After My Alpha Betrayed Me, I Married His Rival

The first flash came at two in the morning.

I was almost asleep when it hit — Tristan's laugh, low and easy, the way it used to sound before the whiskey made it loose and careless. The specific warmth of his hand on the small of my back at some pack function years ago, steering me through a crowd. The smell of pine and woodsmoke that I had spent six years associating with safety.

I sat up in the dark and pressed my palm flat against the mattress and told myself it was grief. Normal grief. The kind that ambushes you at two in the morning when your defenses are down and your body hasn't caught up to the decisions your mind already made.

I lay back down. I went to sleep.

The second night was worse. Longer. More specific. His voice saying my name the way he used to say it when he actually meant it — before the scandals, before the recklessness, before six years of me absorbing damage and calling it loyalty. I woke up with my chest tight and my wolf pacing, agitated in a way she hadn't been since the ceremony.

By the third night, I knew it wasn't grief.

Grief doesn't have that quality — that deliberate, curated feeling, like someone selecting photographs. These weren't random memories surfacing. They were chosen. The best ones. The ones most likely to make me doubt.

I drove to Blackmoor in the morning.

---

Mara Voss was not what I expected from a pack healer. She was compact and sharp-eyed, with the kind of stillness that came from spending years reading people who didn't want to be read. She had a small office off the main corridor of the Blackmoor pack house — clean, spare, smelling faintly of dried herbs and something medicinal I couldn't name.

She listened to me describe the flashes without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment, then nodded once, like I had confirmed something she had already suspected.

"Residual mind-link," she said. "Not a true mate bond. You never had one of those with him."

"I know."

"Six years of emotional closeness can create something that functions similarly, though. Faint. Unofficial. Most wolves never notice it because they never leave." She looked at me steadily. "He's using it. Sending you fragments deliberately. The good memories — am I right?"

"Yes."

"Hooks," she said simply. "He's trying to pull you back the only way he has left."

Something cold moved through me. Not surprise — I had already suspected it, which was why I was here. But hearing it stated plainly, clinically, made it more real. Six years of my life, and this was what remained of it: a faint, unofficial tether he was using like a fishing line.

"Can you sever it?"

"I can teach you to sever it yourself," Mara said. "It's better that way. Cleaner."

It took about an hour.

I don't have good language for what it felt like. Not dramatic — no flash of light, no wave of pain that knocked me sideways. It was quieter than that, and in some ways harder. Like finding a splinter the skin had grown around and working it loose carefully, millimeter by millimeter, aware the whole time of how long it had been there. How thoroughly it had become part of the landscape.

Mara talked me through it in a low, even voice. My wolf helped — she had never liked the connection, I realized. She had been tolerating it the way you tolerate something that doesn't belong.

When it was done, the silence in my mind was enormous.

I sat in the chair in Mara's office and breathed. Just breathed. The absence of it was strange — not painful, exactly, but vast. Like a room you've lived in for years with a low hum in the walls, and then one day the hum stops, and you realize how much of your energy had been going toward not hearing it.

I didn't cry. I hadn't cried since the ceremony and I wasn't going to start now. But I sat there for a long time, and Mara let me, and didn't try to fill the silence with anything.

When I finally stood up, she looked at me with that same steady, assessing gaze.

"For what it's worth," she said, "you have the steadiest aura of any she-wolf I've ever treated."

I looked at her. I didn't know what to do with that — it landed somewhere undefended, in a place I hadn't realized was open. I nodded once, picked up my jacket, and walked out.

I stood in the corridor for a moment, just breathing the ordinary air of the Blackmoor pack house. Somewhere down the hall, I could hear voices, the low sounds of a pack going about its day.

Lighter, I thought. I felt lighter. And more exposed than I expected.

---

Rhys found me in the corridor about ten minutes later. He didn't ask what I had been doing in Mara's office — either he already knew or he understood that I would tell him if I wanted to. Both possibilities were, in their own way, a relief.

"My parents want to meet you," he said. "Tonight, if you're available."

I looked at him. "Is this a political meeting?"

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "No."

I said yes, which I told myself was simply the logical next step in establishing our public alliance. I told myself that all the way to his parents' house on the edge of Blackmoor territory, a low stone building with warm light in the windows and the smell of something cooking drifting out into the cold evening air.

Rhys's father opened the door before we knocked.

He was a broad, unhurried man with Rhys's eyes and none of Rhys's composure — he had the easy warmth of someone who had never needed to perform authority and had spent the years since retirement perfecting the art of feeding people. He took one look at me and immediately turned back toward the kitchen, saying over his shoulder, "I made too much, so don't tell me you're not hungry."

I looked at Rhys.

Rhys looked faintly resigned. "He always makes too much."

His mother appeared from the hallway — smaller than I expected, with sharp, kind eyes and the particular attentiveness of a former healer. She looked at me the way Mara had looked at me, but warmer. Like she was reading something she was glad to find.

"Sit down," she said, and it was not a command so much as an invitation that assumed I would accept it, which somehow made it impossible to refuse.

We sat. Rhys's father put a plate in front of me that was, genuinely, too much food. I looked at it and then at Rhys, who was looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man who had made peace with something long ago.

"He shifted in the kitchen," his mother said, settling into her chair with the cheerful energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this audience. "First time. Knocked over the entire herb rack — rosemary everywhere, thyme on the ceiling —"

"It was one shelf," Rhys said.

"Three shelves. I counted afterward." She looked at me with bright eyes. "He was so embarrassed. Wouldn't come back into the kitchen for a week."

I looked at Rhys. He was looking at the table with the specific, slightly pained patience of a man who loved his mother completely and had accepted that this was simply part of that.

I laughed.

It came out before I could stop it — a real laugh, unguarded, without any of the careful architecture I usually kept between myself and the world. It surprised me. The sound of it surprised me. I caught myself a half-second later, and something in my chest did a strange, quiet thing.

Rhys looked up.

His expression was still composed, still giving away almost nothing. But his eyes were warm in a way that had nothing to do with the light in the room, and he held my gaze for just a moment before looking back at his mother.

"Are you done?" he said.

"Not even close," she said happily, and reached for the bread.