Betrayed by My Fated Mate

I have loved Bryce Hayes for eight years without ever being asked to.

That's the part no one knows. Not Mira, not the pack, not the man himself. Just me, and the wolf inside me who went quiet a long time ago — not from grief, but from the slow, steady drain of giving everything to someone who never once looked your way.

My name is Lilly Evans. I'm a Delta in the Ironveil Pack, twenty-four years old, unremarkable by every measure that matters here. I train with the warriors. I file reports. I keep my head down and my scar covered and I tell myself that proximity is enough. That watching him lead from a distance is enough. That knowing I saved his life — even if he never knows it — is enough.

It was enough. Until tonight.

---

The rain started around seven.

I remember that detail clearly because I'd been watching the sky on the drive back from the eastern border checkpoint, thinking the clouds looked wrong — too low, too fast, the kind of weather that makes your wolf uneasy for reasons she can't name. Mine had been restless all day. A low, anxious hum beneath my ribs that I kept pushing down.

I should have listened.

The road through the forest edge is narrow and poorly lit, a stretch of cracked asphalt that the pack uses for patrol routes but rarely maintains. My headlights caught the rain in sheets. I was maybe two miles from the pack house when the first figure stepped into the road.

I hit the brakes.

There were three of them. Big, loose-limbed, with that particular stillness that rogues have — the kind that comes from spending too long outside a pack's structure, where the wolf starts bleeding into the man. I had half a second to register the wrongness of it, the way they were already moving toward my car with too much purpose for a random encounter, before the driver's side window exploded inward.

The silver hit my skin before I could shift.

I don't remember much after that. Flashes. The cold of the road through my jacket. The sound of rain. A burning in my side that went deeper than muscle, deeper than bone — the particular agony of silver contamination working through a wolf that was already compromised, already running on less than she should have been. My wolf tried to surface and couldn't. She flickered like a candle in a draft.

I remember thinking, very clearly, through the pain: *not like this.*

The pack warriors found me on the road. I know this only because I woke up here, in the healing ward, with the antiseptic smell and the white ceiling and the particular silence of a room where people have been careful not to make noise.

---

I don't know how long I was out.

Long enough for the silver burns to be bandaged. Long enough for the ward to empty out. Long enough