After My Alpha Gave My Music to His Beta

Five mornings after the gala, I woke at three a.m. and did not compose.

I sat at my desk with a blank score in front of me and a pen in my hand, and I stared at the empty staves until the numbers on my phone changed to 3:47. Then I set the pen down, unopened, and went back to bed. Buster lifted his head from his spot at the foot of the mattress, ears tilted in question. I scratched behind them and whispered, "Not tonight, boy."

Zayne didn't notice. He was already gone when I woke again at seven, off to some early council meeting or photo op or whatever it was he filled his mornings with now that I wasn't filling them for him.

The second morning, I did the same. Woke. Sat. Stared. Did not write.

The third morning, my phone buzzed with a mind-link message from Zayne. *Need the Vanessa anthem by Friday. Don't make me ask twice.*

I deleted it without responding.

By the fifth morning, he summoned me to his office.

The message came through the household link, not the private mate bond — Damon Cole's voice, formal and carefully neutral. "The Alpha requests your presence in his office at ten a.m., Luna Madeline." Requests. As if I had a choice.

I arrived at 10:03. Not late enough to be called disrespectful. Just late enough to make a point he wouldn't catch.

Zayne's office sat on the top floor of the pack house, all floor-to-ceiling windows and sleek dark furniture that photographed beautifully for pack newsletters. He was behind his desk when I walked in, iced coffee sweating a ring onto a stack of unread reports, his ceremonial sash draped over the back of his chair like he'd just come from another award he hadn't earned.

And there, on the shelf behind him, gleaming under carefully angled track lighting, was Vanessa's diamond baton.

He didn't look up right away. He was scrolling through something on his phone, one hand loose around the coffee cup, the picture of an Alpha too important to be bothered by his own Luna's arrival.

"Sit," he said.

I stayed standing.

That got his attention. His eyes flicked up, annoyed. "Madeline."

"You wanted to see me," I said. My voice was calm. Measured. The same tone I used when correcting a flat note in a melody.

He set the phone down and leaned back in his chair, studying me the way he studied crowd reactions during speeches — looking for the angle, the leverage point. "I need the anthem for Vanessa's ceremony. You've had five days."

"I haven't written it."

Silence. He blinked, slow and deliberate, like he was giving me a chance to correct myself. "Excuse me?"

"I haven't written it," I repeated. "And I'm not going to."

His jaw tightened. The air in the room shifted — not much, just enough to feel the edge of his Alpha aura pressing outward, testing. "We talked about this. You agreed."

"No," I said quietly. "You told me to. I didn't agree to anything."

He stood. Slow. Controlled. The kind of movement designed to remind me exactly how much bigger he was, how much space he could take up when he wanted to. "Madeline, I don't have time for whatever mood this is. The ceremony is in two weeks. Vanessa has been working her ass off for this pack, and she deserves—"

"Who legally owns my Howling Songs, Zayne?"

The question landed like a blade between his ribs. For half a second — maybe less — his face went blank. Genuinely blank, the mask slipping just long enough for me to see the panic underneath.

Then the Alpha tone slammed down.

"You're remembering things wrong." His voice dropped an octave, vibrating with command, designed to make my wolf submit, to make my knees buckle and my head bow. "Those songs belong to the pack. To Ironcrest. You composed them as Luna, which means they're pack property. That's how it works."

I didn't move. Didn't flinch. I just looked at him.

"That's not what the Lycan Council's Registry says."

His hand jerked. Not much. Just a twitch, an involuntary spasm of shock he tried to cover by reaching for his coffee. But the cup was closer to the edge than he thought, and his fingers caught the rim wrong, and the whole thing tipped.

Iced coffee poured across the desk in a cold, dark wave.

It hit the hand-annotated score I'd left there three days ago — the anthem for the Northeast Pack Alliance summit, the one I'd rewritten sixteen times, the one with notes in the margins in my mother's handwriting because I'd used one of her old templates as a base. The ink started to bleed immediately, black lines smearing into shapeless clouds, five nights of work dissolving in seconds.

Zayne grabbed a stack of papers to soak up the spill. He didn't look at the score. Didn't apologize. Didn't even glance down.

"Madeline, I don't know what you think you're doing, but—"

I turned and walked out.

I didn't slam the door. I didn't say another word. I just left him standing there with coffee dripping off his desk and panic starting to crack through the arrogance in his eyes.

I walked straight to my studio, locked the door, and sat down at my desk.

For the first time in five days, I picked up my pen.

But I didn't write for Zayne.

I opened the anonymous mind-link channel — the one I'd been using for years, the one that bypassed pack systems entirely and ran through the Lycan Council's private correspondence network. The one that connected me to a retired prince in Paris who had never once asked me to stay small.

I composed.

Not an anthem. Not a ceremonial piece designed to amplify someone else's aura. Just music. Pure, unfiltered, devastatingly alive. The kind of composition I used to write before I learned to make myself useful.

I sent it before I could second-guess myself.

Salvador's response arrived four hours later, timestamped 2:14 a.m. Paris time.

*This is the strongest work you've ever sent me. What changed?*

I stared at the message for a long time. Then I typed three words.

*I stopped giving.*

I saved his response with all the others, in the folder I'd been keeping for years, numbered and dated. Then I looked at Buster, curled at my feet, and scratched his ears.

"Good boy," I whispered.

Outside, the pack house hummed with its usual noise. Zayne's voice echoed somewhere down the hall, barking orders at someone. Vanessa's laugh drifted up from the courtyard.

I didn't hear any of it.

I just kept writing.