After My Mate Claimed My Step-Sister as Luna

I hadn't slept in three days.

The healing ward smelled like antiseptic and dried blood. Grayson lay on the cot with his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm I had memorized over seventy-two hours of sitting in the same hard chair. The rogue ambush had torn through his patrol unit in the Oregon wilderness — three warriors dead, two more in critical condition, and my mate dragged back to the Blackridge pack house with his ribs shattered and half his face swollen shut.

I stayed. I didn't eat. I barely drank water. I held his hand when the healer, Maren Voss, reset his bones, and I wiped the blood from his mouth when his wolf fought the sedatives. That's what a Luna does. That's what I did.

On the third morning, his eyes opened.

I leaned forward. My fingers found his. "Grayson."

He looked at me. Not the way a man looks at the woman who hasn't left his side in three days. Not the way a mate looks at the person whose scent is supposed to be the first thing that brings him home. He looked at me the way you look at a stranger who sat down at the wrong table.

"Who are you?" he said.

The words landed somewhere between my ribs. I opened my mouth, but before I could answer, I felt it — the mind-link. Not a private thread between us. A pack-wide broadcast, pushed out with the full weight of his Alpha authority, reaching every wolf in Blackridge simultaneously.

*I feel no mate bond with Eleanor Harris. I don't know this woman. The only person I remember loving is Liliana.*

The bond in my chest detonated.

It felt like someone had pressed a branding iron against the inside of my sternum. My wolf — who had been howling for three days, pacing and clawing and begging me to sleep so she could keep watch — screamed. Not a howl. A scream. The kind of sound an animal makes when it's caught in a trap and knows no one is coming.

I didn't move.

I sat in that chair with my hand still touching his, and I looked at his face. Really looked. His jaw was set. His breathing was controlled. And his eyes — his eyes held mine a beat too long. One second past natural. Two.

I knew that tell. I had watched Grayson Evans lie to pack elders, to visiting Alphas, to his own Beta. When Grayson lied, he held eye contact like a dare. Like he was saying *go ahead, call me on it. See what happens.*

He was lying.

I didn't know why. I didn't know what the play was. But I knew — the way I knew my own name, the way I knew the weight of the Luna pin my mother left me — that my mate was looking me in the eye and performing.

I pulled my hand back slowly. I stood up.