My Chosen Fate

Aubrey POV

I wake up in a cold sweat, heart racing like I just finished sprinting somewhere I don’t remember going. I’m not due up for another hour, but there’s no point in lying here waiting for my body and mind to find middle ground. I’ve had PTSD long enough to know how to keep it quiet — no one at Moon Valley would guess, unless they caught me mid-panic or noticed how easily I freeze with things that wouldn’t faze anyone else.

I get up, already running through the list of things I need to get done today, and that’s when I see it. My dresser knocked over. Clothes ripped out of the closet and scattered across the floor. My books — my neat, alphabetized, don’t-touch books — kicked into a pile like someone was looking for something underneath them.

My eyes drift to the heavy, oversized door leading out of my bedroom, the swinging double-latch still seated perfectly in its strike plate. Like every building in Moon Valley, my cottage was built with the wolf half in mind—boasting wider hallways, massive windows, and heavy push-bar doors designed to let a fully shifted beast burst through effortlessly if they ever need to make a fast escape.

It’s a practical reality of living in a pack, a structural safety net for when instincts override human sense. But looking at the undisturbed exit now, it just proves the humiliating truth: whatever thrashed my room didn’t have to force its way in or out.

What in the actual fuck.

Some creature of the Moon Goddess I am. No survival instincts when it comes to whatever tore through my own bedroom.

I check my body — intact, untouched. Thankfully. I release the breath I didn’t know I was holding.

I used to pray to Her, back when I still thought that was a two-way conversation. Actual prayers, kneeling by the window because someone told me the moon hears you better when you can see it. I asked for a lot back then. A father who wasn’t a ghost. A house where I didn’t have to sleep with my back against the door. A family that actually considered my needs.

I stopped asking for that last one around seventeen, the night my mother made it clear exactly how much I truly mattered. No use praying for a family the Goddess had apparently already decided wasn’t concerned about me.

The wolf took a little longer to let go of. I held onto that one until nineteen, right past the age it was supposed to happen and long past the point pretending helped. Once I did the math on how many people in this pack actually get what the stories promise — the bond, the certainty, the person who was always supposed to be theirs — it wasn’t hard to give up on the rest of it too.

It’s a small number. My mother isn’t in it. Most of the women I grew up with aren’t in it. We get arranged matches, or chosen ones, or nothing, and we call it a life anyway, because what else are you going to call the one you actually have.

So no, I don’t put much stock in fate. Fate didn’t show up for the people who needed it. Fate definitely didn’t show up last night, unless “fate” now moonlights as whatever wrecked my room while I slept through it like the dead.

Nothing’s missing, as far as I can tell. Just a huge mess. I guess I should be grateful for small mercies — assuming the Goddess is even in the business of handing those out anymore.

I get in the shower.

I throw my scrubs on, and head for the hospital.

Whatever happened in my room can wait. I’ll pick it up later, I also need to text Adam to check my cottage while I’m at work, see if maybe he can sniff out who did it. Adam is the pack’s Delta, but also my younger brother.

Moon Valley’s been running short-staffed and short-tempered since the rogues hit the border two nights ago. Fifteen warriors are still down, wolfsbane working its way out of their systems slower than any of them have patience for. Some haven’t fully surfaced yet. The ones who have are worse — restless, prideful, half of them already plotting how to get back out there and avenge whoever we lost, like their bodies didn’t just get carved open two days ago. None of them are anywhere close to healed. All of them are one bad decision away from tearing a wound open again or picking up an infection they’ll be even angrier about.

I get to the hospital early, coffee in hand from the local shop I stop at frequently, and take my usual spot out front to wait out the last few minutes before my shift actually starts. I pull my phone out and text Adam asking if he can check my cottage and see if he can scent out whoever made the mess last night, then hit send.

This is the only part of the day that’s quiet enough to hear myself think, which is either a comfort or a curse depending on what my brain’s decided to replay that morning.

Today it’s replaying Kade — the sound the arrow made coming out of him, wet and wrong, and the way his eyes rolled back before the fever really set in. I’ve pulled worse things out of worse off people, but there’s a difference between hands that are just doing the job and hands that are trying not to shake because it’s your own baby brother’s blood on them.

I’m still somewhere in that memory when two hands drag up my arms, feather-light, and my skin crawls like something’s trying to climb out of it. I’m on my feet and swinging before I’ve even fully processed what touched me, coffee sacrificed to the pavement, and Thomas jumps back out of range, laughing like this is the funniest thing that’s happened to him all week.

“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.” He jokingly lets out.

