When My Alpha Left Me to Burn Alive

Kamden's boots stopped four feet from where I crouched, and the mate bond that used to sing along my spine gave one weak flicker, like a bulb about to die, before it went dark again.

I knew him by scent before I lifted my head—cedar and something colder now, something I didn't recognize. When I finally looked up, his face told me everything the bond couldn't. No relief. No grief unspooling into joy. Just his nose wrinkling, his jaw tightening, his eyes moving over the ruin of me—the burn-scars lacing my throat, the ribs pressing through my shirt—like I was something tracked in on a boot.

"That's Ruby?" one of the warriors asked, low, disbelieving.

Kamden didn't answer him. He said, to all of them, in the flat voice he used for orders, "Barely pack-worthy." Then, to me, nothing at all.

He walked back to the SUV. I understood, the way you understand a slammed door, that I was meant to follow on foot. Six miles of dirt road, his taillights ahead of me, a line of warriors behind who did not offer me a ride. I did not fall. I counted them instead—eleven faces, eleven scents I filed away like evidence. My wolf, wherever she was sleeping, didn't stir. Only my feet kept moving.

Lucy met me on the pack house stairs in silk, one palm curved under a belly I didn't remember her having. "We thought you were dead, poor thing," she said, voice dripping with a kindness that had teeth in it. "Kamden grieved so beautifully for you." She smiled at the Omega guards flanking me. "Take her down."

Down was a room beneath Kamden's bedroom—beneath the room she slept in now. Something in my chest lit, brief and furious, three years of nothing suddenly catching flame, then smothered again before it could become anything. I sat on the narrow cot, opened the notebook I'd carried out of hell, and wrote: *I am still here.*

He called me to his office five days later. Papers waited on the desk—hunting rites, blood-locked to my mother's line, needing my signature to transfer.

When I didn't reach for the pen fast enough, his voice dropped into something that wasn't a voice anymore. It was pressure, a hand closing around my spine from the inside. I hit my knees before I understood I was falling. Blood ran hot over my lip.

My fingers crawled toward the pen against my will. I let them. Then I pointed at my eyes, shook my head, scrawled with a shaking hand: *Can't read this. Need time.*

Kamden's mouth curled in disgust, but he said, "One week," and looked away first.

I wiped my lip in the hallway and added a line beneath the first: *He needs me. That is a weapon.*

Lucy put a mop in my hands two days after that and sent me to scrub the memorial hall—my own portrait on the wall above a plaque with my name carved into brass, commissioned, I'd learn later, for men from Ironcrest who liked a grieving Alpha. I stood in front of my own death and felt nothing until I saw the case beside it.

My mother's wax seal. Sealed the year I was born.

Before I could move, Lucy filled the doorway with two guards behind her. "Don't linger, Ruby. The floors won't scrub themselves."

I went back to the mop. But I knew now exactly where she was.

That night I picked the case open with a bent hairpin, my hands steady in a way they hadn't been in years—captivity had taught me that much, at least. I tucked my mother's letters against my ribs and turned to go.

"What are you doing in here?"

Kamden filled the corridor, Alpha-tone sharpening the air around his words even when he wasn't trying. I turned slow, the documents pressed flat beneath my uniform, my pulse a drum against paper, and held up the rag in my other hand.

He looked at me for a long, cold beat—long enough that I thought the letters would burn straight through my shirt and give themselves away. Then he waved one hand like I was smoke to be cleared from a room. "Get out."

I walked past him with my mother's sealed words against my heartbeat, my face arranged into nothing at all. Behind me, down the hall, I heard his bedroom door open, heard Lucy's voice pitch soft and sweet asking where he'd been.

Something in my chest turned over—warmer this time, deliberate, awake.

It did not go quiet again.