Mated To The Crippled Alpha

The next day, Lewis brought home a woman he introduced as Melody Reyes, a psychologist. I’d spent years in therapy before, so I knew how these sessions worked — knew the soft voice and the careful questions, the way silence was used as a tool, the way every word was chosen to make you feel held rather than studied. I didn’t push her away. I was carrying our pups now, and medication wasn’t something I could risk. I had to find another way through whatever this was.

But this felt different from anything I’d dealt with before. Back then, I had lost the will to fight, to breathe, to stay. The darkness had been a kind of stillness, a slow withdrawal from everything. Now it was the opposite — every instinct in me screamed to survive, to protect what was growing inside me, to claw my way back to the surface no matter what it cost. Yet my body kept slipping out of my reach, like something else had quietly taken the wheel while I wasn’t looking, steering me somewhere I hadn’t chosen to go.

Lewis called it psychological. I wasn’t so sure.

I looked down at my belly, round and heavy in a way that didn’t match my sense of time. By my count, I was barely past a month. But my phone said three months, and the numbers didn’t lie — the dates, the appointments, the photos Lewis had quietly saved. I pressed my palm flat against my stomach, and something settled in my chest, warm and fierce all at once, like a candle lit in a dark room. Grow strong, I thought. Please. Whatever is happening to me, don’t let it touch you.

I’d been flipping through name books for days, searching for something worthy, something that carried weight without being heavy. Lewis had suggested Joy — a name he’d once promised our first child would carry. I understood what he meant by it. He was trying to give back something that had been taken, to reclaim a tenderness that grief had swallowed whole. But that loss had belonged to a different moment, a different bond — something that had begun with Julian and ended in a silence I still couldn’t fully speak about. These pups deserved a name that was only theirs, only ours. A beginning with no shadow attached to it.

Melody sat beside me while I searched, her presence quiet in a way that didn’t feel forced or performed. Most therapists filled silence like it made them nervous. She let it breathe. "Still looking?" she asked softly.

"Mm." I nodded without looking up.

"You still have time. No need to rush."

I smiled at her. "As their mother, I want to get it right."

She tilted her head slightly, watching me with that particular kind of attention that saw more than it let on. "You keep looking at me like you’re figuring something out."

"You’re just... calmer than anyone I’ve worked with before," I said honestly. "More grounded. Like you’re not afraid of what I might say."

She smiled at that, and asked about my past therapist — gently, the way she did everything. I opened my mouth to answer, and the name came easily enough. Sergio. But when I tried to picture his face, there was nothing. Just a blur, a smear where a person used to be, like a photograph left too long in the sun. I remembered the glasses. The way he kept his office lined up with a precision that felt almost compulsive — pens parallel, books spine-out, the tissue box always at the same angle. But his face? Gone. Completely, utterly gone.

A cold feeling moved through me, slow and deep, like floodwater rising.

I pushed harder, chasing the memory down every corridor I could find. Still nothing. My skin broke into a sweat. Melody’s voice came from somewhere far away, asking if I was okay, and I turned to her already knowing my face had gone pale.

"Is this really just psychological?"

Because if it were only that — if it were only grief and trauma and hormones tangled together — why couldn’t I remember what Sergio looked like? I had sat across from him for years. Cried in front of him. Told him things I had never said aloud to another person. And now he was faceless. What else had I already lost without knowing it was going? Would Lewis’s face disappear from me one day too, erased the same quiet way? How long had this been happening? And had Lewis known? Had he been carrying that truth this whole time, holding it just out of my reach while he smiled at me and told me I was okay?

Melody began to speak — something gentle and carefully chosen, the kind of words designed to slow a person down, to ease them back from the edge of panic. And something in me snapped.

I swept the fruit platter off the table.

It hit the floor and scattered across the tile in a burst of color and sound, and I didn’t feel sorry. Not even a little. I looked at her straight on, anger running hot and clean beneath my skin, clarifying everything it touched. "Tell me what’s actually happening to me."

Her face shifted. The calm cracked just enough to let the panic show through — just a flicker, quickly covered, but I caught it. She started to soothe me, reaching for that professional steadiness again, and that made it worse. Something inside me was unraveling at every edge, my thoughts sharp and tangled at once, my temper stripped down to its raw wire. "You’re all lying," I said. "I’m sick. I know I’m sick. Stop treating me like I need to be managed."

I don’t remember walking to the balcony.

One moment I was in the room. The next I was outside, the wind moving through my white skirt like it was trying to tell me something, my hand bleeding from somewhere I couldn’t account for. The clarity hit me like cold water, sudden and total. I looked down at the blood tracing a thin line across my palm. Then at the drop below. Then at the cluster of faces staring up at me from the courtyard, every one of them with their breath held, their bodies gone still in that particular way people go still when they’re afraid to move.

Lewis was there before I could process it. Drenched in sweat, his shirt clinging to him, his eyes wide and stripped of every defense he usually wore. He moved toward me like he was walking on ice, like one wrong step, one wrong breath, would shatter something irreplaceable.

"Elena." His voice was low and devastatingly careful. "Come back inside. You’re scaring me. You’re scaring the babies."

Something in that broke me open completely. The anger dissolved. The heat went out of me all at once, and what was left underneath was just grief — pure and shapeless and exhausting. I looked at him and the tears came fast, spilling before I could even think to stop them, blurring everything until he was just warmth and outline. "I don’t want this," I said. "I don’t know what’s happening to me. I really don’t know."

He reached me and pulled me down from the railing and into his chest in one motion, his arms locking around me so tight I could feel him shaking against me, could feel how hard he was working to hold himself together. His heartbeat was rapid against my ear — not steady, not calm, nothing like the composure he always showed me. He was terrified. He held on like letting go wasn’t a thing he was willing to consider, not even for a second.

"Tell me the truth," I said into his shoulder, my voice cracking down the middle. "It’s not depression. I know it’s not. Don’t lie to me again. Please."

He was quiet for a long moment. His hand moved slowly across my cheek, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw like he was memorizing it. The sigh that left him carried something enormous — guilt, and the particular exhaustion of someone who has been carrying a secret alone for far too long. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

"Elena," he said quietly, his voice breaking on my name in a way I had never heard before. "You’ve been poisoned."