When the Alpha Chose Her Over Me

I was three blocks from the den when my wolf, Wren, went rigid inside my chest.

*Something is wrong.*

I'd heard her say those three words maybe twice in eight years. I started to run.

My name is Maya Scott. I'm the Healer of the Silverfang Pack, and the youngest wolf ever admitted to the Lycan Royal Healing Circle. I'm also the mate of Alpha Lucas King, though most days you wouldn't know it. For eight years, my life has fit inside one sealed room at the back of the pack house. A quarantine lock. Three incubators. Six journals. One pathogen culture I have been feeding and coaxing and rebuilding from nothing since I was twenty-two years old.

It is the only viable Bloodfade culture in existence.

It is the only thing standing between my mate and a slow, bleeding death.

He doesn't know that. That's the whole point.

I hit the corridor at a dead run and stopped.

There were pack members crowded around my door. My door. The one with the biohazard placard and the lock only two people in the world had the override for, and I was one of them. The other one was standing in the middle of my den with his hand on the small of Brynn Ellis's back.

Lucas. My Lucas. In a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled, looking like he belonged.

Brynn was crying.

There was a cake on my workbench. Pink frosting. Little sugar flowers. Someone had pushed my centrifuge aside to make room for it.

And on the floor, in a slow halo of amber medium and broken glass, was eight years of my life.

I didn't scream. I have never been a screamer. I pressed my fingertips together once, the way I do when a problem is about to break open, and I made myself look at it. Really look. The incubation vessel had hit the tile at an angle. The seal had cracked first, then the wall. The culture was already turning the wrong color where it touched the air. Three minutes. Maybe four. After that, nothing in there would be salvageable.

Wren was howling. I could feel her clawing at the inside of my ribs.

*Eight years. Eight years, Maya.*

I know, I told her. I know.

"Maya." Lucas's voice. Low. Warning. He'd turned toward me and angled his shoulder so that Brynn was tucked behind him. Behind him. Like I was the threat. "Before you say anything—"

"What is she doing in here."

It didn't come out as a question. It came out flat, the way a scalpel comes out flat.

"It's her birthday." He said it like that should mean something to me. "I brought her up. I thought—"

"You overrode my lock."

"It's our pack house, Maya."

Brynn made a small, hiccupping sound against his chest. Jasmine. She was wearing jasmine again. I'd asked her once, very politely, to stop wearing scented things in a sterile space. She'd looked at me with those big wet eyes and apologized for an hour. She was still wearing it.

I walked past Lucas. I didn't touch him. I crouched at the edge of the spill, careful of the glass, and held my hand a few inches above the medium. Already cooling. Already gone. I could smell the pathogen breaking down — that faint, sweet rot, almost like overripe pear, that I had been chasing in my sleep for years.

I stood up. I picked up the cake.

"Maya, what are you—"

I dropped it in the biohazard bin. Pink frosting and all. The lid hissed shut.

The corridor went quiet.

I turned to Brynn. She was still pressed against Lucas, but her eyes were on me now, very dry under the wet, watching to see what I would do.

"On your knees," I said.

She blinked. "What?"

"That floor is contaminated. The medium is a Class Two biohazard. It does not get mopped, it gets scrubbed, by hand, in concentric passes from the outside in, with the solution in the blue bottle on the third shelf. You broke it. You will clean it."

I heard the breath leave Lucas's chest in a single hard sound.

"Maya."

"On your knees, Brynn."

"Maya, that's enough."

He stepped between us. He actually stepped between us, in my den, in front of the pack members crowding the doorway, and put his body in front of hers like I had raised a hand.

"Look at her," he said. Quiet. The Alpha tone underneath, just enough that I felt my knees want to lock. "Look at her, Maya. It was an accident. She's been crying for ten minutes. And you — you throw her cake in the trash and tell her to scrub the floor like an Omega? In front of the pack?"

"She is a trainee Healer. She knows the protocol."

"She is twenty-three years old and it is her birthday."

"That," I said, "was a Class Two biohazard."

"It was a jar, Maya."

The word landed somewhere I wasn't expecting. A jar. Eight years of my life, and he called it a jar.

"You know what," he said, and his voice had dropped into that register the pack obeyed without thinking, the one I used to feel in my spine like warmth, "I don't even know what you do behind this door anymore. I haven't known for years. Whatever it is, it matters more to you than this pack. More than your mate. You can't even let a pup have a cake without—" He stopped. Breathed. Started again, quieter, which was worse. "You are cruel, Maya. I don't know when it happened. But you are cruel, and you are not fit to be Luna of this pack."

Someone in the corridor inhaled.

I looked at him. I looked at the man I had pulled out of a freezing river when I was fourteen years old. I looked at the scar on his left forearm where his bones had healed wrong because I'd had to set them in the dark, with my hands shaking, before I knew anything about anything.

I thought, *He is dying. He is dying and he doesn't know, and if I open my mouth right now, every wolf in this corridor will know before he does.*

I closed my mouth.

I stood in the wreckage of my work and I let him say it. All of it. *Cruel. Unfit. Cold.* The pack members listening, the soft jasmine smell of the woman behind him, the dying culture seeping toward the drain. I let it happen. I let him have the floor.

When he finally walked her out, his hand on her back, the corridor cleared like a tide pulling away from a rock.

I locked the door behind them.

I came back at midnight, when the pack house was asleep, and knelt on the tile that no one had made Brynn scrub. I took out my notebook. I started to write. *Loss inventory, Day One.* The pen shook for the first three lines, and then it didn't.

I worked until the windows turned gray.

When I finally stopped, I opened the oldest journal — the one with the cracked spine, the one I have carried with me since I was fourteen — and I turned to the page in the middle where a dried river reed lies pressed flat between the leaves. Brittle now. Almost translucent. I lifted it carefully, the way I lift everything that matters, and I held it in my palm for a long time.

Then I closed the journal.

I went back to work.