After My Mate Saved His Mistress, I Burned My Old Pack

The second wave of rogues hit the eastern fence line just after midnight.

I heard it from the clinic—the renewed snarling, the crack of timber, the distant thud of bodies. The pack warriors were already responding, their howls cutting through the dark in coordinated bursts. Nobody was watching the herbal storage room.

Nobody was watching me.

I had prepared for this. Not this attack specifically, but a night like it—a night loud enough and chaotic enough to swallow one woman whole. The urn had been ready for two weeks, sealed in a cloth pouch at the bottom of my supply bag: ash from the pack's ceremonial fire pit, mixed with dried herbs I had handled for years, soaked through with a small vial of my own blood. My scent, saturated into every grain. I had tested it three times. It would hold.

I pressed two fingers to my wrist. Steady.

The storage room caught fast. I had chosen the accelerant carefully—an herbal oil used for lamp fuel, odorless enough to read as accidental, flammable enough to be convincing. I set the flame at the base of the eastern shelf, stepped back, and watched the fire climb. Then I placed the urn on the floor near the door, in the spot where someone fleeing a sudden blaze might fall.

The smoke was already thick when I slipped out the rear window.

I didn't look back. I had decided, weeks ago, that I would not look back.

Lyra was quiet inside me as I ran—not frightened, not grieving. Just watching. She had understood before I did. She had gone still the night Sage used his aura on me in the hall, and she had never fully come back to life after that. Some part of her had already been making peace with leaving.

The forest swallowed me. The pack's sirens were still wailing behind me, and somewhere in that noise was the beginning of a story I would never hear the end of: the fire, the urn, the healer who burned.

I ran until the sounds disappeared entirely.

—

Seattle took four days.

I traveled by bus and on foot, staying off pack routes, sleeping in motels that didn't ask for ID. I had cash I'd been setting aside for months, small amounts pulled from my healer's stipend in increments that wouldn't register. I had a burner phone, a change of clothes, and my healer's journal with its pressed lavender flower still tucked inside the cover.

I didn't let myself think about Sage. Not yet. There would be time for that later, in some quiet room, when I could afford to feel it. Right now, I needed to be precise.

The Silverfang Pack's territory began at the edge of a pine-dense ridge outside the city. I crossed their border in broad daylight, deliberately, and let their sentinels find me. I kept my hands visible and my posture open. I told them exactly who I was and exactly what I wanted.

A private audience with Alpha Westyn Spencer.

They made me wait six hours in a bare room with a single window. I sat with my healer's bag in my lap and my hands folded on top of it, and I waited.

Westyn Spencer walked in like a man who had never once been surprised by anything. He was younger than I expected—early thirties, maybe, with the particular stillness of an Alpha who had nothing left to prove. He looked at me the way a person looks at a problem they have already begun solving.

'Winifred Harrison,' he said. Not a question.

'I'm told your mother has a degenerative condition your healers can't reverse,' I said. 'I can reverse it. I've treated two cases of progressive wolf degradation in the last three years, both full recoveries. I have documentation.' I set my journal on the table between us. 'In exchange, I need asylum. A new identity within your pack. And a rank that reflects my actual skill, not my history.'

He looked at the journal. Then at me. 'You faked your death this week.'

'Yes.'

'That's either very stupid or very deliberate.'

'I'm a healer,' I said. 'I don't do anything that isn't deliberate.'

Something shifted in his expression—not quite a smile, but close. He pulled the journal toward him and opened it.

—

Three weeks later, in a territory I had left in fire and smoke, Sage Crawford was handed an urn.

I didn't see it. I didn't need to. I knew what would happen—I had known when I planned it, known it with the cold, clear certainty of a woman who had spent years watching a man love his own sense of honor more than he loved her.

His wolf would know. The bond was severed, but the loss would still register like a death. It would hollow him out from the inside.

I pressed two fingers to my wrist, alone in my new quarters in Silverfang territory, and I felt nothing from the bond. Not pain. Not warmth. Not the aching, insistent pull that had kept me awake for months.

Just silence.

I opened my healer's journal to a fresh page and picked up my pen.

I had work to do.