My Mate Suppressed My Wolf for Seven Years

The fevers started on a Tuesday, or I think it was a Tuesday. Days had stopped mattering much in grey.

I was folding sheets in the linen room when the heat hit me sideways, like someone had opened an oven door against my face. My knees buckled. I caught myself on the shelf, sheets sliding to the floor, and by the time the dizziness passed my nose was bleeding onto the white cotton I'd just folded. Bright red on bleached white. I stared at it for a second too long before I remembered to move.

I scrubbed the stain out with cold water and told no one.

It happened again two days later, worse. And then a third time, in the middle of the yard, in front of Delta Wren, who looked at me with something that wasn't quite pity and wasn't quite fear. "You should see the healer," she said, and walked away before I could answer.

I didn't need to see Nessa. Nessa found me.

She caught my wrist in the hallway outside the kennels, her thumb pressing hard against my pulse point, her eyes doing that clinical sweep she used to do when I was Luna and my only ailments were exhaustion and stress. "You're running hot," she said. "How long has this been happening?"

"A week. Maybe more."

She didn't say anything else. But I saw her go straight to Dylan's study that evening, and I saw her come out twenty minutes later not meeting anyone's eyes, and the next morning the little brown bottle in my hand was heavier — the dose doubled, the taste sharper, bitter enough to make my throat close on the way down.

I drank it anyway. Seven years of believing it was medicine doesn't die because your nose bleeds.

The day after that, I was carrying an armful of fresh linens down the east corridor when I heard voices through the crack of Dylan's study door. I wasn't trying to listen. I want that on record too — I wasn't trying to hear anything. But my feet stopped on their own, the way a body stops before the mind decides to.

"—suppression's not holding the way it used to," Nessa was saying, low and clipped. "Her scent shifted twice this week. Old Ferris asked me about it. I told him it was stress."

"It has to hold." Dylan's voice, flat, the tone he used for pack business, not for me. "If the bloodline surfaces before I've — not yet. Not yet, Nessa."

The linens were suddenly very heavy in my arms. *Bloodline.* *Surfaces.* The word sat wrong in my chest, like a stone dropped into still water, rings spreading out before I understood what had broken the surface.

The door opened. Dylan stepped out and found me standing there, arms full of white cotton, face doing whatever my face does when I'm caught.

He didn't even blink. That was the thing about Dylan — he never had to scramble for a lie, because to him it was never a lie. He straightened his cuffs.

"You heard wrong," he said, gentle, patient, the voice he used to use when I cried over small things early in our bond. "We were talking about your instability. The fevers. The nosebleeds." He tilted his head, and something in his eyes went soft in a way that used to make my chest ache with gratitude. "I'm worried about you, Maisie. The tinctures are the only thing keeping your wolf from tearing you apart from the inside. You remember what happened before we started them. Do you want to go back to that? Do you want to end up like her — gone, silent, nothing left?"

I didn't remember what happened before. I never had. But he said it with such certainty that the memory I didn't have felt more real than the one I did.

"No," I said. "I don't want that."

"Then trust me." He touched my shoulder, brief, proprietary. "Go on. Finish your rounds."

I walked away with the linens. My hands were shaking. Not from the fever this time.

He started coming to my room after dark that week. Not with tenderness — I'd stopped expecting that the night the mark went cold — but with the particular hunger of a man checking that a lock still holds. He'd sit on the edge of my cot, uninvited, and tell me things in a voice gone soft and reasonable.

"You were never strong enough to be Luna," he told me the first night. "The rejection was a mercy, Maisie. You'll see that eventually."

"Arianna's wolf is everything a Thornwood Alpha deserves," he told me the second. "Strong. Simple. Not — complicated, like yours."

The third night he didn't say much at all. He just sat there, watching me the way you watch something you own to make sure it hasn't moved.

I said nothing through all three. Some old, worn-down part of me still thought silence was safety.

On the fourth night, when the door creaked open and his shadow fell across the cot, something in me had finished stacking itself into shape.

"Get out," I said. Not loud. Not shaking. "And don't come back."

He went very still. For a long moment he just looked at me, like he was recalculating something that had always added up before. Then he left, and the door clicked shut, and I sat alone in the dark with my heart slamming against my ribs.

The words hadn't killed me. I said them again, into the empty room, just to hear them a second time.

"Get out."

Nothing answered. But nothing broke, either. And for the first time in weeks, that felt like enough.