When My Alpha’s Lies Killed Our Pup

I have been Luna of the Ironcrest Pack for seven years.

I know what silence from Ezra feels like. It has a texture — cold and deliberate, like a door shut not from the wind but from a hand. This one has lasted seven days, and on the morning of the eighth, he walks into my dressing room without knocking.

I am sitting at the vanity, working a comb through my hair. I watch him in the mirror. He does not look at my face. He sets a glossy black box down on the vanity surface — not handed to me, just dropped — and takes one step back, the way you'd put down something that isn't yours and never was.

"Joelle didn't want these." His voice is flat. Finished.

I set the comb down. My hands go very still in my lap, and I press two fingers to the inside of my left wrist, just below the pulse point, the way I always do when I need to stay in my body. I look at the box. Tissue paper. A white satin ribbon.

"Ezra—"

"She said the sizing was wrong." He is already moving past me, toward the jewelry stand on the far shelf, like this conversation is already over. "I told her you'd pass them along or dispose of them. Doesn't matter."

He reaches past me and unclasps my father's pendant from my throat.

The touch is businesslike. Three seconds, maybe. The silver wolf-tooth pendant — the one my father put around my neck the morning of my Luna ceremony, the one I have worn every single day for seven years — lifts away. I feel the absence before I fully process what has happened. A pale band of cooler skin where it rested.

"Joelle's brother has his Coming of Age ceremony next month," Ezra says, closing the pendant in his fist. "Silver wolf-tooth is traditional."

"That was my father's." My voice comes out quiet. I keep it that way.

Something flickers across his face. I used to be able to read every shift in his expression. Now I watch them pass like weather through a window I'm standing on the wrong side of.

"It's silver," he says. "It'll mean more on a Delta's son than gathering dust in a dressing room."

"Do not do this." The words come out before I can stop them. I stand up. "Ezra. That pendant belonged to my father."

He turns to face me fully then, and I feel it before he speaks — the Alpha tone rolling into the room like a pressure change before a storm. It isn't loud. It never needs to be. It presses against the back of my skull and down through my chest and tells every instinct in my body to be small.

"Helen." He says my name like a period at the end of a sentence. "Your mother's placement in the pack infirmary is reviewed quarterly. Pack funding is allocated at my discretion." A pause.