THE MATE I LEFT BEHIND

CHAPTER FOUR

SELENE'S POV

Darkness has a smell in a hospital.

Ozone from the dead lights.

Fear-sweat from the staff trapped in it.

And beneath both, spreading fast, the copper bite of blood that hadn't been there sixty seconds ago.

Somewhere ahead of us a gurney crashed sideways into a wall, metal shrieking against tile.

A woman's voice human, terrified, oblivious to what actually stalked her building, screamed once before cutting off hard.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. Human staff. Unarmed, unwarned, and standing directly between us and whatever had just cut the power.

"Stay close," Kaelan said, voice dropped low, already moving despite the wound still weeping through his shirt.

"Whatever's loose in here isn't interested in humans. It's interested in me. Which means it'll go through anyone standing in the way to get there.”

"Generators should've kicked in," I said, one hand tracing the wall.

"They won't," Kaelan said. "Not if someone cut them first."

I ran through the layout of the building in my head, every stairwell and supply closet I'd memorized on my walk in that morning.

The habit of a surgeon who never trusted an unfamiliar space to stay predictable.

Three exits.

One elevator, useless now.

A generator room in the basement that anyone with a floor plan and thirty seconds alone could reach unnoticed during a normal shift change.

Ivy's flashlight sliced a thin blade through the black.

"Security's not answering. This isn't tracks on the fence anymore, this is…"

"An attack," Kaelan finished.

His voice hardened

"The one night I can't fully shift."

His voice cracked slightly on the admission, the first real fear I'd heard out of him since I'd walked back into his life that morning.

And I understood, in that single unguarded moment, exactly how much it cost an Alpha to say those words out loud in front of the two people who needed him strongest.

The poison wasn't just slowing his healing.

It was locking him at half-strength on the exact night his pack needed him whole.

Whoever built that toxin had planned this window

.

"Somebody knew," I said. "Timed it."

I thought of the last dose Whitfield had logged in his chart, the exact hour it had been administered, the fact that only a handful of people in this entire building had access to that schedule.

The list of who could have leaked it was short enough to fit on one hand, and that thought alone turned my stomach colder than the dark around us ever could.

Glass exploded down the hall.

Ivy's beam caught, for one frozen second, a shape too large for human, crouched low.

Eyes flashing flat animal white.

"Behind me," Kaelan snarled.

He forced a partial shift that visibly tore something loose in him.

Claws punching through fingertips shaking with the effort.

"You'll rip your wound wide open," I said.

"Then it opens." He didn't look back. "Ivy, get her out."

"I'm not leaving," I said, exactly as Ivy said, "She won't leave."

The shape lunged, hiding exactly how much bigger it could get. Not a rogue wolf.

A weapon somebody had paid for.

It hit Kaelan first.

The sound after snarling, shattering glass, a body slammed through drywall to the studs was louder than any trauma bay I'd ever worked, because this time the man who might not get up was the one I'd already sacrificed five years to keep alive.

I ripped the fire extinguisher off its bracket and drove it into the attacker's exposed flank the instant it reared back to strike again.

It shrieked and staggered. Kaelan drove it to the floor and finished it before it found its feet.

Ivy's beam shook over the body as it shifted back in death a stranger, paid muscle, not pack.

Up close, in the returning light, the dead man's face meant nothing to me, but his boots did military surplus, worn on the outside edge in a specific pattern I recognized from exactly one place, a training compound two states over that hired out to anyone with enough cash and no questions asked.

Whoever wanted Kaelan gone hadn't reached into pack business for muscle.

They'd gone outside entirely.

Somewhere with no scent trail leading back to Blackthorn Valley.

"Not from any pack I know," Ivy said.

Kaelan straightened, blood soaking dark through his shirt.

"Which means somebody with real money hired him." His eyes cut to me. "Selene. The proof from five years ago. Do you still have it?"

I opened my mouth.

The lights snapped back on, and in that same second I saw the second attacker standing calm in the stairwell doorway.

Not lunging, just watching, an Ashcombe medic's badge clipped to his collar.

Marcus.

The man who'd sounded the alarm about tracks on the fence line ten minutes ago.

Standing there now with a syringe steady in one hand.

"You should have stayed dead, Selene," he said softly. "Easier for everyone."

I felt Kaelan go absolutely still beside me, the specific, deadly stillness of an Alpha calculating distance, angle, and the exact number of seconds it would take to close the gap between himself and a man he'd trusted for six years. Marcus saw it too.

His grip on the syringe didn't waver, but something in his eyes sharpened, like a man recalculating odds he'd assumed were already settled in his favor.

Nobody in that hallway moved for what felt like a full minute, though it could only have been seconds.

Three people.

One needle.

And every single outcome balanced on whoever blinked first.

Behind me, I could hear Selene's breathing become shallow and fast.

I was calculating how many seconds it would take to close the distance

And how few of them she actually had.