After My Alpha Humiliated Me, I Became Royalty

The alarm horn didn't stop for almost an hour.

I stood in the cabin doorway, wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket I'd found in the corner, and watched the eastern sky go orange with what wasn't a sunrise. Ironveil was too far to see, but I knew that color. Torches. Warriors scrambling. Storehouses being ransacked while pack wolves stumbled into a dark border with no wolfsbane trail to guide them.

I felt nothing.

That surprised me more than anything else. Three days ago I would have run barefoot through the snow to help those people. Now I just leaned against the splintered doorframe and watched the color fade.

*Let it burn,* Lira murmured.

Her voice was different. Steadier. Deeper. Like something that had been kept underwater for years was finally coming up for air.

---

The first two days in the cabin, I couldn't keep water down.

The severance sickness came in waves — a cold sweat would break across my back, and then the scar on my neck would flare like someone was pressing a live wire against it. I'd double over, gagging on nothing. Then it would pass, and I'd lie flat on the plank floor staring at the water stains on the ceiling until my breathing evened out.

Lira stayed with me through every crest of it. She didn't whimper. She didn't hide. She paced.

By the third morning, I noticed something.

I was chewing a strip of dried jerky I'd found buried in the pantry, and my senses — hearing, smell, the tension in my shoulders that read the woods — were sharper than they had been in three years. I could pick out a squirrel two ridges over. I could smell the pine sap warming on the south wall. Lira felt bigger inside my ribs, like a room I'd never known was there had opened a door.

"Lira," I said out loud. My voice cracked from disuse. "Why are you getting stronger?"

She was quiet for a long moment. When she answered, her voice was careful, feeling for the words.

*Something inside you was always held back,* she said. *Something is changing.*

My hand went to the pendant at my collarbone without thinking. The moonstone was cool, faintly humming under my fingertip in a way I'd stopped noticing years ago. I looked down at it.

For the first time since I'd left Ironveil, I felt something like fear.

---

Marta came on the fourth day.

She was one of the pack Omegas — a broad, gray-haired kitchen wolf who'd worked beside me every morning for three years and had once, quietly, slipped a heel of bread into my apron when Laura ordered my rations cut. I heard her boots on the gravel outside before I heard her voice, and I opened the door with my hunting knife tucked behind my back.

She saw the knife. She didn't flinch.

"Thought you might be hungry, girl."

She set a canvas sack on the floor. Bread, hard cheese, dried apples. My throat tightened, but I didn't cry. I'd stopped doing that four nights ago.

"You shouldn't have come," I said. "Laura will—"

"Laura's got bigger problems." Marta lowered herself onto the crate by the door with a grunt. "Rogues took the whole eastern storehouse. Grain, salt meat, half the healer's stock of yarrow. Kylee stood in the war room this morning and told the warriors your border work was 'overcomplicated.'" She snorted. "Two of the boys almost laughed in her face."

I sat down slowly across from her.

"The Alpha sent Roan out to find you," she went on. "He was gone a day and a night. Came back with nothing. Whatever that bond did when it broke, he can't smell you at all now." She looked at me carefully. "Nobody can."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I said, "Thank you, Marta."

Her eyes drifted down. Just for a second. To the pendant at my throat.

I didn't catch it in the moment. I only remembered it later.

---

She was gone by dusk. I ate half the bread and slept for the first time in three days.

I woke to the sound of something breathing outside my door.

By the time I got the knife up, a hand was already around my wrist, and another was at my throat — not to choke me. To *pull*. I felt the chain snap before I understood what had happened. Cold air rushed against my collarbone where the moonstone had been.

I threw an elbow. Whoever it was — hooded, faster than me, and reeking of unfamiliar musk — was already three strides into the trees.

I ran to the doorway. Nothing. Just the wind moving in the pines.

My hand came up to my chest and closed on empty skin.

"No," I whispered. "No, no, no—"

Lira was howling inside me. Not in grief. In something that felt almost like *recognition*.

---

The messenger wolf came at dawn.

It was scrawny and mangy, one ear notched, and it dropped a small waterproof pouch at my feet with the practiced disdain of a creature paid in scraps. Then it turned and vanished back into the trees before I could speak.

Inside the pouch was a folded scrap of paper and a cheap prepaid phone with a single video queued on the screen.

The note was in Declan's handwriting. Six words.

*You have nothing left of mine.*

My thumb hovered over the play button. Something under my ribs went very, very still.

Then I pressed play.