When My Alpha Let Me Bleed Out for His Luna

I chose red because white was for brides, and I was done being patient.

The dress was simple — fitted through the waist, skirt falling just below the knee, the kind of red that reads as a statement before you've said a word. I'd bought it three weeks ago in a small boutique two towns over from the human hospital where I'd spent the worst month of my life. The salesgirl had said it made me look powerful. I'd smiled and paid cash.

I stood outside the Ironveil Pack's grand hall and listened to the noise inside. Music, laughter, the low hum of important people performing importance. Three allied Alpha delegations. Griffin had pulled out every stop for this one. A Naming Ceremony for the heir — Miranda's boy, the child born the same night I was bleeding out on a frozen road sixty miles north of here.

I pressed two fingers to the inside of my wrist. My pulse was steady. My wolf stirred, faint and slow, like something turning over in sleep. She'd been like that for months now — present enough to remind me she was still there, too weak to do much else. The doctors called it terminal bond deterioration. I called it what it was: Griffin's mark, six years overdue, rotting us both from the inside out.

I had less than one moon cycle. I'd done the math a hundred times. The numbers didn't change.

I pushed open the hall doors.

The scent hit the room before I did. White jasmine and winter rain — my scent, the one that had made Griffin's wolf go feral the night we came of age, the one I'd spent six months learning to carry like a weapon instead of a wound. I watched it move through the crowd the way a stone moves through still water. Unmated wolves stiffened. Heads turned. A Delta near the entrance actually took a step back.

I kept walking.

The hall was beautiful, I'd give them that. Garlands of white flowers along the ceremonial tables, candles everywhere, the Ironveil Pack's crest hanging above the dais where Miranda stood in ivory silk, one hand resting on the edge of the table like she owned it. Because she did. She'd bought it with my blood.

I found Griffin before he found me.

He was standing at the dais, turned slightly toward Miranda, and then he wasn't. His head came around like something had yanked it, and his eyes found me across the entire length of the hall. I watched the color drain from his face. I watched his jaw lock. I watched his hands go very still at his sides — that particular stillness that every wolf in his pack had learned to read as the moment before the storm.

His wolf was clawing at him. I could see it in the way his shoulders had gone rigid, the way his nostrils flared once, twice. Six months without my scent, and now here it was,