After My Alpha Chose His Mistress Over Me

We walked for six hours before I let myself stop.

Buster's paws were raw by the second, so I carried him the last mile before the tree line broke into open field, and even then he whined at being put down, like he didn't trust the ground not to belong to Ryan too. I understood that. My whole body still expected a hand to close around my arm, an Alpha tone to press down on my shoulders and fold me to my knees. It didn't come. The forest just kept being forest, quiet and green and indifferent, and somewhere past it was a border I hadn't crossed since I was too young to remember crossing it.

The mind-link buzzed faint and far, the way distance thinned it. Mac's voice came through in pieces, clipped, the way he always spoke, but there was something under it now that hadn't been there yesterday.

*Three scouts crossed the eastern perimeter this morning. Nobody stopped them.*

I kept walking. *Whose scouts?*

*Doesn't matter whose. What matters is nobody stopped them.* A pause, and I could picture him standing at the tree line with his arms crossed, watching the woods the way he used to watch me cross a room — like he was cataloguing weaknesses before someone else could exploit them. *The Deltas who're left can't hold a real line. They never could. We were the line, Victoria. You know that.*

I did know it. I'd known it for years, quietly, the way you know the foundation of a house even if no one ever shows you the blueprints. I had begged my father for those bloodlines in a snowstorm with my knees going numb, and Ryan had stood in front of his pack for five years taking credit for warriors he never once asked the origin of.

*He's breaking things,* Mac sent. *Furniture. A table in the west hall. Word is he put his fist through the wall outside the training yard this morning.*

*Let him.*

*I'm not worried about the walls.*

Something in that made me slow my steps. Buster pressed against my leg, sensing it before I said anything, the way dogs always sense weather before it arrives.

*What are you worried about, Mac?*

The answer took longer than it should have. *Lorelei pulled him into the study an hour ago. Door shut. I couldn't hear the words, but I know her voice when she's performing and I know her voice when she's not, and this wasn't a performance.* Another pause, heavier. *He came out quiet. That's not like him.*

I didn't have a name for the unease that settled into my chest, only the shape of it — cold and familiar, the same shape as every warning I'd learned to ignore for five years because ignoring it had once felt safer than acting on it. Not anymore.

*Watch him,* I sent. *And watch her more.*

*Already am.*

I closed the link and kept walking, because there was nothing else useful to do with the feeling. Whatever Ryan and Lorelei were building behind that door, it wasn't my problem to solve from six hours out on foot with a limping dog and a fistful of broken moonstone in my pocket. I told myself that. I almost believed it.

The tremor came back around midday, stronger than it had been in the pack house, stronger than it had been on the stone floor of that banquet hall. It didn't hurt. It felt like standing very close to something enormous and asleep, feeling its breath move the air before you could see it. I stopped walking and pressed my palm flat against my sternum, and Buster sat and looked up at me with his head tilted, patient, like he already understood something I didn't.

"I don't know what you are," I said out loud, to the thing under my ribs. It didn't answer. It never had. But it had heard Ryan's rejection vow, and it had heard me lie on my knees and apologize to a woman who broke my mother's pendant, and both times it had turned over like a sleeper disturbed by a sound almost, almost loud enough to wake for.

I thought of the Silvercrest border. I thought of a father I hadn't spoken to since I was a child small enough to be carried, a father I'd only reached out to once, in a storm, to beg for warriors that weren't for me. I had never asked him for anything for myself. Not once.

It was time to stop hiding what I carried. Whatever it was.

The border came into view an hour before dusk — no fence, no wall, just a shift in the air, the trees growing straighter and older, the ground packed down by patrols that clearly walked it often. I felt the guards before I saw them. Six wolves in human form, dressed plainly but standing like soldiers, spread into a loose crescent around me before I'd taken three more steps.

Their leader was tall, gray at the temples, with the kind of stillness that came from decades of not needing to prove anything. He studied me the way you'd study a locked door you didn't have the key to.

"You're not pack," he said slowly. "And you're not rogue." His nostrils flared, once, twice, and something crossed his face I couldn't name — not fear, but close to it. "What are you?"

"I need to speak with the King," I said. "Tell him it concerns his daughter."

The guard didn't move for a long moment. Then he lifted two fingers to his ear, and I heard him murmur into a comm link, low and urgent, words I couldn't fully catch — *unclassified signature, requesting immediate escalation, sir, you need to see this yourself* — and somewhere beyond the tree line, a report was already moving faster than I was, toward a man I hadn't seen since I was small enough to be carried through snow.