When the Alpha Chose Her Over Me

I went to my father at dawn.

I hadn't slept. I'd showered the medium off my hands and changed my shirt and put my hair up because Aidan Scott had been a Beta for thirty-one years and he could read a daughter's face at fifty paces. I wasn't going to give him that face.

"Little wolf," he said, when I let myself in. He was sitting up. That was a good morning. "You look tired."

"I look fine."

"You look tired and you're lying about it."

I sat on the edge of his bed and pressed my fingertips together and made myself smile. "I brought the new tincture. Two drops under the tongue, hold for thirty seconds. Don't swallow it dry like last time."

He took the dropper. His hand shook a little. Not as much as last week. The tincture was working, the part of it that was meant to work — the part that bought time. The cure itself was three months out. Had been three months out yesterday. Was now, after the broken vessel, somewhere between a year and never.

I didn't tell him that.

I stayed two hours. I changed his sheets. I read him the weather report from the paper because he liked the cadence of it, even when the forecast was wrong. I did not check my phone. Wren paced inside my chest the whole time, her ears flat, her tail low.

*Maya.*

Not yet, I told her. Let me have him for one more hour.

*Maya, something is wrong at the den.*

I know.

I kissed my father's forehead. I told him I would come back at supper. I closed his door very gently behind me and then I walked the corridor at a normal pace because the pack was watching now, the pack was always watching now, and I would not give them a Luna who ran.

My private rooms were two floors up. The journals lived on the second shelf of the bookcase to the left of my desk, in chronological order, fourteen of them, the oldest with the cracked spine and the river reed pressed inside.

The shelf was empty.

I stood in the doorway and counted the gap. Fourteen volumes' worth of empty wood. The dust line was clean where they had been, which meant whoever took them had taken all of them at once. Quickly. Without looking.

The door had not been forced. It hadn't needed to be. There was one other person in this pack house with an override on my locks, and he had used it twice in three days.

I sat down on the floor.

I sat down on the floor of my own bedroom, and I put my forehead against my knees, and I did not cry. I have never been a crier. I just stayed there, very still, until Wren stopped pacing and sat down inside me too.

*He took them,* she said.

Yes.

*To give to her.*

Yes.

*Maya, he is dying. He took the only thing keeping him alive and he gave it to a girl who breaks glass.*

I know, Wren.

I got up. I washed my face. I went to find out what he was going to do with them.

***

The Council met in the long room on the ground floor, the one with the carved table and the windows that face the training yard. I wasn't summoned. I learned about the meeting because the pack house was buzzing with it by midmorning of the third day — the Alpha's trainee Healer, presenting before the elders, reciting compound preparations like she'd been born holding a pestle.

I stood in the corridor outside the meeting room. I didn't go in. I just listened.

Brynn's voice came soft and steady through the door. "For a Stage Three inflammatory response, the base infusion is silverroot and yarrow at a four-to-one ratio, steeped at sixty degrees for exactly eleven minutes. Any longer and the active alkaloid degrades. Any shorter and the binding agent fails to release."

She was reading from page forty-seven of journal six. I knew because I had written page forty-seven of journal six on a Tuesday, in February, three years ago, with a fever of a hundred and one, after Lucas had stopped knocking on my door at night.

I heard old Councillor Reeve make an impressed sound.

I heard Lucas, very quiet, say, "She's been studying for months."

Wren snarled.

I walked away before I did something my body wanted to do and my mind couldn't afford.

***

They came for me at dusk.

Daniel Howe, the Beta, with two Deltas behind him. He looked like a man who had been asked to swallow glass. He didn't quite meet my eyes.

"Maya. The Council requests your presence."

"Requests."

"Requires," he said, and his voice cracked a little on the second syllable.

I walked between the Deltas down the corridor I had walked ten thousand times. Pack members moved out of the way. Some of them looked at the floor. One of them — a young Gamma I'd patched up after a border skirmish last winter — opened her mouth like she might say something, and then closed it.

In the Council room they were all standing. That was the first wrong thing. You stand for an honor or a sentence.

Lucas was at the head of the table. He did not look at me.

Councillor Reeve read from a paper.

"Maya Scott, Healer of record, Silverfang Pack. A formal accusation has been laid before this Council by Alpha Lucas King. The charges are as follows. Forbidden practice — the conducting of unsanctioned biological experiments within pack territory. Violation of pack medical protocols — failure to disclose the nature and substance of said experiments to the Council. Hoarding of collective pack resources — the sequestration of Healer knowledge, equipment, and materials within a sealed and unmonitored workspace, in defiance of the Healer's oath of pack service."

My hands were very still at my sides.

Reeve looked up. "Do you wish to respond to the charges?"

I looked at Lucas. He was staring at the wood grain of the table like it had insulted his mother.

I thought about saying it. The whole thing. *Bloodfade, three years ago, your Alpha, my father, eight years, the culture she broke, the formulas he stole and gave to her like a man tossing bread to a dog—*

I looked at Lucas's hand on the table. The slight tremor in his ring finger. The faint blue cast under his nails that no one else in this room had been trained to see.

I closed my mouth.

"No," I said. "I do not."

Reeve blinked. He had expected a fight. They had all expected a fight.

"In light of the gravity of the charges and the absence of a defense," he said, recovering, "this Council suspends Maya Scott's Healer rank pending full investigation. She is barred from the Healer's den and all associated workspaces with immediate effect. Her name is struck from the active Healer registry of the Silverfang Pack."

The gavel came down.

I did not move. Lucas did not look up.

Daniel stepped forward, very gently, and held out his hand.

"Your sash, Healer."

I unpinned it. The clasp was old, and stiff, and I had to use both hands. I folded it into a neat square the way my mother had taught me to fold linen when I was six, corners to corners, edges aligned, and I laid it across his open palm.

Then I walked out of the room past my mate, who still had not looked at me, and I did not look at him either.