5…

•Shaun•

“Why the hell did she keep fainting?” I roared, carrying my mate’s limp weight through the courtyard while blood dripped steady down her chin onto my arm, my heart slamming so hard against my ribs it felt like it might crack something. “And who the hell announced me finding a Luna to the whole damn pack?”

Nobody answered right away. Every wolf in that courtyard had gone dead silent, half of them still gaping at the blood, the other half not meeting my eyes at all, and that silence told me everything I needed to know before I even turned to look for the one person who should have known better.

My beta… he was the only soul with me for the past forty eight hours.

He stood off to the side, and the second our eyes met, his face did something I had never seen it do before. Guilt, plain and ugly, written across every line of it. He didn’t even try to lie his way out of it. He just looked sorry, and sorry was not going to fix the fact that my mate had walked straight into an ambush of fifty strangers’ worth of noise because someone couldn’t keep his mouth shut on the drive home.

“Alpha, I only mind link a couple people, I swear, I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think.” My voice came out low and cold in a way that made two wolves near the gate take an involuntary step back. “You know her situation and why I was bringing home an injured human, not that I was announcing a Luna to the whole pack before she’s even had a full day to figure out her own name. You had one job tonight, Luke. Keep this quiet until I decided how to handle it.”

“I’m sorry, Alpha. It won’t happen again.”

“It better not.” I didn’t have time to deal with him properly, not with Faye’s head lolling against my shoulder and blood soaking through the blanket wrapped around her, so I filed the anger away where I could get back to it later and kept moving. “Get me a healer. Now.”

The pack house doors slammed open under my boot before anyone could reach them for me, and I carried her straight through the great hall, past the portraits of alphas who came before me, past a cluster of pups who scattered out of my way the second they caught sight of my face, and up the stairs two at a time toward my own room, because there was no version of tonight where I put my mate anywhere that wasn’t within arm’s reach of me.

The healer met me at the door, an older woman named Greta who had patched up more injuries in this pack than I could count, and even she went pale at the sight of the blood.

“Lay her down, Alpha. Let me look at her.”

I did, gently, easing Faye onto the bed like she might shatter if I moved wrong, and then I stood there hovering while Greta worked, checking her pulse, her eyes, pressing careful fingers along her skull while murmuring things under her breath that I couldn’t make sense of.

“The human doctor cleared her,” I said, more to myself than to Greta, pacing a tight line at the foot of the bed. “Said she was fine. Concussion, nothing life threatening. But she’s fainted twice now, and the amnesia isn’t clearing, and I don’t know what the hell just happened downstairs, whether it was the crowd or something else entirely.”

“Her vitals are steady,” Greta said slowly, frowning down at Faye’s face. “But there’s something strange in her scent. Something underneath the human. I can’t place it.”

That cold feeling in my gut, the one that had been building since the second she flinched in the car, settled deeper.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet.” Greta straightened, wiping her hands on her apron. “But whatever it is, it isn’t ordinary human. And it isn’t ordinary wolf either.”

I looked down at Faye, pale and small against the sheets, blood still crusted at her nose, and felt the weight of everything I didn’t know about her pressing down on my chest. Goddess knew I did not have room in my life for a weak mate, let alone a human mate with a fried brain and a stranger’s blood on her face and a scent that made the pack healer frown like she’d found something she couldn’t name.

But weak or not, mine or not, something had spoken to her downstairs. I hadn’t heard it, but I’d felt her hear it, felt whatever it was land in her before her nose started bleeding and her knees gave out under her.