When My Alpha Chose His Mistress Over Saving Me

He did not drag me. That would have been a kindness, in its way. A clear thing. Something the body could name.

He walked me back. His hand stayed on my wrist the whole way, not tight, just there, the way a man holds a leash he does not need to pull. The bond did the pulling. My feet went where his went. My breath matched his without my asking. I hated my own body for knowing the rhythm.

The pack house was dark and quiet. He took me past the kitchen, past the back stair, to the door at the end of the corridor that led down. I had not been down there in years. I used to send omegas to fetch flour from the dry shelves. Now I was the one going.

The stairs were narrow. The air got colder with each step. He opened a heavy wooden door and stood back to let me go in first.

It was a storage room. Stone walls. A single high window the size of a dinner plate. Sacks of grain stacked against one wall. The smell of damp stone, and underneath it, the sweet old smell of feed.

I walked to the middle of the room. I did not turn around.

"In the morning," he said behind me, "the physician will come."

I waited.

"You still carry the bloodline." His voice was the voice he used to brief his deltas on patrol routes. Even. Efficient. "The treatments are aggressive, but they have a success rate. We will try until it takes. Sylvia will raise the pup."

I closed my eyes.

I did not turn around. I did not want to give him my face.

"Walker." My voice was very small. I hated that. I tried again. "Do you feel anything."

There was a pause. Not the pause of a man thinking. The pause of a man choosing which sentence to use.

"That isn't the relevant question."

I heard the door close. I heard the lock turn. I heard his boots on the stairs going up, and I heard them stop once, near the top, and then keep going.

Then I was alone.

I sat down against the wall. The stone was cold through my shirt. I drew my knees up and rested my arms across them. Buster's collar was still tied around my wrist. I pressed my thumb against the leather and felt the cracks in it.

I did not cry. I had thought I might. There had been a moment, on the stairs, when I felt the tears coming up and I had braced for them. But they did not come. Something underneath them had already moved.

I let myself sit with it. All of it. I had been refusing to, for seven years. Tonight I was not going anywhere.

The first one. I had not even known what I was losing yet. I had been twenty-three. I remembered the bathroom tile. The way the cold went up through my knees. Walker had been at a council meeting. Someone had brought me tea.

The second. The bed-rest months. The blue chair by the window. He came home for dinner three times that whole stretch.

The third. The one I had almost named. The lock of fur, soft and grey. The cedar box. The boot.

The fourth. The fifth. I let them come. Each one. The empty bed afterwards. The meals I ate standing up in the kitchen because sitting down at the long table alone was worse. The seven Christmases. The seven birthdays. The mornings I had woken up and reached, before I remembered not to.

Sable rose inside me. She did not howl. She did not pace. She lay down beside me the way a dog does when someone is sick, and she stayed.

You knew, she said again, without saying it.

I knew.

The moon moved across the high window. A slow pale square sliding along the opposite wall. I watched it.

Something in me settled. Not peace. Not even calm. Something harder than that. A kind of quiet that had bone in it.

By the time the square of moonlight had crossed the wall and started to fade, I was not broken. I want to be clear about that. I was decided.

I did not yet know how. I only knew that the woman who had walked down those stairs was not the woman who would walk back up them. Whatever came next — the physician, the needles, the years they meant to take from my body — they would not get the rest of me. They had taken what they were going to take. The remainder was mine.

I must have slept. Just for a little.

I woke to a sound I did not recognize.

A low groaning, far off. Like a tree bending in heavy wind. Except there was no wind. The sound came from underneath. From the stone.

Then I felt it. Cold. Wet. Curling around my ankle.

I looked down.

Water. Pushing in fast under the door, spreading across the floor in a thin dark sheet. I scrambled up. The sheet became a puddle became a flood. I heard it now — a roaring outside, somewhere above, a sound like the sky breaking open.

Footsteps overhead. Many. Running. Voices shouting orders I could not make out through the stone.

And then, clear as if he were beside me, Walker's voice — the Alpha tone, sharpened, commanding — somewhere above and far to the east. Evacuating. Coordinating. Calling Sylvia's name.

The water reached my knees.

I heard him give one order I could not pretend not to understand.

"Hold the basement locked. She runs the moment she has the chance."

The water kept rising.