My Alpha Rejected Me for the Pack’s Healer

The clinic was quiet in the way only a room with a dying woman in it can be quiet.

I stood at the side of the treatment table with two fingers pressed to Mara Clark's wrist, counting. Her pulse was slow. Too slow. And under the slowness, something else — a small, wrong flutter that didn't belong in any heart I had ever treated.

I looked at the tray on the steel cart beside me.

Alivia had prepared it three hours ago. Neat vials. Neat labels. Her handwriting was always neat. I lifted the first vial up to the lamp and read the concentration printed on the side, then read it again, then a third time, because my mind kept refusing to land on what my eyes were telling me.

The number was wrong.

Not wrong by accident. Wrong by design. The compound was calibrated to push a tired heart, not steady it. A dose like this wouldn't help Mara hold on. It would walk her, gently and on schedule, off the edge.

My hands went cold.

I worked. I worked the way I have always worked when something inside me is screaming — quietly, with my hands, one task at a time. I drew a counter-agent. I adjusted a drip. I pressed my palm flat to Mara's sternum and pushed everything my Healer's gift had into her chest, the warm current of it sliding from my bones into hers, looking for the damage, trying to lift it out before it could finish its work.

The damage was already set.

I knew it before my gift confirmed it. I knew it the way you know a storm is too close to outrun. The compound had been in her bloodstream for hours. It had bonded to the muscle. There was no clean way to pull it back out.

I worked anyway. I worked through three a.m. I worked through four. The window above the sink turned from black to a thin, mean grey.

At five-twelve, Mara's eyes opened.

She found my face. She had always been able to find my face in a crowded room. She was the only one in this pack who could.

Her fingers — paper-light, paper-cold — closed around mine.

"Leave him," she whispered. Her voice was barely there. "Before it takes the rest of you too."

I bent down. I wanted to tell her I would. I wanted to tell her I had already started planning. I wanted to tell her that I had heard her every other time she had said it and I was sorry, I was so sorry, that it had taken until now.

Her hand went slack against mine before I could shape a single word.

I pressed two fingers to her wrist out of pure habit.

Nothing.

I stood there in the grey light of that small room with the dead Luna's hand cooling in mine and I understood, with a clarity so complete it felt almost peaceful, that this was