You Actually Used Something Like This On Me?

POV: Sera

The kitchen held nothing but the faint blue flame flickering beneath the cauldron. I stood at the preparation table, mechanically stirring the thick liquid in the pot.

The wound across my palm had begun to close, pushing out the last fragments of shattered moonstone as the flesh knit itself back together. The bleeding had stopped, but every rotation of the wooden spoon pulled at the healing tissue, sending pain crawling up through the nerves — a persistent reminder of everything that had just happened. On my cheek, the red mark Damien's hand had left was still a dull, throbbing ache.

He had called Seraphina's name. He had struck me because of the tapestry.

These things I remembered clearly.

But in the moment he shoved me away, I had caught it — his pine scent, ragged and nearly savage, bleeding through every crack in his composure. An Alpha's pride demanded that he bury weakness beneath rage, but I was his Luna. Even a Luna without a wolf could sense these things. His mind was standing at the edge of collapse, and I had felt it.

He had mistaken me for someone else, and that was the only reason he had pulled back.

My scent was close enough to hers. Close enough to the woman he loved.

What he believed in that moment did not matter. I was Bloodmoon's Luna, and healing my Alpha was the purpose I had been given. He needed me — or rather, he needed what I could make.

In the early hours before dawn, I carried the bowl of Evening Primrose Calming Potion up the stairs, softening each step as I moved toward the second-floor study.

The heavy oak door stood wide open. I was still several paces from the threshold when the pine scent rolled out to meet me — thick and scorching, edged with something feral and barely contained. Beneath it coiled something else entirely: a sweetness, cloying and wrong.

My stomach clenched hard.

Then I saw it. The amber lamplight. A body draped over another. And Lydia's fingers, tipped in red lacquer, pressed flat against the left side of Damien's chest, directly over his heart.

The bowl left my hands.

Scalding liquid splashed across my ankle. I did not feel it.

Damien was slumped against the wide leather sofa, eyes a deep crimson, shirt torn open at most of its buttons to expose the hard plane of his chest. Lydia — the woman who had always called herself his little sister — sat astride his lap, her skirt shoved up to the tops of her thighs, a low and deliberately inviting sound escaping her lips.

The sound of shattering ceramic made her go still.

She turned. Her eyes found mine. For the space of half a second, I saw it plainly in her expression: the frustration of interrupted calculation, and then the rapid, practiced weighing of options. Then she screamed, throwing herself sideways off the sofa in a show of panicked stumbling. She tore her already-loosened collar further open, baring a wide stretch of pale skin and the red marks along her collarbone, and she pressed herself into the corner of the sofa, shaking, tears already streaming.

"Phina! It's not what you think!" Her voice broke into a raw, ragged wail. "I only came to deliver border intelligence to the Alpha — and then he suddenly lost control. He was going to force me!"

I did not look at her performance. My gaze had not left Damien.

Lydia was lying.

Because Damien's hands had never touched her. They were locked around the leather armrests of the sofa, fingers driven so deep into the material that his knuckles had gone white. He was holding himself together through sheer will, fighting whatever was raging through his system.

When the door swung fully open and fresh air moved through the room, I identified the source.

It was a scent I knew better than almost anything — Evening Primrose Essence at an extreme concentration, fused with something that carried the unmistakable signature of black magic. An aphrodisiac. Everyone in the pack knew that, without a wolf form, I had poured everything into herbalism. Only I could refine Evening Primrose Essence to that level of purity. And that afternoon, in the Great Hall, Lydia had taken the vial I had prepared for Ash.

"You stole my medicine." The fury that moved through me was cold and absolute. I raised my hand toward the corner where she huddled. "You laced the essence with black magic. You drugged him."

"What are you talking about?!" Fresh tears smeared her makeup into something artfully ruined. "I was delivering a field report. My Luna — I understand, I do. You still can't shift, and you've been desperate for the Alpha to give you a real mate mark so you can hold your position. But how could you use something like this on him? Do you have any idea what you nearly did to me tonight?"

"Enough."

The hoarse voice cut through us both.

Damien pushed himself to his feet, swaying. His eyes were still that deep, blood-soaked red, and they had locked onto me with the flat, focused look of something that intended harm — the look of a man who had been manipulated and would not forgive it.

