Sacrificed To The Triplet Alpha Kings

Marcus didn’t speak for the first twenty minutes of the drive, and Lilith was grateful for it. He kept his eyes on the road, one hand steady on the wheel, giving her the silence she needed to fall apart quietly in the passenger seat without an audience.

She stared out the window without really seeing anything. The Blackwood forest gave way to open road, then to the neutral stretch of land that belonged to no pack, and every mile felt like it was taking too long and somehow also happening too fast. Her hands wouldn’t stay still. She kept smoothing her skirt, then twisting her fingers together, then pressing her palms flat against her knees like that might stop the shaking.

She kept thinking about yesterday. She’d spent the afternoon in the greenhouse with Sera, breathing in lavender and rosemary, feeling peaceful for the first time in days. While she’d been doing that, her mother’s body had been failing somewhere miles away, and she hadn’t felt a thing. Hadn’t sensed it. Had just been happy, actually happy, while her mother’s heart rate spiked and her blood pressure climbed and no one at Shadowmere could bring it back down.

”Your mother’s a fighter,” Marcus said, breaking the silence without taking his eyes off the road. ”Four months in that state, and her body’s still holding on. That’s not nothing.”

”I know,” Lilith said quietly. She did know. But it didn’t help ease how she feels currently.

”The Alphas will make sure she has whatever she needs here,” Marcus added. ”Best healers. Best equipment. Whatever it takes.”

Lilith nodded, though her mind wasn’t really on the quality of the hospital. It was on the fact that her mother had nearly died last night, or come close enough that Doctor Reeve hadn’t been able to handle it, and she had been asleep in a beautiful room full of flowers, completely unaware.

***

Saint Mary’s Supernatural Hospital came into view as the light started turning gold with early evening, a sprawling complex of pale stone, larger and more modern than anything at Shadowmere, with covered walkways connecting the different buildings and gardens that looked tended but not decorative, functional rather than beautiful.

Marcus pulled up to the main entrance. ”I’ll be right here,” he said. ”However long you need.”

Lilith didn’t answer. She was already moving, her bag clutched to her chest, her legs carrying her toward the doors before the carriage had even fully stopped rocking.

Inside, the hospital smelled like antiseptic and something floral underneath it, some attempt to soften the clinical edges. A young woman behind the front desk looked up as Lilith approached, already breathless.

”Cassandra Thorne,” Lilith said. ”She came in last night. From Shadowmere.”

The woman checked her ledger, unhurried in a way that made Lilith want to scream. ”Room 407. Fourth floor.”

Lilith took the stairs. She didn’t trust herself to stand still in a lift, to wait for doors to open and close, to do anything but move. By the second floor her breath was coming hard, by the third her legs were burning, and she didn’t slow down until she reached the fourth-floor corridor and had to stop, hand pressed to the wall, forcing herself to breathe before she could read the room numbers straight.

407 was three doors down.

She pushed the door open with a hand that wasn’t quite steady.

Her mother lay in the bed exactly the way she always did. Still. Silent. Peaceful in a way that had stopped meaning anything comforting to Lilith months ago, because peaceful just meant absent, meant gone somewhere Lilith couldn’t follow. The machines here were different from the ones at Shadowmere, newer, quieter, with more lines and more numbers scrolling across small screens, but her mother’s face was the same face Lilith had been memorizing for four months.

For a moment Lilith just stood in the doorway, staring, unable to make herself move closer. Some part of her had been braced for something different. Worse, or somehow also better...her mother sitting up, maybe, eyes open, some visible sign that last night had changed anything at all. Instead there was just this. The same stillness. The same silence.

She crossed the room and sank into the chair beside the bed, reaching for her mother’s hand before she’d even fully sat down. Cassandra’s skin was cool, thinner than Lilith remembered from just three days ago, or maybe that was only her imagination, only fear rewriting what she was seeing.

”Mama.” Her voice cracked on the single word.

She didn’t decide to cry. It simply happened, the tears coming fast and silent at first, then breaking apart into something uglier, her shoulders shaking, small broken sounds escaping her throat that she couldn’t have stopped if she’d tried. She pressed her mother’s hand against her cheek, needing the contact, needing something solid to hold onto.

”I’m sorry,” she said, the words coming out warped by crying. ”I’m so sorry, Mama. I wasn’t here. I was in a garden yesterday. I was happy yesterday, and you were...you were fighting for your life, and I didn’t know. I didn’t feel it. I should have felt it. I should have known something was wrong.”

There was no answer. There never was. But Lilith kept talking anyway, kept apologizing to a woman who couldn’t hear her, because the apology needed to exist somewhere even if it never landed.

”I keep leaving you,” she whispered. ”First Shadowmere, now here. I keep having to leave you behind, and every time I do, something happens. I hate this. I hate not being able to just stay.”

She cried for a long time, long enough that her throat went raw, long enough that the light outside the window shifted a full shade darker. Eventually the sobs thinned out into something quieter, exhaustion taking the place of the sharper grief, and she simply sat there holding her mother’s hand, breathing.

A soft knock came at the door before it opened. A woman entered...sharp-eyed, silver hair cropped short and practical, a healer’s coat over dark green scrubs.