“I smelled something foul and assumed it was another rogue that breached the borders,” I say, expressionless.

“Don’t worry, if it was a rogue, I’d have jumped right in and saved you.” He grins, all teeth. “Fen and I happen to think you’re adorable with all your helplessness.”

I roll my eyes hard enough to strain something. “Let’s get inside. Night shift’s probably ready to chew someone’s arm off by now.”

Thomas is the type to hit on any woman who can breed with him, as long as she has a pair of breasts. He is funny enough to converse and bicker with, but that’s the full extent for me, just a familiar face to make the heavy workload less serious.

Inside, the smell hits first — wolfsbane and antiseptic and the particular staleness of a room that’s had too many bodies in it for too many hours. Night shift looks exactly how you’d expect after two days of this: hollow-eyed, running on fumes, desperate to hand off their clipboards and go collapse somewhere quiet. We take report fast, divide up the remaining patients, and I’m barely three steps into my task list when James finds me.

“Hey, good morning, Aubrey,” he says coolly.

I hate how easy it is to smile at him. “Morning, James.”

He’s easy to look at in the specific way that makes it inconvenient — clean-cut, dark hair, the kind of hazel-green eyes that probably shouldn’t be allowed on someone most of the staff can’t stand. James isn’t warm to many people here. Ask half the hospital and they’ll tell you he’s an ass. He’s never been anything but decent to me, which either means I’m the exception or I just haven’t been on the wrong end of him yet. Thomas passes behind him mid-conversation and rolls his eyes hard enough that I feel it from three feet away. He always gets a little pissy when he finds James and me chatting.

I don’t put much thought into it, because Kade’s already yelling for me from his room like the building is on fire.

“Sis! Sis! Tell them I can breathe fine.”

He can’t. Not really. Two days ago I had my hands inside my own brother’s chest cavity, more or less, chasing an arrowhead that lodged itself deep enough to puncture a small piece of his lung. He’s lucky. He’s nineteen, a warrior, and apparently allergic to the concept of bed rest.

“You had a hole in your lung, Kade. A hole. You don’t get an opinion on this.”

“Ash agrees with me,” he says, like that settles anything.

“Ash is exhausted from keeping you alive and you know it. Let him rest.” I check his oxygen levels and his temperature, noting the faint tremor still in his hands from the fever breaking. He’s healing — fast, even faster than the other patients hit by the same arrows — but fast isn’t the same as done, and I’m not signing off on done just because he’s bored.

I don’t flinch changing his bandages, don’t bother with gloves half the time when everyone else needs full protective gear before they’ll go near a wolfsbane wound. Same story with silver, on the occasion it comes up. No wolf, nothing for either one to actually poison — that’s the going theory, mine included, it’s all that makes sense at this point. It’s convenient, being the one person in this hospital who can handle the ugly stuff without possibly getting sick. Wolf-less has to be good for something.

He keeps arguing. I keep not caring. Eventually I do the only thing guaranteed to shut him up: I hand his chart to James.

“He’s stable, vitals are good, just needs to stop bugging me to let him leave. Congratulations, he’s your problem now.”

James smirks. “I can deal with that.”

Kade groans loud enough that half the hall probably hears it, already resigned to losing this round. James, for all his reputation, is significantly less charmed by Kade’s whining than I am, which honestly might be exactly what my brother needs right now.

I check my phone and Adam has responded: “Hey sis, checked your place out, I don’t smell anyone besides you, but I’ll let Alpha Holt know what happened. Keep me informed on if it happens again.”

Later the alert for bed six comes through as I’m walking out of another warrior’s room. I don’t have to ask which patient it’s for — bed six is also one of the warriors who came in two nights ago with a poisoned blade wound that missed his heart by less than an inch and two more that missed everything vital purely by luck, still unconscious, still critical, and now, apparently, out of veins that want to cooperate.

James is already there when I get in, gloved up, ultrasound machine wheeled to the bedside. “Blown twice,” he says, not looking up. “Third time’s supposed to be the charm, but I need a hand.”

“You have hands.”

“I need two more, and since mine are both busy.” He nods at the probe in one fist, the catheter ready in the other. “I need you to stretch the skin so I can see this deeper vein better, I’m almost out of options.”

I move to stand beside him at the bedside, and he takes my hand — no warning, no hesitation, just closes his fingers around mine and guides it exactly where he needs it, pressing two of my fingers flat against the skin at an angle I wouldn’t have picked myself.

“There. Don’t move unless I tell you to.”

His grip isn’t gentle. It isn’t trying to be. But for the first time since meeting him, my skin doesn’t crawl when he touches me.