After He Defended Her, I Rejected My Alpha Mate

I held his eyes.

Not aggressively. Not with the trembling, desperate need of a woman trying to make her mate see her. Just — steadily. The way I'd learned to hold things I couldn't afford to drop.

Liam stood in the nursery doorway with Levi still warm and milk-heavy against my shoulder, and I looked at him the way I'd once seen my father look at a man who'd made a very expensive mistake and didn't yet know it.

'I'll be there,' I said.

That was all. Four words, quiet as a door closing.

He exhaled. His whole frame loosened — that particular slackening of a man who has confused a woman's silence for her surrender so many times that it has become reflex. He almost smiled. He rubbed his jaw once, that compulsive little tell, and nodded.

'Good,' he said. 'Thank you, Camille.'

He left.

I listened to his footsteps all the way down the hall. I listened until I heard the soft, distant click of the guest wing door — her door — and then I sat in the rocking chair and I breathed. Once. Slow and deliberate, the way you breathe when you are teaching yourself that you are still intact.

Levi stirred against my shoulder. I pressed my palm flat against his back and felt the small, steady drum of his heartbeat.

Then I opened the mind-link.

*Tomorrow,* I sent.

Josephine's reply came back in under three seconds. No words. Just a single pulse of acknowledgment — sharp and certain, the mental equivalent of a blade being drawn.

I closed the link. I held my son. Outside the window, New York glittered cold and indifferent, and I sat with the full, clean weight of what was coming and did not flinch from a single ounce of it.

---

I woke before dawn.

The pack house was quiet in that particular way it got in the deep middle of winter — not peaceful, just suspended, like a held breath. I lay still for a moment and listened. Down the hall, Levi was sleeping. The Spencer family Omega that Josephine had imported to replace Etta — a calm, capable woman named Dara who smelled of chamomile and took no nonsense — had the night shift. I had checked on her at midnight. Everything was fine.

I got up. I did not go back to sleep.

I was dressed and standing at the kitchen window with a cup of tea when I heard Giselle's footsteps on the back stairs. That particular light, practiced tread — careful enough to seem delicate, deliberate enough to be anywhere she chose.

I did not turn around.

I heard the espresso machine. The grind of beans. The precise, domestic sounds of a woman who had learned very quickly how a man liked his mornings. And then — so brief I might have missed it if I hadn't been listening for exactly this kind of thing — a small sound. Glass on marble. The faint, chemical sweetness that didn't belong in a kitchen.

My grip tightened on my mug.

Wolfsbane had a smell. Most wolves knew it the way they knew the smell of smoke — instinctively, viscerally. But in small doses, dissolved in something dark and bitter, it was easy to miss. Easy to dismiss. And Liam had been missing things for weeks now.

I heard her carry the cup out of the kitchen.

I stood at the window and I did not move and I thought, very clearly: *Let him drink it.*

Not because I wanted him harmed. But because a man who would not protect his own son from a silver burn would not protect himself from a poisoned cup. And because by the time the wolfsbane made his aura soft and his senses fractionally dim, I would already be standing in that ceremony hall with seventy-two pages of pack law folded in my sister's breast pocket.

His clouded judgment was his own making. I was simply done trying to be the antidote.

---

I dressed carefully.

Not a Luna gown. I hadn't worn one since the banquet — since the night I watched my mate set down his champagne glass and walk away from me without looking back. I chose instead a deep charcoal suit with clean, unforgiving lines, the kind of thing that said nothing about softness. I pinned my hair back. I checked the mirror once, not to reassure myself, but to confirm.

I looked like a woman who had already decided.

Dara had Levi fed and settled in the suite Josephine had arranged on the east wing. I kissed his forehead. He grabbed my finger and held it for a moment with that absolute, uncomplicated grip that babies have — the grip that means nothing except *you are mine and I am yours* — and then he let go.

I walked to the ceremony hall with my chin level and my pulse steady.

At the entrance, I didn't need to look for Josephine. I felt her — that particular, iron-edged presence my sister had carried since we were girls. She fell into step beside me for exactly three paces, close enough that I could see the clean line of the folded documents in her breast pocket and the faint outline of silver at her boot.

She didn't say anything.

Neither did I.

We walked through the doors together.