Chapter 6: Rubbing It In

(Amara's POV)

The next few weeks became a masterclass in torture.

I hadn't known Valerie was capable of such creativity. Growing up, she'd simply been mean the casual, careless cruelty of a girl who'd never once been told no. But this was different. This was artistry. A deliberate, patient dismantling of whatever peace I'd managed to patch together for myself, one small cut at a time, never quite deep enough to bleed in front of witnesses.

It started small.

At the first pack run after the claiming ceremony, I arrived early. I always arrive early now, I'd learned, the hard way, that arriving on time meant watching Valerie drape herself over Damon like a second skin the moment I walked into view. I stood at the edge of the clearing in simple running clothes, my white coat still hanging in my office at the clinic, and let the low, fat moon over the pines talk me into believing, for one full minute, that I could breathe.

Then I heard her laugh.

That particular laugh. The one she'd perfected over the past year, the one that said look at me, look what I have, look what you lost loud enough to carry across an entire clearing like a thrown knife. I turned, and there they were.

Damon stood with his back against an old oak, arms wrapped around Valerie's waist. She was pressed flush against him, fingers toying with his collar, mouth hovering just under his ear. I couldn't hear what she was saying. I could see it working, his hand sliding lower on her hip, an almost-smile pulling at his mouth.

Then she looked up. Straight at me.

Her eyes held mine a bit too long to be an accident. Long enough to make sure I understood this had been staged, that she'd positioned the two of them exactly where she knew I'd see them first. Long enough for the slow, satisfied curl of her mouth that said, without a single word, I won.

I looked away first. I always looked away first.

"Amara." Marcus's voice came from my left, and I turned to find the pack's beta watching me with something too close to pity for comfort. "You're early."

"I wanted to stretch before the run." My voice came out normal. Steady. I've been practicing.

He nodded, but his eyes flicked toward Damon and Valerie, then back to me, and I remembered too late that Marcus had been Alpha's second for twelve years. He saw everything. He just usually had the manners not to say so.

"Clinic keeping you busy?"

"Always." I made myself smile, and it almost reached my eyes. "Flu season's hitting the pups hard. Dr. Chen and I have been running vaccinations all week."

It was the right thing to say. Marcus loved pack business more than gossip, and for the next ten minutes he asked me about vaccine supply chains and quarantine protocols, and I answered with the kind of clean professional competence that had earned me a medical license two years ahead of schedule. I was good at this. Useful. It was the only thing I trusted about myself lately.

Behind his shoulder, I could still hear her laugh. I didn't look again.

That became the pattern.

At pack dinners, Valerie leaned across Damon to reach for the salt, pressing her chest to his arm, giggling an apology no one had asked for. During training, she insisted he spot her through every drill, his hands finding her shoulders, her waist, the small of her back, over and over. At council meetings she took the seat at his right hand, my old seat, the one I'd held as Luna-in-training for three years and murmured suggestions into his ear that made the older wolves nod along approvingly, like she'd been born to it.

And every single time, she found me in the crowd.

Every time. Her eyes sought me out like heat seeking cold, and she smiled triumphant sometimes, pitying other times, and once or twice almost wistful, as if to say poor thing, don't you wish this was you.

The worst part wasn't Valerie. I could have hated Valerie with both hands and slept fine at night.

The worst part was Damon.

Because he let her do it. Because he stood there with his arm locked around her waist and his mouth pressed to her temple and never once, not once looked at me. Never acknowledged the woman standing twenty feet away that he'd once held onto so tightly at an airport gate my wrist had ached for a week.

I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself I was healing. I told myself a great many things, that October, most of them lies I was getting frighteningly good at believing.

The pack clinic became my sanctuary.

Two weeks after the claiming ceremony I threw myself into work with the kind of desperation that only the truly broken possess. I arrived before dawn and left long after the moonrise. I took every late shift, every emergency call, every messy case the other doctors quietly avoided, because a busy pair of hands left no room for a mind that wanted to spiral. For hours at a stretch, I didn't think about Damon Blackwood at all. That alone was worth the exhaustion.

The clinic itself sat low and modern at the edge of the territory glass, steel, the sharp clean smell of antiseptic serving both the pack and the surrounding human towns, a goodwill measure that had earned us more allies than most Alphas managed in a lifetime. The waiting room stayed full, the exam rooms stayed turning, and I loved every exhausting second of it more than I loved almost anything else in my life right then.

Dr. Liam Chen had been with us for eight months.

Thirty-two, kind brown eyes, hands that moved with the gentle precision of a man who understood healing was as much an act of trust as it was of skill. He'd come from a pack in Oregon after some messy business involving an Alpha challenge he'd wanted absolutely no part of. "I'm a doctor, not a soldier," he'd told me once, and something in my chest had loosened just hearing him say it out loud.

He didn't push. That was the thing about Liam, he noticed everything, being a doctor made noticing unavoidable, but he never once dragged anything into the light before I was ready. He'd found me crying in the supply closet on my third day back and simply handed me a box of tissues. "Inventory's done. Take your time." He'd watched my hands shake after Valerie's little performances at pack gatherings and never asked why. He just made sure there was always coffee in the break room. Always an extra set of hands when a case turned complicated. Always a quiet presence that asked nothing of me in return, which, some days, was the only kindness I could actually stand to receive.

"Amara." His voice pulled me out of my own head, and I looked up from a chart I'd apparently been staring at, unseeing, for the better part of five minutes. "You've been frowning at that vaccination record a while now. Is the handwriting really that bad?"

I blinked. "Sorry. Just thinking."

Liam leaned against the doorframe of the small office we shared, white coat unbuttoned over navy scrubs. "You do that a lot lately. The thinking." A pause, gentle as everything else about him. "And the apologizing."

"Occupational hazard."

"Mm." He didn't push that either. Instead he nodded toward the window, where late afternoon sun was bleeding gold through the pines. "Last appointment canceled, ear infection, but the mom fed him honey before we could get him in and he perked right up. We're done for the day."

I checked the clock. Five-thirty. I'd been here since six that morning. "Oh. Good, I should" I gestured vaguely at the door, at the territory beyond it, at the life waiting for me out there that I didn't especially want to walk back into.

Liam watched me for a long moment. Then he did something I hadn't seen him do before.

He smiled not the polite professional one he gave patients, not the sympathetic one from the supply closet. This one was different. Hopeful, almost shy, and it changed his whole face into something younger.

"There's a coffee place," he said carefully. "In the human town. Blue awning. They do this cinnamon thing that's..." He stopped, ran a hand back through his hair. "I'm doing this badly."

Something strange happened in my chest. A flutter, and then a small skip, like a muscle remembering a motion it had almost forgotten how to make.

"Liam"

"What I'm trying to say," he pushed on, "is would you like to get coffee with me. Not as coworkers. As..." he gestured loosely between us, "something else. Something where you don't have to apologize for thinking too much."

The words hung there, gentle and unassuming the first kind thing anyone had offered me in weeks that didn't come with a hidden blade folded inside it.

I opened my mouth to answer.

"Amara."

The voice came from the doorway, behind Liam, and it turned my blood to ice on the spot.

Damon.

He stood in the threshold of my office like he had every right to be there, broad shoulders filling the frame, dark hair windblown, gray eyes locked on me with an intensity sharp enough that my wolf let out a low, involuntary whine before I could stop her.

Whatever answer I'd been about to give Liam died somewhere in the back of my throat.