My Alpha Forgot Our Love

I had rehearsed the words so many times that by the time I finally said them, they came out calm. Almost gentle. Like I was reading from a document I'd already signed.

"I, Selene Carlson, Luna of Ironvale Pack, reject you, Arthur Miller, Alpha of Ironvale Pack, as my fated mate."

The office was quiet except for the rain against the windows. Arthur sat behind his desk — the same desk we'd picked out together eight years ago from a salvage yard when we couldn't afford anything better — and he didn't flinch. He didn't look up. He had a pen in his hand and some kind of territory report open in front of him, and for a moment I thought he hadn't heard me.

Then he set the pen down.

"Accepted," he said.

That was it. One word. The same tone he used to approve supply requisitions.

I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist — a habit I'd developed somewhere in the last three years, when I learned that the body needs somewhere to put things the face can't show — and I waited for something. Pain. Relief. The soul-deep rupture the old stories described. What I felt instead was a dull, spreading ache, like a bruise finally surfacing after the impact had long passed.

He still hadn't looked at me.

I turned and walked out.

The pack house hallway was empty at that hour. My footsteps were quiet on the hardwood floor we'd refinished together the first winter, when Ironvale was still small enough that the Alpha and his Luna did their own repairs. I passed the framed territory maps on the wall — each one marking a year of expansion, a border pushed further, a rival pack absorbed or allied. I had hung every single one of them.

I did not look back.

---

I heard about the crash at dawn.

Marcus Webb knocked on my cottage door while it was still dark, his face doing the careful thing it did when he was managing bad news. He told me Arthur's SUV had gone off the mountain road sometime after midnight. A ravine off Route 9, the rain-slicked stretch we'd always said needed guardrails. Pack warriors found the wreckage at first light.

"He's alive," Marcus said quickly, reading my face. "Diane's with him."

I nodded. I asked if Kason was still asleep. Marcus said yes. I told him I'd be there in twenty minutes and closed the door.

I stood in my kitchen for a moment with my hand flat on the counter. Outside, the rain was still coming down.

I thought about the fact that he had driven straight to Hayley's penthouse celebration. That was where he'd been going. That was the direction he'd chosen, thirty minutes after I spoke the rejection words in his office.

I picked up my keys and drove to the medical wing.

---

Diane Holloway met me in the corridor outside his room. She was still in her