My Alpha Accused Me of Hurting His Mistress

The mind-link punched through my sleep at 11:47 PM.

*Luna. Medical wing. Now.*

It was Rowan, our Beta, his voice tight in a way I had not heard in five years of marking. I sat up in the bed I shared with my mate and reached for him out of habit. The sheets beside me were cold.

I pulled on jeans and a sweater. My Healer's kit was already by the door. I have been the Ironveil Pack's lead Healer since I was nineteen. Five years as Luna. People die when I am slow, so I am never slow.

The pack house was too quiet for an emergency. No lights in the common rooms. No wolves crowding the hall outside the medical wing the way they always did when one of our own was hurt. Just Rowan, standing by the door, his eyes pinned to the floor.

"Who is it?" I asked.

He did not look up. "Luna. Maybe you should let one of the junior medics—"

"Who is it, Rowan?"

His jaw worked. He stepped aside.

I opened the door.

The smell hit me before the sight did.

My mate's scent — pine sap and storm, the bond's anchor, the thing that had defined *home* for me for five years — was tangled with something sweet and synthetic. Lilia's perfume. Underneath that, the rawer scent I had only ever caught on my own skin and his. Sex. Sweat. The chemical signature of two wolves who had been moving inside each other less than an hour ago.

Sable howled. My wolf, who almost never raised her voice. The sound filled the inside of my skull until I could not hear my own breathing.

Declan was on the exam table with his shirt off. His mark — *my* mark, the one I had set in his throat the night he claimed me — was livid red, like he had been scratching at it. Lilia was on the second cot, half-wrapped in a sheet. There was a bite on the curve of her neck. Deep. Fresh. The kind of bite a male wolf only gives when he is too far gone to remember he has a mate.

My hands stayed at my sides. They did not shake.

"Isla," Declan said.

I walked past him.

I set my kit on the rolling tray. I snapped on gloves. I pulled the lamp arm down so the light fell clean across Lilia's neck, and I cleaned the wound with the same antiseptic I would have used on a child. She watched me through her lashes. Her mouth was slightly parted, like she was waiting for something.

"Tilt your head to the left," I said.

She tilted.

"Further."

She tilted.

I closed the bite with three stitches. My fingers moved the way they had moved through ten thousand other wounds. My fingers did not know yet that they had four days left to be fingers.

When I was done I stripped the gloves, dropped them in