After My Alpha Declared His Mistress Luna

The rain didn't stop until almost dawn.

I sat under that border tree for hours, Barnaby warm and heavy in my lap, listening to the storm work itself out against the leaves. At some point the pack house lights went dark, one window at a time, until the whole building was just a black shape against a black sky.

I should have been cold. I was cold. But there was something else underneath it — that same strange clarity from the night of the banquet, quiet and sharp, like a blade that hadn't been used yet.

Barnaby had gone still in my arms a while back, his ears forward, his nose working the air toward the dark tree line behind us. His tail moved in slow, steady sweeps. Not afraid. Curious. The way he got when he sensed something large and calm nearby — something that didn't feel like a threat, even if it probably should.

I didn't turn around.

I don't know why. Maybe I was too tired. Maybe some part of me already knew that whatever was back there in the dark wasn't going to hurt me, and that knowledge was so foreign and so fragile that looking directly at it might break it.

So I just sat there, holding my dog, staring at the dead windows of the pack house, while the rain thinned to a drizzle and then stopped entirely.

Whoever — whatever — was in those trees never moved closer. Never made a sound. But the feeling of being watched stayed with me, steady and oddly warm, until the sky started going gray at the edges and Barnaby finally relaxed completely, dropping his chin onto my knee with a long, satisfied exhale.

I scratched behind his ears.

"Yeah," I said quietly. "Me too."

I didn't sleep. When the light was strong enough to see by, I got up, tucked Barnaby under my arm, and walked back to the pack house.

The back door was unlocked by then. No one was awake to notice me come in.

---

The kitchen smelled like coffee and last night's roast. I found a clean mug, filled it from the pot someone had already started, and stood at the counter drinking it slowly. My clothes were still damp. My shoulder still ached from where Camille's wolf had hit me. The titanium ring sat on my finger like a cold, permanent accusation.

I was on my second cup when I heard his footsteps.

Colt moved differently from other people. Heavier. More deliberate. Every step announced itself, the way Alpha footsteps always did — a low, subconscious pressure that made the air feel slightly thicker. I had spent three years learning to read his moods from the sound of his walk alone.

This walk was wrong.

I set my mug down.

He came through the kitchen doorway and stopped. He was dressed but barely — a shirt half-buttoned, jaw unshaved, his dark hair still rough from sleep. His eyes found me immediately, and something in them was already off. Already too sharp, too focused, like he'd been thinking about this since before he woke up.

"You were outside last night," he said.

Not a question.

"Yes," I said.

He crossed the kitchen slowly. I didn't move. There was nowhere to go — the counter was at my back, the island to my left, and Colt was filling the space between me and the door with the particular, suffocating weight of an Alpha who had already decided something.

He stopped about two feet away. His nostrils flared.

I watched his face change.

It was subtle at first — a slight tension around his eyes, a tightening of his jaw. Then his gaze dropped to my shoulder, my neck, the damp fabric of my shirt, and the tension became something else entirely. His chest expanded on a slow, deliberate inhale.

The silence stretched.

"Who," he said, very quietly, "were you with."

My pulse kicked. "No one. I was under the border tree with Barnaby."

"Don't." His voice dropped lower, and the Alpha tone bled into it — that particular vibration that pressed against the base of your skull and told your body to submit before your brain could argue. "Don't lie to me. I can smell it on you."

I didn't answer.

His jaw worked. "It's a male scent. Strong. Stronger than anything in this pack." His eyes came back to mine, and what was in them now wasn't just jealousy — it was something uglier, something that had nothing to do with caring about me and everything to do with ownership. "Who touched you."

"No one touched me."

He moved fast.

His hand shot out and grabbed my left wrist, yanking it up between us. I gasped — not from pain, not yet — just from the shock of it, the sudden violence of the motion. He stared at the titanium ring on my finger like it had personally offended him.

Then he grabbed it.

He twisted. Hard.

The pain was immediate and white-hot. The ring didn't move — it never moved, that was the whole point of titanium, that was why he'd chosen it — but the skin beneath it did. I felt it tear, a thin, burning strip along my knuckle as he wrenched the band back and forth, trying to force it over the joint.

I screamed.

The sound tore out of me before I could stop it, sharp and raw, bouncing off the kitchen tiles. Barnaby scrambled up from his spot by the door, barking frantically.

Colt didn't stop.

"Take it off," he snarled, and his voice was fully Alpha now, all command and no reason, the tone crashing over me in waves. "Take it off and tell me who you were with."

"I can't — " My voice broke. "Colt, stop, you're — "

"Tell me."

Another twist. Another scream. The skin around the ring was slick now, warm and wet, and I could feel the blood welling up where the metal had torn through.

I stopped fighting it.

Not because I gave up. Not because the Alpha tone finally broke through whatever had been holding me together since the banquet.

But because something went very, very quiet inside me.

I looked at my hand. At the blood running down my finger, pooling in the groove of the ring, dripping onto the clean kitchen floor.

I looked at Colt's face — the fury in it, the possessiveness, the complete and total absence of anything that looked like love.

He had announced his true mate to the entire pack two nights ago. He had moved another woman into our room. He had sent me to the basement with a shoe box.

And now he was bleeding me over a ring he'd given me as a leash.

The clarity from the border tree came back. Colder this time. Cleaner.

I stopped screaming.