When My Alpha Left Me to Burn Alive

The warriors from Ironcrest arrived on a Thursday, and Lucy seated me at the far end of the hall before their boots had even cleared the doorway.

Servants' end. Close enough to the kitchen that I could smell the roast burning slightly at the edges, far enough from the head table that no one visiting would mistake me for anything but staff. I sat with my hands folded and watched Kamden laugh at something one of the Ironcrest Betas said, his head tipped back, easy, like a man with nothing buried under his floorboards.

Lucy waited until the room had settled into that particular lull between courses, when conversation dips and everyone's listening without meaning to. Then she lifted her glass, found it empty, and looked straight down the table at me.

"Ruby," she called, pitching her voice to carry, sweet as poured syrup. "Would you mind? Since the Omega seems to have nothing else to occupy her."

A few heads turned. Not many. Enough.

I stood. I crossed the hall with the pitcher, aware of every eye that flicked toward me and away again, quick, like I was something faintly embarrassing to be caught looking at. I poured. The water rose to the rim of her glass, and she watched me do it with her chin tilted, pleased.

"He'll never want you back," she murmured, so low it barely stirred the air between us. "Look at what you are."

I set the pitcher down. I didn't spill a drop.

I walked back to my seat at the servants' end and sat with my hands folded again, and I wrote nothing in my notebook that night. Some things didn't need ink. Some things I only fed to the thing pacing behind my ribs, low and patient, learning the shape of every insult like a blade learns a whetstone.

*

The guard's name was Petra, and she took a week of my rations without meeting my eyes, sliding the kennel key across the table like it burned her.

Midnight. Ten minutes, she said. Not a second more.

Barnaby heard me before he saw me — his ears came up first, then the rest of him unfolded slow, like standing cost him something. I knelt at the bars and he pressed his face into my palm, and under my fingers I could count every rib, count the knobs of his spine where fur used to hide them. His tail moved. Just barely. Like he wasn't sure it still worked.

"I know," I whispered, the words scraping rough coming out. "I know."

He leaned harder into my hand, and something in my chest cracked open wide enough to hurt.

I wasn't going to wait for a tribunal that might never come. I wasn't going to let him die in a cage while I collected evidence like a good, patient ghost.

Before I left, I tore a page from the back of my notebook, wrote four words in the dark by feel alone, and tucked it beneath the loose stone outside the Omega quarters where Maren's people checked twice a week. *Barnaby. Shadowvale kennels. Soon.*

I didn't know yet if the word was a promise or a prayer. I let it be both.

*

The gala invitation went up on the pack house board two days later, gold script on cream paper, and Lucy handed me my uniform herself — high collar, long sleeves, the kind of servant's dress built to disappear a body rather than dress one.

"It'll cover the scars," she said, not unkindly, which was somehow worse. "No one wants to see that over dinner."

I was folding linen in the kitchen the morning of, close enough to the office doorway to hear Lucy's voice drop into the register she used only for Kamden — warm, coaxing, a hand smoothing down the front of a plan.

"Let them see you've moved forward, Kam," she was saying. "A strong Alpha with a strong Luna and a child on the way. That's what the Ironcrest renewal requires. Optics matter."

A pause. Then Kamden's voice, flat and easy, agreeing before she'd even finished the thought. "Fine. Whatever you need."

My wolf slammed against my ribs — once, hard, a fist against a locked door — and I gripped the counter edge until my knuckles went white and the urge to shift, to *tear*, passed through me like a fever breaking.

A child. A performance for men who liked their alliances wrapped in the shape of a family.

I made myself breathe. I made myself fold the next napkin, and the one after that, my hands steady even as something ancient and coiled turned over inside my chest, patient no longer in the way it had been an hour ago.

*Soon,* my wolf said again, and this time the word didn't feel like waiting.

It felt like a countdown.