My Alpha Hid His Illness Behind Another Woman’s Scent

I've been Luna of the Silverfang Pack for seven years. I know what wolfsbane smells like.

It's faint at first — a chemical sharpness hiding under something sweeter, the way a bad feeling hides under a normal Tuesday. I caught it the moment I stepped into my mother's room, chamomile tea still warm in my hand, and my wolf went rigid before I even understood why.

There was a woman at Matilda's bedside.

She was beautiful in that precise, deliberate way — dark hair pinned back, white blouse, the kind of posture that says I belong here without needing to announce it. She was leaning toward my mother with a small smile, her voice low and honeyed, saying something about a revolutionary new treatment for cognitive decline. A clinical vial sat on the bedside table. Unmarked. The kind of unmarked that isn't an oversight.

My mother was nodding along, the way she nods at everything now — not because she understands, but because the fog is kind enough to make her agreeable.

I stood in the doorway for exactly three seconds.

Then I stepped back into the hallway and waited.

I'm not impulsive. I never have been. Seven years of leading a pack teaches you that the worst thing you can do in a crisis is move before you know what you're moving toward. So I stood under the fluorescent lights with my chamomile tea and I breathed, and I catalogued: the wolfsbane under the sweetness of the vial, the floral-sharp scent coming off the woman herself — something I recognized, something that had been living on Enzo's collar for weeks — and the absolute, bone-deep certainty that whatever was happening in that room was not a treatment.

She came out four minutes later.

I stepped into her path.

'I need to see your clinical trial documentation,' I said. 'And your pack healer authorization for whatever you just administered to that patient.'

I kept my voice even. I didn't raise it. I didn't need to — my Luna aura does the work when I let it, threading through the words like a current, low and unmistakable. I watched her face.

She was good. Her expression held for three full seconds — composed, professional, faintly puzzled, the look of a healer who has never been questioned and finds it mildly inconvenient. Then her eyes flashed. Just once. Wolf-gold, bright with panic, gone almost before it registered.

Almost.

She turned and walked out of the facility. Not running. Just walking at the pace of someone who has decided this conversation is over and is not interested in being told otherwise.

I let her go.

I went back into my mother's room, set the chamomile tea on the table, and picked up the vial she'd left behind. I didn't open it. I didn't need to. The wolfsbane was clear enough through the glass — faint, concentrated, nothing that belonged anywhere near a human nursing home or a legitimate cognitive treatment protocol.

My mother