My Mate Suppressed My Wolf for Seven Years

The laundry pile came first.

I found Dylan's shirts folded into my basket the next morning, still warm from someone else's iron, tucked between the grey uniforms like they belonged there. I didn't need to ask who put them there. I just carried the basket to the wash house and did the work, because that's what an Omega does, and I was an Omega now.

By midday there was a box outside my cot. Inside: a scarf that smelled like Dylan, sprayed twice, maybe three times, so the whole corridor would catch it walking past. A note in Arianna's loopy handwriting. *Thought you'd want a piece of him back.* I folded the scarf, set it on the shelf, and didn't touch it again.

At the morning run, Dylan stood on the porch steps in his Alpha stance, chest out, voice carrying over two hundred wolves stretching and yawning in the cold.

"Luna Arianna's investiture is in one week," he announced. "All Omega staff will serve. Foster—" he said my name like it was a job title, not a person, "—you're assigned to drink service. Personally requested."

I heard the laughter ripple somewhere behind me, quiet, careful, the kind that knows it's cruel and does it anyway. I said, "Yes, Alpha," because those were the only two words I was allowed, and I went back to scrubbing the porch rail.

But I was watching now. That was new. I watched Old Ferris flinch when Arianna's voice hit a certain pitch. I watched Delta Wren's jaw tighten every time Dylan touched her shoulder in passing. Not everyone here loved their new Luna. I started keeping a list in my head, name by name, face by face. It cost me nothing and it felt, for the first time in days, like doing something instead of just enduring it.

The investiture came fast. I stood at the edge of the hall in grey, a silver tray balanced on my forearm, pouring wine into glasses held by people who used to ask my opinion on pack matters. Dylan stood at the front with the Luna pendant — my pendant, the one I'd thrown at his feet and heard skid against Arianna's heel — polished now, gleaming, no trace of the floor it had touched.

He clasped it around her throat. The whole hall applauded.

"A toast," Arianna said, lifting her glass, looking straight at me over the rim. "To new beginnings." Then, louder, sweeter, aimed like a blade: "Omega Twelve, refill the front table."

Twelve. Not Maisie. Twelve.

I felt every eye in that room slide toward me to see if I'd crack. My hand did not shake. I refilled the glass at the front table, and the woman holding it wouldn't meet my eyes, and I moved on to the next one, and the next, steady as a metronome.

Something inside me didn't break that night. It had already broken, weeks ago, in pieces too small to name. What happened at that table was different — it felt like the pieces stopped scattering and started stacking themselves into something with weight. I didn't know what it was yet. I only knew I stopped flinching somewhere between the third glass and the fourth.

Sylvie found me two days later, elbow-deep in a bucket of grey wash water behind the kennels. She'd come on an alliance errand — border patrols, some shared hunting ground dispute, routine Beta business between Ashfell and Thornwood. She took one look at my hands, rope-burned from hauling feed sacks, and one look at the grey dress, and her whole face went still in a way I recognized. Sylvie's still face was worse than her angry one.

"Who did this," she said. Not a question.

"Sylvie—"

"Who did this, Maisie."

I told her. All of it, low and fast, while she stood there with her hand resting on the blade at her hip like it might decide something on its own. When I finished, she didn't say a word for a long moment. Then: "Come to Ashfell. Tonight. I'll carry you across the line myself if I have to."

"I can't."

"You can. Watch me make it simple."

"I have no wolf, Sylvie. No pack. I'd walk into your Alpha's territory as nothing. A charity case with rope burns." My voice cracked on the last word, the first crack in days, and I hated it. "I won't do that to you. Or to me."

She didn't argue after that — Sylvie never wastes breath on a fight she can see she'll lose — but she pressed something small and smooth into my palm before she left. A comm stone, warm from her hand.

"One word," she said, "and I come. Doesn't matter what it costs me."

I closed my fingers around it and didn't cry until she was gone.