After My Alpha Rejected His Wolfless Luna Before Everyone

I learned the next part later, from Dominic's Beta and a very quiet healer.

Word of my petition reached Ironridge in two days. Lola heard it first, through the pack link, in the middle of a manicure.

She did not scream. She did not throw anything. She went white, then she went to work.

By noon she was in the Council's intake office, wearing a pale blue dress and a smear of concealer on her wrist that looked a lot like a bruise. She sat on the edge of the chair like it might bite her.

"I didn't want to come," she told the investigators. Her voice was high and breathy. "But I'm so scared. Elisa came at me in the pack house. She grabbed my throat. She said if I ever stood beside Wyatt again, she'd *end* me."

Then she tipped her head and bared her neck. A tiny whimper slipped out, right on time.

The scent rolled across the room. Soft, warm, helpless. Two young attendants leaned toward her without knowing it. One of them offered her a tissue.

In the corner, a gray-braided woman in a healer's coat lowered her pen.

Clara Thorne had been sniffing out liars for forty years. She watched Lola's throat work and drew one slow breath through her nose. Then another.

Fear smells ragged. It has sour edges and sweat in it. Lola's fear had no edges at all. It was smooth as a store-bought cake, and every layer sat exactly where it should.

"Nobody's panic is that tidy," Clara murmured. She wrote three words on the intake form and underlined them twice.

*Full scent analysis.*

---

The next morning, Dominic found me in the hall, bent over the ledgers.

"Two Ironridge warriors came to the border at dawn," he said.

My pen stopped. "Who?"

"Senior Deltas. They carried a written demand." He set half a sheet of paper on the table. Then the other half. The tear ran straight through Wyatt's signature. "It claims you are a pack member under outstanding bond obligations. It requests your immediate return."

"And you said?"

"I read it to them first. Out loud." His voice stayed level. "Then I told them Elisa Bennett is a petitioner under the Luna Accord. Any further contact is interference with a Council proceeding. The penalty for that is not a fine."

"Did they argue?"

"One opened his mouth. The other pulled him back." A pause. "They left quickly."

I looked at the torn paper. *Outstanding bond obligations.* Twenty-three years, and he had boiled me down to a debt.

I waited for the shake in my hands. It didn't come.

"Has the tribunal date been confirmed?" I asked.

Dominic studied me. Something moved behind his eyes. It looked a lot like respect.

"It has."

"Then we're done talking about Wyatt." I pushed the halves aside and picked up my pen.

He tilted his head, just slightly, and bared his throat for half a breath. I pretended not to notice. My ribs noticed.

---

The preliminary hearing was held in a round chamber of dark wood, with seven Council members seated above me in a curved bench. No one smiled. I stood alone at the lectern, and Dominic stood beside me, not a step ahead.

I laid it out piece by piece, the way I'd once laid out grain tallies.

The forged requisition orders, each stamped with my seal. The structural analysis of the stronghold: hollow panels, iron rods, no wolfsbane core, no silver in the footings. Mia's cramped copies of the second ledger, set side by side with the typed budget. And the brass registry plate, Lola's scent-key still faintly sweet inside it, Wyatt's signature on the authorization.

"The den cost four hundred thousand dollars," I said. "The stronghold should have held three hundred wolves. It would have buried them."

A councilman with a heavy jaw flipped a page. Then another. His jaw tightened.

No one asked me to repeat anything. No one coughed.

"Prince Dominic," the chair said at last. "Do you stand with this petition?"

"I second it." Calm. Final. "On record."

The gavel fell once.

"The full tribunal is set. Nine days from now, in the great hall of Ashford."

That was it. Nine days. I thanked them. My voice came out steady. I walked out through the tall doors, into the long stone corridor, and I got maybe six steps.

The heat hit me at the base of my spine.

It was not warmth. It was a furnace door ripped open. It shot up my back, through every nerve, into my skull, and my vision went white at the edges.

"No," I whispered. My palm slapped the wall. "Not now."

Something in my back *cracked*.

I heard it. The whole corridor heard it. A wet, bright snap, like a branch under a boot, and then another along my shoulder, and my knees gave out and I slid down the stone.

Behind me, a door banged. Boots. "Elisa!"

I couldn't answer. My mouth was full of the taste of metal. The dead mark on my neck burned so cold it felt like fire.

Twenty-eight years of silence. Twenty-eight years of being told there was nothing in me, that I was a hollow shell with good handwriting.

And now, under my ribs, something that had been turning over in the dark finally lifted its head.

It did not whisper.

It *roared*.