My Alpha Chose His Mistress Over His Injured Luna

I have healed wolves who were half-dead on the table. I have pressed my hands into wounds that would have made a warrior faint and held steady. I have never once, in all my years as a Healer, let what I was feeling show on my face when it mattered.

So when Raelynn Gonzalez's phone lit up on the examination table beside her, and I saw the mind-link signature bloom across the screen in Xander's unmistakable frequency, I did not stop moving. I kept my fingers on her shoulder, kept my healing warmth flowing steady and even, and said nothing.

I just breathed.

And that was when it hit me.

The scent was already there. I don't know how I had missed it when she walked in — cedar and dark musk, the specific warmth of my mate's skin, the smell that used to mean home. It was soaked into her. Not a trace, not a passing brush. Saturated. The kind of deep that takes months to build.

My wolf screamed.

Not a whimper. Not a warning. A full, raw, tearing scream from somewhere behind my sternum that I had to physically contain the way you contain a wound — pressure, stillness, don't let it out.

Raelynn didn't notice. She was still talking.

"He's so protective, it's almost annoying, you know?" She laughed, tilting her head so I could access the muscle along her trapezius. She'd been transferred to us from the Ashveil Pack three weeks ago for a training injury — nothing serious, a deep tissue tear, but she'd requested follow-up sessions. "Like, I sneeze wrong and he wants to know about it."

"Mm," I said.

My voice came out exactly as it should. Mild. Professional. Faintly warm.

"He says it's just because I'm new to the territory." She smiled at the ceiling. "But I think he just likes knowing where I am."

I finished the session in eleven minutes. I noted the recovery progress in her file — good, ahead of schedule — told her she could resume light training in four days, and walked her to the ward door with the same steady ease I always carry in this room.

I closed the door behind her.

I crossed the ward to the supply closet in the back corner, the one with the heavy door that seals tight, and I stepped inside, and I pulled it shut behind me.

Dark. Shelves of gauze and antiseptic and bone-set compound. The smell of clean linen and nothing else.

I pressed my hand to my neck.

The mate mark has always been warm. From the night Xander marked me, five years ago, it has run a few degrees above my surrounding skin — a quiet heat, a constant reminder. I used to press my fingers to it when I was tired or homesick in distant territories. It always felt like a heartbeat.

Under my fingers now, the skin was cool.

Not cold. Not gone. But cool, and when I concentrated —