I did not have time to move. A hand closed around my throat like a steel trap, and the force of it drove me backward into the oak doorframe. The back of my skull cracked against the wood, and the impact turned everything dark at the edges. I gasped, fingers wrapping around his wrist on reflex, feet leaving the floor as I struggled to pull in any fraction of air.

At a distance that should have held something else entirely, there was nothing in Damien's eyes but revulsion.

"To get yourself marked," he said, each word dropping with deliberate, surgical cruelty, "to make me take you — you actually used something like this on me?"

"I didn't—" The words came out broken, barely syllables. Tears ran down my face, wrung out by the body's simple need for oxygen.

"Listen to me." His fingers tightened. He watched my face redden, and he spoke with the slow precision of someone delivering a final verdict. "I would sooner rupture every vein in my body and die on this floor than mark something that can't even grow its wolf."

I stopped struggling.

My hands fell.

The commotion had been too loud to go unnoticed. Heavy footsteps were already converging from both ends of the corridor, and the patrol guards filled the doorway. They took in the scene in a single sweep: Lydia, disheveled and weeping in the corner; Damien, violent and barely coherent, his pheromones so thick the air was difficult to breathe; and me, suspended by one hand, the floor beneath me scattered with broken ceramic and soaked in the scent of Evening Primrose. No trial was needed. The conclusion assembled itself behind every set of eyes in that doorway — a desperate, jealous Omega with no wolf and no standing, who had reached for the lowest possible means to force a mate mark she could never earn.

Damien released me.

I dropped onto the carpet and stayed there, one hand pressed to my throat, coughing in long, desperate pulls of air. Shards of broken porcelain pressed into my knees. I could not feel them. I lifted my head and looked up at the man standing over me, his expression entirely closed.

"Damien." I swallowed the taste of blood. "Is that truly what you think of me?"

Whatever hunger I had ever felt for his acknowledgment, it had never been enough to make me reach for black magic. My dignity, at least, had always held that line.

"Enough." He cut me off without looking at me.

Lydia seized the opening immediately, crawling forward on her knees to wrap both arms around his leg. "Alpha, the Luna frightened me so badly — if you hadn't had the strength to resist, I would have—" She was not finished. "What she did is a betrayal of the pack. She has no right to be—"

"I said enough." He glanced down at her once, and whatever she saw in his face silenced her. Then he looked toward the guards in the doorway, and his voice carried the full, effortless weight of Alpha command. "Nothing that happened in this room leaves this room. I will not have a scandal attached to the Luna's name inside my territory."

He looked down at me with the expression of a man confronting something that had simply exhausted him.

"Since you're so committed to your potions, go to the apothecary. The fighting at Ironridge has left us with serious casualties. You'll brew for the wounded. That is the one thing you are actually useful for."

"And," Lydia added, her voice dropping into something soft and almost gentle, "since Phina needs time to reflect — perhaps she should repair the Moonstone Tapestry. Her bird damaged it, after all. It was Seraphina's, wasn't it."

Damien was silent for a beat. He did not disagree.

"Though," Lydia continued, her eyes on me, a quiet curve at the corner of her mouth, "the tapestry was woven by human hands using a very specific technique. The pack's iron needles won't pass through it. It requires silver needles. The finest gauge."

Silver. The one material that punished werewolf blood without exception — even contact left serious burns. Even in those who had never shifted.

"Since Phina hasn't awakened her wolf, she's not quite a full werewolf," Lydia said pleasantly, delivering the cruelest observation in the gentlest possible tone. "Really, she's the most suitable one for the task."

I did not look at Lydia. I kept my eyes on Damien's back.

Even a werewolf whose wolf had never surfaced still carried that blood. Silver still burned. This was not a chore. It was a particular kind of humiliation, designed to be felt in the body as well as the spirit.

I was still on my knees. Without thinking, I moved my hands behind my back.

I watched him through eyes that would not quite clear. I waited. I was waiting for any sign, however small, that something in him could still hesitate.

Then I heard him speak.

"Fine. See to it. And until that tapestry is mended, keep that bird of yours out of my sight."