The Feral Alpha's Mate

She runs a healing hut. She runs a sister's medication schedule. She runs the arithmetic of how many weeks are left, every morning, before she has finished grinding the first handful of anything. The hut smells of yarrow and failure. Cora crushes another handful of feverfew into the mortar, the pestle scraping stone in a rhythm she learned at twelve, when her mother first showed her how to grind grief into something that passes for hope. The paste will do nothing. She knows it. The plant knows it. But grinding gives her hands something to do while her sister coughs herself hollow on the cot behind her. *Stop.* Eliza's voice comes out scraped thin, like paper drawn over a wound. *You're making that sound again. The one where you're calculating my funeral.* Cora sets down the pestle and turns. Her sister lies propped against three thin pillows with the blankets pulled to her chin despite the summer heat coming through the eastern window. Dark circles carved into half-moons under hazel eyes. Skin gone the colour of old milk. *I'm not calculating anything.* Jenner arrives with an offer that is not an offer, and the bargain they strike is witnessed, written and entirely unsurvivable if either of them tells the truth about it. There is one thing in the valley that might work and it belongs to a pack her own people have not spoken to in thirty years, and the price of asking is the kind of price you do not get to renegotiate afterwards. What follows: a wolf in the clearing, a prisoner's bargain, a healer's test, a week of embercake, a scar she cannot forget, a messenger from home, and a confession made in the rain. *She just proved he was a murderer. She just saved this pack from a traitor.* *The law is the law. She compromised our borders.* A mortar. A cot. Three thin pillows. One bargain, witnessed. One bond, unasked for. *But I know I'm not leaving.*