My Mate Used Wolfsbane to Fake Our Bond

The wolf woke up.

Not the way she'd stirred at the graveside — a scared push against a locked door. This was different. This was a hand slapping the door from the inside and holding it there. Hot. Insistent. Furious in a way I did not know I was allowed to be.

*Do not kneel.*

She didn't say the words. She didn't have words. But the meaning came through my sternum like a note held on a low string, and it rattled my teeth.

I sat very still on the waiting room bench. Liv was drawing on the back page of Sylvia's notebook. A house. A tree. A wolf too big for the tree. She hummed a song from a cartoon I hadn't let her watch in months.

The document was on my lap. Ironridge letterhead. The clerk's careful signature. TERMS OF RESOLUTION.

I put my palm flat over my chest, the way you press a fussy child.

*I know,* I told her. *I feel you. I hear you.*

She pushed back harder.

I sat with her for an hour. A full hour. I counted the ceiling tiles. I watched a fly land on the vending machine three times. I felt the wolf strain against whatever chemical fog had been keeping her small for seven years, and I felt her lose ground and gain it and lose it again.

Then I turned my head and looked through the little square window into the medical wing.

Casey's chest was barely moving. One hand curled loose on the blanket. The strap across his ribs so he wouldn't shift in his sleep. Half his face gone purple.

I looked at Liv. At the too-big wolf in her drawing. At the way her socks didn't match.

*He will die,* I told my wolf. *You know he will.*

She understood me. I felt her understand. And the fury did not go away — it folded. It sat down inside my chest with its ears flat and its eyes open, and it waited.

I clicked the pen.

My hand was steady when I wrote my name on the acceptance line. Steadier than it had any right to be.

---

The hall smelled the way it always had. Cedar polish and something faintly animal underneath. I had cooked in the kitchen off this hall. I had carried Sylvia's trays down this corridor. I knew which floorboard creaked.

They brought me in through the side door like a delivery.

Dozens of faces I recognized. Faces I had fed at pack dinners. Faces that had smiled at Liv when she was small enough to carry on my hip. Not one of them met my eyes.

Massimo was in the Alpha's chair.

He had dressed for it. Dark shirt, no tie. His hair combed back the way he wore it for photographs. Bianca stood at his right shoulder in a pale gray suit, hands folded in front of her, chin level. She looked like she had been born standing there.

The tribunal elder gestured to the stone at the center of the floor.

I walked to it. I did not look at Massimo. I looked at the stone.

I knelt.

My knees hit and the wolfsbane scar on my neck went hot, the way it had gone hot at the funeral, the way it went hot every time the truth got close enough to touch it. Like it knew. Like the chemical was reminding me who had put it there.

"State your confession," the elder said.

I opened my mouth.

"I fabricated my Luna status."

The words came out even. I don't know how. My tongue felt like it belonged to someone else.

"I was never his mate."

A murmur ran along the back row. Somebody coughed.

"I deceived the Ironridge Pack."

I looked up then. Just once. Not at the elder. At Massimo.

His face was empty. Not cold — empty. The way a stopped clock is empty. He was watching me the way a man watches an appliance finish its cycle. Waiting for the light to turn green so he could take his laundry out.

Something in me went very quiet.

Not the wolf. The wolf was still there, folded and waiting. Something else. Something newer. A small hard thing behind my breastbone that took a careful measurement of Massimo Drax's face and filed it away.

"The confession is accepted," the elder said. "Stamped into record."

The stamp came down on the paper. Wood on wood. A small, ordinary sound.

Bianca's mouth moved, just at the corner. Not a smile. A tick of satisfaction, quickly smoothed.

I stood up.

My knees held.

---

They authorized Casey's surgery inside the hour.

I sat in the recovery room and watched him breathe. In. Out. The monitor beeped in a steady rhythm that was the most beautiful sound I had heard in a week. Liv slept across two plastic chairs I'd pushed together, her cheek mashed against my folded coat. Barn light through the window turned everything the color of old honey.

The healer came in and told me the surgery had gone well. His wolf was stabilizing. The shoulder would heal. He would keep the arm.

I nodded. I said thank you.

I did not cry.

Relief was not what I felt. Relief is what you feel when a burden lifts. This was not lifting. This was accounting.

I made a list in my head.

One rusted Corolla. Forty-one dollars minus the motel. A five-year-old daughter with mismatched socks. A brother with a healing shoulder and a wolf who was going to owe me the rest of his life whether he liked it or not. Three of Sylvia's notebooks. An eye-tracking tablet in a duffel bag.

No pack. No status. A permanent line in the Ironridge record calling me a self-confessed liar.

And inside my chest — folded, patient, awake — a wolf who was beginning, slowly and insistently, to recognize the burn on my neck as wrong.

I put my hand over Casey's. His fingers twitched.

I wasn't broken.

I was taking inventory.