Alpha, She Is Done With You

Sora's POV “Spread your legs.” The man behind me thrusts hard, slamming deep into my body like a merciless invasion. I feel his wolf revelling in it. As his contracted mate, I should crave his mark. Instead, I only feel cold touch and sharp pain. He flips me over roughly and folds my legs up against my chest. The position is completely humiliating. Wide open. Exposed. “Hold them yourself.” His voice is cold, but his hips keep pounding, hot and ruthless. “No… Ethan, I can’t…” I gasp. My lungs burn from lack of air. Every brutal thrust feels like it is tearing me apart. “Don’t like this position?” His voice slides through the darkness like silk. Dangerous and tempting. “Your body is much more honest than your mouth.” Shame floods my cheeks, but my core clenches around him anyway. He growls and drives into me even harder. The room fills with the wet slap of skin against skin and my broken moans. When my o****m hits, white light explodes behind my eyes. I reach for his shoulders like a drowning woman, desperate for even a second of warmth. He pulls out fast, without a trace of tenderness. Another monthly “duty” ends in suffocating darkness. After, I lie on my side the way the doctor said to. Best position to hold it. Best chance. I stare at the ceiling and wait for the warmth to drain out of me, because I know it's going to. I'm not confused about what just happened. Some women would tell themselves that kind of matching means something. It doesn't. What we have in that bed isn't closeness. It's the bond doing Ethan's thinking for him, plus a body that needs an heir. If I had no womb. If I couldn't carry. This so-called understanding between us wouldn't last one single second. I've always known it. Three hours ago I was smiling at my phone like a fool. Come home. Two words. On ovulation day, that's the only kind of invitation this marriage has. I stood in front of the mirror at the Pack hospital and changed into the long dress. The long one, always, because it covers the leg. Seven years and I still don't want him to see the weakness. By the time I made it from the hospital to the Packhouse, he'd already showered and was waiting. He didn't say hello. He crossed the room and put me against the wall and kissed me like he was angry about it. And my body answered. It always answers. Seven years, and he's never once needed me to show him anything. He knows how to make me react before my head can catch up. “Can you… hold me?” I whisper. The lights snap on. He turns his back and buttons his expensive shirt. His powerful muscles disappear under the fabric. “Track your ovulation this month. Tell me when you get the results.” His tone is flat. “But,” I sit up quickly, “the day after tomorrow is our seventh anniversary. You missed last year. Can we have dinner together?” His broad shoulders tense for half a second. He looks like a perfect, cold Greek statue. Beautiful and completely untouchable. “We haven’t seen each other in a month,” I beg softly. “I miss you, Ethan. Can we talk?” He's already up now. Dressing fast, back to me, not a glance. "Give me an heir I can pass the pack to," he says. "Then we'll have something to talk about." I don't answer. I saw it coming. I could tell you, to the word, how many times in the last three months he's ended this exact thing with this exact sentence. It stopped landing a while ago. It's just the sound the door makes on his way out. The door closes. Not hard. Not soft. Just closed. His seed goes cold on my thighs. I curl up and try to keep it in, and the tears come before I can stop them. I let them, once, quick. Then I'm done. I pick up my phone. Lyra's account. I don't follow it. I know it by heart anyway. Newest post. A concert curtain call, flowers stacked to her knees. The camera drifts over one bouquet, and there's a card tucked in it, and I read the handwriting before I read the words. 【The Moon Saw Us First.】 I've known that handwriting for seven years. I don't get it wrong. Lyra. His first love. The one who was supposed to be gone for good. She's back. The phone buzzes in my hand before the thought finishes. Hospital. Emergency line. A pack member, hit at the border. Complex wound. The attending's off-site and nobody on the floor wants to touch it. I'm still pulling my coat on when I reach the bay. I don't think about Ethan. I don't think about Lyra or her flowers or the cold going down my legs an hour ago. There's a body in front of me losing more blood than it can spare, and that's the whole world, and it's the one part of my life where my hands never shake. I call it. I move. I do what has to be done, fast and clean, in the order it has to be done in. The resident beside me stops what he's doing to watch. I feel him stop. I know what he's thinking, because they all think it eventually. The crippled nurse. The wolfless one the Alpha keeps around out of pity. He didn't expect her to be the steadiest set of hands in the room when it counts. They never do. The patient stabilizes. I strip my gloves. I don't wait to be thanked. Thanks aren't the point, and here of all places, I already know exactly what I'm worth. I bring Violet her coffee after, the way I do every day. I have my hand on the office door when I hear his voice through it. Ethan. Inside. With his mother. "You're thirty now," Violet is saying. "Seven years and one daughter, and we still don't even know if the girl can shift. And you're still half-hearted for about a second. Once a month, that's all that Omega gives you. How is a cripple supposed to get pregnant on that?" A pause. "If it can't be helped, you find someone who can. Give me one healthy grandson and I'll accept it." Ethan is quiet a moment. "That's out of the question," he says. "Have you forgotten what happened when Sora had Yuki? The amniotic fluid embolism." Something rises in my chest. He remembers. I finish his sentence for him, in my head. She's been through something that dangerous once. I won't put her through it again. Then Ethan says: "Childbirth is a huge risk. Sora's already survived it once, she can take the pressure. But Lyra, after everything she went through back then, I won't let her carry that kind of danger." Violet laughs, low. She brings up the old thing nobody's supposed to touch. Lyra, and the child she lost. I stand at the door with the coffee going cold in my hands. He didn't say I won't put Sora through it again. He said I won't let Lyra carry that danger. He was never afraid for me. He's afraid that someday, if Lyra has to have a child, she might suffer. I think about the night Yuki was born. The bleeding that wouldn't stop. The critical notice. One foot over the line, and a doctor's hand dragging me back. Ethan was at Lyra's concert that night. He told me afterward he never got the message. I believed that for seven years. Inside the office they're still talking. I've stopped hearing it. I set the coffee down on the shelf by the door, and I turn, and I go. At home the first thing I see is Yuki's little shoes by the door. I want to talk to her. I always want to talk to her. But since she started kindergarten this year, she's been closing the door on me, a little more every week. I know why. Her first day back, she found out her mother isn't like the other mothers. The leg. The no-wolf. After that she went cool, then cooler. She won't even let me pick her up from school anymore. My own daughter is ashamed of me. She comes out of her room when she hears the door. She doesn't run to me. She stops a few feet away and looks up with those clear eyes, and she asks the thing she's been holding onto. "Lyra's back, Mommy." Her small voice is steady. "Are you and Daddy going to get divorced?"