After My Alpha Poisoned Me at Our Alliance Banquet

I planned every inch of the banquet hall. The white roses on the head table. The Blackridge crest stitched into the runner. The seating chart that took me three weeks of phone calls to balance. I even chose the wine.

No one mentioned my name in the welcome speech.

I stood at the edge of the room with a clipboard I didn't need, watching Jackson Sanders lounge at the Alpha's seat like the throne had grown around him. My fated mate. The man I had run this pack for since we were eighteen years old. Silverfang's Alpha on paper. Mine, by the Moon Goddess, in a way I had stopped saying out loud.

Josie Jensen was draped against his shoulder. She wore red. Of course she did.

"Olivia." My wolf's voice in my head was thin and tight. Her name was Nira. She had been quiet for years, tucked behind my ribs like a folded letter. Tonight she was awake and uneasy. "He smells like her."

I knew. Cedar smoke and rain, that scent that should have only been mine, was tangled with something sweeter. Vanilla. Cheap perfume sprayed directly onto his collar. Josie tilted her chin against his jacket and rubbed slow, like a cat. Scent-marking. In front of two packs. In front of me.

My wolf whimpered.

That was the part I hated most. Not the public ownership. Not the smirk Josie sent me over the rim of her glass. The way my body still leaned half a step toward him, like a plant toward light. Fifteen years of guilt and a mate bond will do that. Train you to call a leash a love story.

"Lady Hughes."

Derek Hale's voice. Jackson's Beta, his shadow, his hand when Jackson didn't want to dirty his own. He glided up with three of the inner circle behind him and a ceremonial goblet in his palm. Silver. Heavy. Steam curling at the rim like the drink had been warmed.

"A toast," Derek said. His smile was practiced. "For the woman who built this alliance. From the Alpha, with gratitude."

The wolves around him laughed in that low, knowing way that men laugh when the joke is a knife.

I took the goblet. Polite. Automatic. My fingers wrapped around the stem, and Nira slammed against the inside of my chest.

"WOLFSBANE."

The smell hit me a second behind her warning. Bitter, sharp, hidden under mulled spice and honey. The kind of dose you put in a drink for a wolf you don't want walking out of the room.

My throat closed. I lifted my eyes across the hall.

Jackson was already looking at me.

He didn't blink. He didn't frown. He lifted his own glass an inch and tipped his head, that small, lazy gesture I had watched him use a thousand times to tell warriors to fall in line.

"Drink up, Olivia."

The Alpha tone wasn't even loud. It didn't need to be. It rolled across the floor and settled in the base of my spine like a hand pressing down. The whole hall went quiet around it. Every Silverfang head bowed half an inch on instinct.

Mine should have. Mine almost did.

Fifteen years. Four graves. A boy I had carried on my back since we were ten. A Moon Goddess who had stitched our names together and then left me to wear that thread like a noose.

Refuse him here, in front of Blackridge, and the alliance I had bled for would crack. Refuse him, and every wolf in this room would whisper that the Luna who wasn't a Luna had finally lost her mind.

Nira was screaming. "Don't. Olivia, don't, don't, don't —"

I drank.

The first swallow was warm. The second was fire.

It hit my chest like someone had lit a match inside my lungs. The goblet slipped. I heard it ring against the floor before I felt my knees go. Nira's howl tore up my throat raw, all teeth and no air, and I was on the polished marble before anyone moved.

My spine arched. My hands curled in on themselves. Somewhere very far away a woman in Blackridge colors was screaming. A glass shattered. Chairs scraped. I tasted copper and ash.

Nira lunged for the mind-link. Wide open. Bare. I felt her throw herself against the bond like a wolf against a locked door.

*Jackson. Jackson, please. Please, mate, please —*

The link was open. He heard her. I felt him hear her.

Nothing came back.

Not a word. Not a flinch. Not the smallest tug of his end of the bond reaching for mine. Just the cold, polite hum of a man who had decided, somewhere between the appetizer and the toast, that he could live with this.

The last thing I saw before the dark closed was Josie's red sleeve sliding into his lap.

—

I woke up to the smell of antiseptic and lavender oil.

Miriam Cole's clinic. White ceiling. Soft yellow lamp. An IV taped to the back of my hand and a charcoal patch over my heart. Miriam herself was at the counter writing something in her ledger, the slow scratch of a pen the only sound. She didn't turn when I stirred. She just said, quietly, "Don't sit up yet, sweetheart."

I sat up anyway. My wolf was a small, shaking thing curled at the bottom of me. Half-dormant. Hurt in a way I had never felt her hurt before. When I reached for her she flinched.

The glass partition between the recovery room and the hallway was frosted at the bottom and clear at the top. Through it I could see two figures standing close.

Jackson. In a fresh shirt. He had changed.

And Josie, tucked under his arm with her face pressed into his chest, shoulders shaking in that delicate, photogenic way she had perfected.

"—made such a scene," she was saying, voice trembling just enough to carry. "In front of Blackridge, Jack. In front of everyone. I was so embarrassed for her —"

"I know, baby." His hand stroked her hair. "I know. It's handled."

He didn't look toward the glass. Not once.

I waited for it to hurt.

It didn't.

Something inside my chest — the warm, stupid, fifteen-year-old thing that had lit up every time I heard his footsteps in the hall — simply went out. Like a pilot light in an empty house. No grief. No fight. Just a small, clean click, and then cold.

"Nira," I whispered.

"I'm here," she said, hoarse. "I'm here."

"We're done."

She didn't argue.

—

Grayson Oliver came the next morning.

I knew his name before he gave it. Lycan Elder. Silver at the temples, dark coat folded over one arm, the kind of stillness that made the room arrange itself around him. He had been at the negotiating table all week, sitting two seats down from Jackson, watching everything and saying very little.

He didn't ask how I felt. He didn't sit.

"Miss Hughes." His voice was even. Unhurried. "In four days at Silverfang I have watched you run three alliance sessions, redraft a treaty clause your Alpha could not read, and drill warriors twice your weight. I have also watched your pack let you be poisoned at your own banquet."

My throat was still raw. I didn't try to answer.

"That is not a verdict on you," he said. "That is a verdict on them."

He set a thick cream-colored envelope on the bedside table. The Lycan crest was pressed into the wax in deep silver.

"The Royal Guard takes a new training class in Blackwood in six weeks," he said. "I do not extend this twice."

He inclined his head, just slightly. Then he left.

I stared at the envelope for a long time. Outside the glass, Jackson's laugh drifted down the hall, low and easy, like nothing in the world had broken.

My hand closed over the wax seal.

Nira lifted her head.