When My Mate Chose His Mistress Over Our Pup

I woke up not knowing where I was.

That was the first thing—the not knowing. My body registered warmth before my mind registered anything else. Warmth, and softness, and the absence of cold metal beneath my cheek. I lay still for a long moment, cataloguing the ceiling above me. High. Pale wood beams. Morning light coming through curtains that were actually drawn, like someone had thought about whether I'd want them open.

I hadn't been in a room where someone thought about what I'd want in a very long time.

The door opened.

I flinched so hard I nearly rolled off the bed. My hands flew up, my whole body bracing—

"Easy." A woman's voice, low and unhurried. "I'm Vera. I'm the pack Healer. I'm going to stay right here in the doorway until you tell me it's okay to come in."

I stared at her. She was maybe forty, with kind eyes and a medical bag hanging from one hand. She didn't move. She just waited.

"Okay," I said. My voice came out like something that had been left in a drawer too long.

She came in slowly, set her bag on the nightstand, and sat on the edge of the bed with the careful deliberateness of someone who understood that sudden movements cost something. She checked my arms first—the silver burns had blistered and wept, leaving raw pink tracks from my wrists to my elbows. She cleaned them without commentary, without flinching, without asking me how I'd let this happen to myself.

I was so grateful for that I had to look away.

"The miscarriage was complete," she said quietly, when she was done. Not a question. Just the truth, laid down gently, like she knew I needed to hear it said out loud before I could start carrying it. "Your body went through significant trauma. You'll need rest. Real rest, not the kind where you're lying down but still bracing for the next thing."

I nodded. My throat was too tight for words.

She was packing up her bag when the door opened again.

I didn't flinch this time. I don't know why. Maybe because I'd already used up my flinch for the morning. Or maybe because something in me recognized the scent before my brain caught up—cedar and cold stone, clean and deep, like the air before a storm that hasn't decided yet whether to break.

Gunnar West filled the doorway the way large things fill spaces—not aggressively, but completely. He was in a plain grey shirt and dark pants, nothing that announced his rank, and his aura was dialed so far down it was almost imperceptible. Almost. There was still something in the air around him that made the room feel more solid.

He didn't come in.

He sat down in the chair beside the door—the chair that was as far from the bed as the room allowed—and rested his forearms on his knees.

"No one will touch you without permission," he said. "Not the pack. Not the healers." A pause. "Not me."

I looked at him for a long moment. He looked back, steady and unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be and no expectation of anything from me.

"Okay," I said again. It was becoming my whole vocabulary.

He nodded once and didn't push.

---

I learned later that Tobias had started drinking the night I left.

I didn't learn it from Gunnar—he didn't volunteer information about Silverclaw, and I didn't ask. I heard it from Declan, Gunnar's Beta, who had the kind of face that couldn't quite hide what he was thinking. He mentioned it in passing, something about pack intelligence, and then stopped himself. But I'd already caught the shape of it.

Tobias, drinking. Tobias, walking the hallways at night. Tobias, stopping outside the kitchen and standing there for long minutes, his head tilted like he was trying to catch a scent.

I knew what scent. Vanilla and rain. I'd been told once, years ago, that it was distinctive. I'd spent five years trying to suppress it with unscented soap and the smell of cleaning products.

I hoped it haunted every room in that house.

---

On the fourth day, Gunnar knocked on my door.

"There's something I want to show you," he said. "You don't have to come."

I came.

He led me down a hallway I hadn't seen yet, to a door at the end that opened into a room full of light. South-facing windows, three of them, flooding the space with the kind of afternoon sun that made everything look like it was worth something. There was a wooden easel in the center. Canvases stacked against the wall. Brushes in clean jars, paints arranged in a row.

I stood in the doorway and couldn't speak.

"I'll leave you alone," Gunnar said from behind me. And then he was gone, and the door clicked shut, and it was just me and the light and the smell of linseed oil and the terrible, aching possibility of a blank canvas.

I picked up a brush.

My hand shook. I let it shake.

I painted the canvas black first—all of it, every inch, until there was nothing left but dark. Then I loaded the brush with silver-grey and dragged it across the center in a single, jagged stroke.

The freezer. The cold. The floor.

I was crying before I finished the stroke. Not quietly, not the way I'd learned to cry in the Silverclaw Pack House—silent, controlled, invisible. Loud. Ugly. The kind of crying that sounds like something breaking open.

Sasha stirred.

It was the first time I'd felt her since the roof. Just a flicker, faint as a candle in a windstorm, but there. A low sound in the back of my mind that wasn't quite a whimper and wasn't quite a word.

I pressed my paint-stained hand flat against my sternum and breathed.

"I know," I whispered. "Me too."

I picked up the brush again.