THE MATE I LEFT BEHIND

SELENE'S POV The mountains rose out of the fog the way they always did, dark shoulders wrapped in cloud, and I hated how fast they undid me. Five years ago I'd watched that ridgeline shrink in my rearview mirror at sixty miles an hour, tears freezing on my jaw because it was February and I'd forgotten to turn on the heater. I'd sworn, somewhere around mile forty, that I would never let that sign fill my windshield again. Welcome to Blackthorn Valley–Population 4,200. My hands locked on the wheel. I counted my breaths instead of my regrets, four in, four held, eight out, the same trick I taught panicking families in the trauma bay. It worked on them better than it worked on me. "You can turn around," I said out loud, to no one, because I never listened to myself either. I didn't turn around. I had a contract, a borrowed name, and a job. Dr. Selene Voss didn't run. Only Selene Ashcombe had done that once, and she'd spent five years paying interest on it. Seven years built that name. Medical school, then a trauma fellowship at Henry Ford in Detroit, where I learned to work a gunshot wound at three in the morning with my hands steady and my throat locked around a scream nobody could hear. Detroit taught me how to disappear inside a job, an apartment on Trumbull I barely slept in, the Ambassador Bridge lit up gold outside my window every night while I stitched strangers back together and told myself that counted as healing. It didn't. But it built the wall I needed. The call had come four days ago and knocked half that wall down. Dr. Whitfield, Blackthorn Regional. Two-week locum. High-profile private patient, severe animal attack. Complete confidentiality. Twenty thousand dollars. No human hospital paid that much for two weeks and called a mauling an animal attack unless a very specific kind of animal had done the mauling. I should have caught it. Grief makes you stupid exactly when you need your instincts sharpest. I found the patient's name only after I'd signed, quit my position, and packed the car. Patient: K. Ashcombe. Kaelan. My mate. Not anymore. You can't stay mated to a dead woman, and as far as this valley knew, Selene Ashcombe drowned in the Kestrel River five years ago, her scent stopping cold at the bank, gone as if she'd never existed. I'd made sure of it. One freezing night, I'd cut my own blood into a blade to throw the dogs off my scent. I'd weighted my jacket with stones and sunk it downstream. I'd convinced an entire pack of trained trackers that their future Luna was dead. So the person hunting Kaelan would believe they'd already broken him and stop circling. It hadn't worked. That sat in my gut like a swallowed stone as I parked and stared at the hospital doors. I could still leave. I got out of the car instead. Pine. Wet granite. Woodsmoke from town. My body remembered this air faster than my mind could stop it. A nurse led me down a corridor that smelled like antiseptic on top and something older underneath. Pack smell, the smell no coat of paint ever quite covers. "He's been unstable since the second attack," she said. "Doesn't heal right. Whitfield thinks wolfsbane, cut with something we can't identify.” Second attack. The floor dropped away under me. "When was the first?" "Five years ago. Around when we lost our Luna." She glanced sideways. "Bad year for this pack." She pressed her badge to the reader outside his door. "He doesn't like strangers touching him. Even like this." "I've handled worse," I said. Detroit had taught me to hold a scalpel steady over a man screaming for his mother, to keep my hands from shaking through things that would have broken most people. Nothing in seven years of trauma medicine had taught me for this. The door slid open. The smell hit first. Pine, smoke. And underneath it, him Unchanged in five years, now cut through with blood and a poison I recognized in my bones before my mind caught up. He lay with his eyes closed, bigger than I remembered, harder, a scar cutting pale and jagged along ribs that should have healed in days, not years. Them his eyes opened. Storm grey. Unchanged. Neither of us breathed. "Selene," he said. Not doctor. Not who are you. My name. Torn out of him raw. The monitor beside his bed screeched into alarm that had nothing to do with his pulse and everything to do with mine, because I understood, standing frozen in a stolen coat, that every word I'd rehearsed on the drive up had just become worthless. He knew me. And the nurse behind me had gone dead silent, the specific silence of someone who just watched a ghost answer to her own name. I should have said something. Some line I'd rehearsed on the drive up, some careful clinical deflection that would have bought me thirty more seconds to think. Nothing came. My mouth had gone as dry as the desert he'd compared me to a heartbeat ago, and my feet had planted themselves in the doorway like the floor had grown roots straight through my shoes. The chart in my hands trembled. I set it down on the rolling table beside the door before he could see that too, before one more piece of evidence stacked itself against the lie I'd driven three hundred miles to protect. "I need to check your vitals," I said. Even to my own ears it sounded like begging. Kaelan didn't answer. He just watched me the way a man watches a mirage he's afraid will dissolve if he blinks, and somewhere down the hall a second monitor started beeping in sympathy with the first, as if the whole building had felt the tremor of a five-year-old lie finally cracking down the middle.