After My Alpha Chose His Mistress Over Me

The bond broke at 9:41, right between the toast and the meat course.

I had a fork in my hand. I remember that. The torches along the great hall were lit, every ranked wolf of the Ironridge Pack packed shoulder to shoulder at the long tables, and I was seated at the far end near the kitchen doors in a plain gray dress because that was where they always put me. Five years as Alpha Ryan's mate, and I still ate within reach of the dish bins.

Then Ryan stood, and the hall went quiet the way a room goes quiet when an Alpha wants it to.

Lorelei rose with him. She was wearing the Luna circlet. My circlet. Silver, thin, set with moonstone chips, and it sat on her dark hair like it had been made for her. Her hand rested in the crook of his arm.

"Tonight I settle something the pack has waited on too long," Ryan said.

His eyes found me down the length of the hall. Not with hate. That would have been something. He looked at me the way you look at a chair you've decided to throw out.

"I, Ryan, Alpha of the Ironridge Pack, reject you, Victoria, as my mate and Luna."

The mark on my neck went cold first.

Not painful. Cold. Like someone had pressed an ice cube to the skin and held it there. Then it went empty — and that was worse — a door closing on a room that had never had furniture in it. Something in my chest reached for him out of five years of habit and found nothing but the echo of its own reaching. The pain came second, and it came all at once, down my spine, into my hips, into my teeth.

My fork hit the floor. Then my knees did.

I went down onto the stone in front of three hundred wolves and I couldn't breathe. My cheek was against the flagstones. I could smell wax and roast meat and the cold underside of the floor. Somewhere above me a chair scraped and nobody stood up. Not one of them. I heard Lorelei make a small sound, and when I turned my head I saw her lips curl at one corner before she smoothed it away into concern.

And under all of it — under the cold mark and the shaking and the noise — something moved in me.

Deep, beneath my ribs. A tremor. Slow and enormous, like the shudder of something turning over in its sleep after a very long time. It wasn't the pain. The pain was thin and bright and everywhere. This was heavy. This had weight. It pressed outward once, hard, against the inside of my body, and then it stilled.

I didn't know what it was. I only knew it had heard him.

I flattened my palm against the stone. I made myself breathe out. Then in. Then I got my knee under me and I stood up, alone, with no hand offered and none asked for.

I didn't look at Ryan. I didn't look at her. I looked at nothing at all, and I walked the whole length of that hall past every table, past every wolf who had eaten food I helped carry in, and I did not give a single one of them my tears.

Behind me, someone finally started clapping.

***

The mark was a dead flat scar by morning. Cold to the touch, like a coin left outside.

I went through the pack house early to take what was mine. It didn't take long. Two boxes. Books, a coat, Buster's spare leash, and my mother's moonstone pendant, which I kept in my palm because I didn't trust it in a box.

Lorelei was waiting at the top of the upstairs hallway. She was already dressed, already perfumed — lavender, the lavender Ryan had pumped through every room of this house for her — and she was holding a candle in a brass dish, though the hall lights were on.

"You dropped something last night," she said sweetly. "Downstairs. In front of everyone."

I stepped around her.

Her hand shot out and caught my wrist, and my fist opened, and she plucked the pendant out of it before I could close my fingers.

"Give it back."

"Ask nicely." She held it up by the chain, let it turn in the light. Then she looked me in the face, and let go.

It hit the stone and it didn't just crack. It burst — milky-blue slivers skidding under the banister, into the runner, across five years of floor. The last thing I had of my mother, in pieces.

I made a sound. That was my mistake. She saw my face.

And then, calmly, Lorelei turned her hand and held it over the candle flame — three seconds, four — until the skin went shiny red, and she started screaming.

Ryan came up the stairs at a run. Staff spilled into the hallway behind him, kitchen omegas, the housekeeper, two young warriors. Lorelei was folded against him with her burned hand cradled up like a broken bird, sobbing that she'd only tried to give it back to me, that I'd shoved her into the candle.

"On your knees," Ryan said.

I didn't move.

He put the Alpha tone in it. That crushing weight that comes down through the shoulders, that isn't a request. "Victoria. Kneel. Apologize to her."

My knees hit the stone. My mouth opened.

"I'm sorry," I said, to Lorelei's shoes.

And while I was down there, low and unwatched, I closed my hand over the biggest shard of my mother's stone and slid it into my sleeve.

Because the tremor came again. Right then. Under my ribs, rolling over, waking — and something that was not my own voice moved in the dark behind my eyes. No words. Just fury, and heat, and a low sound like a growl starting a long way off.

My fingers closed on the shard. In the doorway across the hall, Mac — the warrior commander I'd brought into this pack myself, years ago, with a favor nobody here knew I'd begged for — crouched and quietly began picking the rest of the fragments out of the runner, one by one, and pocketing them.

Ryan didn't notice. He was stroking Lorelei's hair.

"Get her boxes out of my house," Lorelei said through her tears, and pointed at the window, at the low tin roof behind the pack house. "Put them in the shed. With the dog."