After My Mate Chose Her, I Lost Our Pup

I knew something was wrong the moment he stopped touching me.

Colton had a way of going still that the rest of the pack had learned to fear. That absolute, pressurized stillness — no pacing, no raised voice, just the air in the room pulling tight like a wire about to snap. I had seen it used on warriors twice his size. I had never had it turned on me.

Until tonight.

He was already dressed. I was still sitting on the edge of his bed, my hair loose, the sheets warm behind me, the room thick with the scent of honeysuckle and rain — my scent, the one he had told me once, in a rare unguarded moment, that he could pick out from three territories away. He was standing at the window with his back to me, and something about the set of his shoulders made my wolf go very quiet inside my chest.

"I'm taking Natalie Larson as my chosen mate," he said. "The Silvercrest alliance requires a formal bond. The decision is made."

The words landed flat. No preamble. No softening. The same tone he used to dissolve a border dispute or reassign a warrior to a different post.

I sat very still.

"Natalie Larson," I repeated. My voice came out steady. I don't know how.

"Daughter of Alpha Larson of the Silvercrest Pack. The mating will be announced at the end of the month." He still hadn't turned around. "You'll need to vacate the cabin by the end of the week. I'll have someone arrange—"

"Colton."

He stopped.

"Did the three years mean nothing?" I asked. Softly. Just once.

The silence stretched. Outside, the wind moved through the pines. Somewhere in the pack house, a door closed.

He didn't answer.

He picked up his jacket from the chair, shrugged it on, and walked out. He didn't look back. The door didn't even slam — it closed with a quiet, final click that was somehow worse than any sound I had ever heard.

I pressed my back against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on the floor.

My wolf howled. It was the kind of sound that fills your entire skull, every corner of it, and makes no noise at all in the room. Just inside. Just mine. She had been howling to be claimed for three years, a low, constant ache I had learned to live around the way you learn to live around a bad knee or a scar that pulls in cold weather. This was different. This was the sound she made when she understood that the thing she had been waiting for was never coming.

I pressed my hand flat against my abdomen.

Four weeks. Maybe five. I hadn't told anyone yet — not even Elara, the pack healer, though I suspected she already knew. I had been planning to tell Colton over Thanksgiving dinner. A home-cooked meal at the cabin, just the two of us, the kind of