THE MATE I LEFT BEHIND

CHAPTER TWO

SELENE'S POV

"You have the wrong person," I said.

Steady.

I was almost proud of it.

Kaelan's eyes never left my face.

"Selene," he said again, quieter, like saying it too loud might make me vanish a second time.

"My name is Dr. Voss." My pulse slammed hard enough that I was certain he could hear it.

Of course he could.

Mates hear each other's hearts like a second pulse under their own skin.

"I'm the specialist Whitfield brought in."

"You smell like her," he said.

His hands fisting into the blanket hard enough that the fabric strained under his grip.

"Exactly like her. Not close. Not similar. Exactly."

"I get that a lot. Ashcombe blood runs through half the coastal packs." A weak lie, and he heard every c***k in it.

"Fine," he said finally, jaw tight. "Doctor."

I made myself work. The wound was worse than the chart said.

Black threads of infection forking outward like ink dropped in water, moving with a pattern no ordinary infection made. I'd carried this exact poison in my own arm once, the night I ran.

Wolfsbane, refined, cut with something I still hadn't named even after years of research under a fake library card.

Built specifically to stop a shifter's healing cold.

Whoever attacked him five years ago had built this.

Whoever attacked him three days ago had improved it.

The person I'd sacrificed everything to stop had never stopped at all.

"You're shaking," he said, cutting straight through my clinical mask.

"Long flight."

"You flew in this morning. I hear it in your heartbeat when you lie, Doctor Voss. I've always been able to."

The door slammed open. A young woman with dark hair and Kaelan's exact stubbornness stormed in, Ivy, the name surfacing from a lifetime ago.

She froze. Went white. "You," she breathed, stepping back like the floor had tilted. "You smell…"

"Ivy."

Kaelan's voice cracked across the room like a whip.

"She's supposed to be dead," Ivy said. "I watched them drag that river for three days. And now she's standing here in a lab coat."

"I need everyone to calm down," I said, in the voice that had talked down a hundred panicking families in a dozen emergency rooms over the years.

Nobody calmed down.

Kaelan sat up despite the wound tearing beneath his ribs and seized my wrist, gentle and unbreakable at once. Gold flooded the edges of his eyes.

"Five years," he said, voice splitting on the number. "Tell me right now if you're real, or I lose my mind completely in front of both of them."

The door burst open a second time. A broad-shouldered stranger strode in wearing Draven black and silver like a dare.

"Ashcombe," he said, ignoring me and Ivy entirely, eyes locked on Kaelan with cold satisfaction. "Twice in five years. Someone really doesn't like you."

Kaelan's grip on my wrist tightened until it ached.

"Get out, Draven," he snarled, gold flooding his eyes fully now, "before I finish what your father started thirty years ago."

Rourke's eyes swept the room once, unhurried, like he was cataloguing exits and weaknesses out of pure habit. "I only came to check on my dear rival's condition," he said, "and to remind him the Draven pack had nothing to do with whatever nearly killed him this time. Wouldn't want misplaced accusations souring negotiations we haven't even started yet."

"Negotiations," Ivy spat.

She was still half-shifted, still trembling with the effort of holding her human shape. "You show up the same week someone tries to murder my brother twice and you want to talk about negotiations?"

"Coincidences happen, Ashcombe. Even inconvenient ones." Rourke's gaze slid to me again, longer this time, weighing something behind his easy smile. "Though I have to say, Doctor, you have excellent timing. Arriving right as the drama peaks. Almost theatrical."

"I was hired to treat a patient," I said.

"Nothing theatrical about a paycheck."

"Of course." He didn't believe me.

I could see it in the small, satisfied tilt of his mouth, the look of a man who'd already decided to keep a piece of information in his pocket for later use.

That look terrified me more than anything he'd actually said.

I stood locked between a man who'd just recognized me as his dead mate, a furious sister who hadn't decided whether to forgive me, and a rival Alpha delighted by an attempted murder on pack land and underneath all of it, one fact hammered louder than the rest.

He still knew my heartbeat.

Which meant the bond had never broken. Not for one single day.

I forced my hands steady on the chart, forced my breathing back into something clinical, because the alternative was falling apart in a room full of people who already had reason to distrust me.

Kaelan's grip on my wrist hadn't loosened. If anything it had tightened, like some animal part of him refused to believe I might vanish the moment he stopped touching me.

"Everyone needs to leave," I said, sharper now. "All of you. I have a patient with an active infection and a room full of people raising his heart rate."

Rourke laughed under his breath and let himself out without being asked twice, though not before one last glance thrown back over his shoulder.

A glance that lingered a beat too long. Ivy watched him go with murder plain across her face, then rounded on both of us the second the door clicked shut.

"You have exactly one minute," she said, "to explain how a woman who drowned five years ago is standing here with her hand on my brother's chest, before I start screaming loud enough for the whole hospital to hear it."

"Ivy…" Kaelan started.

"One minute, Kaelan."

I opened my mouth.

And found, for the first time in five years, that I didn't actually know where to begin.