After My Alpha Gave My Music to His Beta

They told me to stand behind the curtain.

Not in those exact words, of course. Damon Cole, Ironcrest's lead warrior, delivered the message with his eyes fixed somewhere above my left shoulder, the way he always does when he's following an order he knows is wrong. 'The Alpha requests you remain in the backstage corridor during the ceremony, Luna Madeline. For flow purposes.' Flow purposes. I almost laughed.

I didn't argue. I just nodded and walked through the side door he held open, my heels clicking on the polished floor until the sound was swallowed by the roar of a thousand wolves applauding somewhere beyond the velvet curtain in front of me.

Silvercrest's grand hall smelled like cedar and warm candlelight. From where I stood, I could see the edge of the stage through a gap in the curtain — just enough. The podium. The lights. The crowd of Alphas and their Lunas seated in long, gleaming rows, all of them here for the annual Alphas' Assembly gala, the biggest night in the pack calendar. And there was Zayne, standing at the center of all of it, exactly where he always stood.

He looked magnificent. I'll give him that. Six foot three, broad-shouldered, his ceremonial sash catching the spotlight like he was born inside it. He probably believed he was.

The presenter's voice boomed through the hall. 'Alpha Zayne Morgan of Ironcrest Pack — Alpha of the Year.'

The applause was deafening.

Zayne smiled, that slow, camera-ready smile I had watched him practice in the mirror of our penthouse bathroom more times than I could count. He stepped forward, accepted the award, and then — then he reached down to the podium and lifted the ceremonial baton.

Vanessa's baton. Diamond-inlaid, catching every light in the room, glittering like something sacred.

He held it up like a torch.

'This honor belongs to the creative soul beside me,' he said. His voice filled the hall, warm and certain and practiced. 'My Beta, my battle-partner in music, Vanessa Reyes. She is the heartbeat behind every anthem Ironcrest has ever howled.'

Vanessa stepped forward from her seat in the front row — gowned in deep gold and burgundy, the exact colors of Zayne's ceremonial regalia, a choice that was not an accident — and the hall erupted again. She pressed a hand to her chest, performing gratitude with flawless precision, her floral perfume so thick I could smell it even backstage, drifting through the gap in the curtain like smoke.

I stood very still.

Five years. Five years of composing between three and five in the morning, the hours I called the pack's held breath, when the world went quiet enough for me to hear the music underneath everything. Five years of hand-annotated scores, of rewriting a single bridge sixteen times until it carried exactly the weight of an Alpha's aura at full strength. Five years of scores that were never framed, never credited, never even acknowledged in a private room with no cameras present.

And he held up her baton.

I reached for the mate mind-link. Just once. One quiet question, the kind I had been swallowing for years, finally slipping out before I could stop it.

*Why?*

His answer came back fast and hard, the Alpha tone riding underneath every word like a current designed to make my knees buckle.

*Stay where you are. You're the Luna for photographs, Madeline. That's your role tonight. And when we're back, I need a new anthem drafted — for Vanessa's Rank Elevation Ceremony. Pro bono. She's done more for this pack's image than you understand.*

Decorative Luna. He didn't say those exact words in the link. He didn't have to. The shape of them was in every word he did say.

The applause was still going. Vanessa was still glowing. The baton was still catching the light.

Something inside me went very, very quiet.

Not the quiet of hurt. Not the quiet of someone trying not to cry. It was a different kind — the kind that comes after a long, slow fracture finally finishes. Clean. Complete. The way a score sounds when the last note resolves and there is nothing left to add.

I let the curtain fall back into place.

I didn't watch the rest of the ceremony.

I stood in the backstage corridor with my hands folded in front of me, my mother's plain silver cuff cool against my wrist, and I thought about a locked drawer in a private estate outside Paris. I thought about years of correspondence, drafts returned with careful, reverent notes in the margins, a voice that had never once told me to stay invisible.

I thought about the Lycan Council's Registry of Pack Arts, and the sealed certificates sitting in my lawyer's office, and how a plain, unassuming folder could end an Alpha's career in a single afternoon.

I thought about all of that, and I said nothing, and I smiled at no one in particular.

The curtain glittered. The crowd roared. And I began, very quietly, to count the days.