My Alpha Demanded I Save His Mistress’s Life

I knew something was wrong before she even stepped out of the car.

I was standing on the front steps of the Shadowvale pack house, a mug of tea going cold in my hands, when the black SUV pulled through the main gates. The morning was sharp and grey, the kind of early autumn day that smells like wet bark and coming rain. I watched the driver circle around to the passenger side, and then I watched him lift out a wheelchair.

She was already arranged in it perfectly. Back straight. Neck brace fitted just so. A soft cream blanket across her lap, pale hands folded on top of it like something painted. Camilla Shaw looked up at the pack house the way a woman looks at a thing she has always believed belongs to her.

I pressed two fingers against my side, just under my right ribs. An old habit. I didn't realize I was doing it.

I had heard the name Camilla Shaw for eight years. Xavier mentioned her occasionally — never at length, always with a particular quality of quiet that I had learned not to ask about. She was from the Thornfield Pack's allied eastern holdings. Her family had done something for him once, something important. He owed them. That was all he ever said.

That was all he thought he needed to say.

Xavier appeared in the doorway behind me before her wheels hit the gravel path. I felt him — I always felt him, that pull at the center of my chest that eight years had done nothing to dull. His hand came to rest briefly on my shoulder as he moved past me, and the contact lasted exactly as long as it took him to clear the steps.

He didn't look back.

I watched him cross the courtyard. Watched the way his stride changed — that slight, unconscious forward lean of an Alpha moving toward someone he feels responsible for. His voice reached me from across the gravel, low and warm in a register I recognized. I had heard it directed at me, sometimes. Not often enough. Not lately.

"Camilla." Just her name. But the way he said it told me everything.

She looked up at him, and her eyes filled. Not dramatically. Just enough. The corners of her mouth pressed together like she was fighting back something too tender to show.

"Xavier," she said softly. "I didn't want to call you. I know how much you have to—"

"Don't." His voice was gentle in a way I had not heard from him in months. "You should have called sooner."

I turned and went back inside.

---

By evening, I had been moved.

Beta Jessica was the one who told me. She appeared in the doorway of my room — the room I had occupied for three years, two floors up, east wing, close enough to Xavier's chambers that the mind-link between us hummed steady and warm even in sleep — and she