selene having to tell me. That was James's particular fluency: making the cage sound like care. *She is unwell. She needs pack care.* His warriors would believe it, or they'd tell themselves they did, because the alternative was admitting they were dragging a woman back in chains on a fraudulent warrant.

Most of them wouldn't meet his eyes when he gave the order. I knew that too, somehow. I knew the shape of a pack that was starting to doubt.

The knowing didn't make me safer. Eight warriors — weakened, maybe, but still eight — against one she-wolf who'd collapsed in a courtyard forty-eight hours ago and hadn't yet tested what Selene's awakening actually meant for her body.

*We will find out soon enough,* Selene said quietly.

There was no fear in her voice. Only a certainty so deep it felt geological.

I stood at the window and watched the tree line and thought about the warrant, and the warriors, and the man who had written *subject* on my medical file for nine years and eleven months and sixteen days.

"All right," I said, to Selene, to the healer, to the room.

"Then we prepare."