Mated To The Crippled Alpha

Chapter 490: You Should Be Dead

The moment Vito found out, something in him broke.

I watched it happen. His face didn’t crumble the way most people’s do , it went very still instead, the way water goes still right before it freezes. He’d spent years trying to make sure I had a good life. He’d taught me things, pushed me, built a version of safety around me the best way he knew how. And now a doctor was sitting across from us telling him that the skydiving, the stress, all of it , had been too much for a heart that was already quietly failing.

I could see the guilt carving itself into him, so I did what felt natural.

"Vito." I waited until he looked at me. "Stop. I’m fine. Medicine has come a long way , there are surgeries, treatments, options. This isn’t a death sentence. Look at me. I’m sitting right here."

He pulled me into his arms before I finished the sentence, his grip tight, his voice so rough it barely sounded like him. "I’m sorry. Anna, I’m so sorry."

I patted his back the way I would with Yael. "My father had a heart condition too. He managed it for years. I’m not running a pack or handling political crises , my life is quieter than his ever was. You don’t need to fall apart over me. I promise I’ll be okay."

He didn’t say anything. He just held on.

Later, I would understand that something shifted in him that day , something permanent. He made a decision in that hospital room that he never put into words. I only saw the result of it.

He cut almost everything physical from my routine. The self-defense drills, the endurance training, most of the outdoor activities , gone. He kept the arts courses, the languages, the books. My academic schedule was scaled back. He explained it calmly, practically, the way he explained most things, but I could hear what was underneath it: the doctors had told him my heart would weaken as I got older. That stress , physical or emotional , could accelerate that. That even a transplant carried risks that could shorten my life rather than extend it.

He started studying cardiology the same week. I found medical textbooks on his desk between mission briefings, covered in his handwriting in the margins. He never mentioned it directly. He also, quietly and without telling me, began searching for a compatible donor. Just in case, he would have said, if I’d asked. I didn’t ask.

There are people who love you loudly. Vito loved like he did everything else , without announcement, without asking for credit, just steady and thorough and always a step ahead of the worst possible outcome.

I turned fifteen that spring. Vito was eighteen.

The Blackwelle pack had been moving for years , Wisteria hardening somewhere out of sight, their plans sharpening into something real , but inside the walls of the villa in Snowville, life was quieter than it had ever been. The medication kept things stable. I was cheerful most days, genuinely. I’d grown up surrounded by older brother energy , first Ethan, then Vito , and it had shaped me into someone who leaned in rather than pulled away, who reached for a hug before she’d thought it through.

Vito prepared a garden for me that spring. I don’t know when he’d arranged it , sometime during one of his absences, I assume , but I woke up one morning and it was just there: color everywhere, flowers that would bloom in rotation through every season, and in the center of it all, a swing he’d built himself. He never mentioned making it. I found it and didn’t say anything either. I just started using it every day.

A mute woman named Sera looked after me when Vito was away, which was often. I knew why I was hidden here , the Blackwelle pack couldn’t know where I was, not even Yael. The isolation sometimes pressed against me, but I never once thought about running. Vito had kept me alive. Without him I’d have been gone before I was old enough to understand what that meant. Running from him would have been like running from the only solid ground I’d ever stood on.

Every time he came back, I’d hear the front door and be off the swing before I’d made a conscious decision to move. No shoes, hem of my dress probably catching the grass, completely undignified. I didn’t care. He’d barely be through the door before I had my arms around him, and he’d hold me like I was something worth holding.

I was on the swing when the door opened one afternoon, a book balanced on my head, half-asleep in the warmth. The sound snapped me upright. I grabbed the book, didn’t bother with my shoes, and ran toward the entrance already smiling.

I stopped.

The person standing in the doorway wasn’t Vito.

She was lean and sun-darkened, something weathered and predatory in the set of her shoulders. She looked nothing like the pale, small girl I remembered from when I was five , the one who had looked at my arms and legs with cold, calculating eyes and told me what she wanted to do to them. But the feeling she gave me was identical.

My instincts didn’t need memory to recognize a threat.

"Anna." She smiled, slow and sweet. "I can’t believe you’re still breathing." She stepped forward, and the sweetness dropped. "Vito really has been coddling you. Hiding you away somewhere nice like this."

Behind me, I heard the soft sound of Sera moving , discreet, efficient. I didn’t look. I kept my eyes on Wisteria and let my body go loose, deliberately soft, deliberately small. A gardening hoe sat in the flowerbed two feet to my left.

"The Sander pack should’ve been wiped out years ago," she said, her voice dropping into something colder. "Vito’s too sentimental. Looks like I’ll have to handle this myself."

I let my knees buckle. Let my face do the thing fear was supposed to do. My fingers found the hoe handle as I went down.

"I don’t know what Vito sees in you." She pulled out a blade, clean and direct. "Probably your face. It won’t help you now. My father’s leg has never healed , your family did that. Someone has to answer for it."

She brought the knife down.

I rolled, fast and low, and came up swinging. The hoe connected with her head and the sound was awful. Blood came immediately. I didn’t wait to see how much.

I ran.

I had never run toward the gate without Vito. Every instinct in me had always oriented around him , his direction, his permission, his presence as the fixed point I moved around. But he wasn’t here, and Wisteria was behind me, and the part of me that wanted to survive was louder than all of it.

I hit the gate and skidded to a stop.

There were men on the other side. A lot of them, big and still, the kind of still that meant they were waiting rather than resting. The energy coming off them was heavy and dark, the specific weight of an alpha’s enforcer , a dominance so blunt it pressed against my skin from twenty feet away.

The one at the front was the source of it. Tall, eyes that moved like something calculating lived behind them, a smile that had never once been warm.

Behind me, Wisteria’s voice came out ragged and furious. "Silas, kill her."

He looked from her bleeding head to my face. Something in his expression shifted , not quite amusement, not quite contempt.

"You should be dead," he said.