After My Alpha Rejected Me for the Lycan Throne

I didn't sleep that night.

Jett came to bed after midnight. He kissed my forehead like nothing had happened, laid his hand flat against my belly, and fell asleep with the easy breathing of a man who had won something. I lay there in the dark counting his exhales, keeping my emotions flat behind a wall I had built years ago without knowing it was a wall. My wolf paced somewhere far below. Awake now. Furious. Watching.

I waited until the sky turned gray. Then I went downstairs and made Teagan breakfast like it was any other morning.

"Drive safe," I told her at the door, loud enough for Margaret to hear from the sitting room. I hugged her. Pressed my mouth close to her ear. "Route 9. Come back through the north pass tonight. I'll leave the mudroom door unlocked."

She squeezed my hand once and was gone.

---

Teagan told me later how it went. I want to tell it the way she told it, because I wasn't there — but I was. Through the bond I keep with my sister that no Alpha ever put on paper, I was there in every silence.

She drove twenty miles past the Ironmaw border before she pulled into the gravel lot of the diner off Route 9. She texted Stella from the parking lot. *I need you. Diner. The one off Route 9. Don't come through Ironmaw roads.*

Stella was there in forty minutes.

They took the corner booth. Vinyl seats cracked at the edges, coffee that tasted like it had been on the burner since dawn. Teagan wrapped both hands around the mug and started talking.

The wolfsbane in the tea. The stairs — not yet, but the pattern of it, the way Margaret's hand rested on my shoulder like she was already deciding. The command that dropped me to my knees on the kitchen tile. The claw-ring Margaret wore on her right hand, the one that still carried our father's scent if you got close enough to know what you were smelling for.

Stella didn't interrupt. She held her coffee and let her face do nothing, which Teagan said was the first time she'd ever seen Stella hold that much still.

When Teagan finished, she asked her question carefully. Casually. The way you ask when you already know.

"That guy you've been seeing. The unmated Alpha. Can I see him again?"

Stella blinked. "Sure." She pulled out her phone. Scrolled. Turned the screen around.

Teagan said her stomach dropped so fast she thought she might be sick right there in the booth.

Jett. In a soft gray sweater she'd never seen him wear at home. Smiling the smile he used at pack summits — the warm one, the one that made people trust him. His arm around Stella's shoulders. A little coffee shop somewhere neither of them lived.

Teagan set the phone down very gently on the table.

"Stella," she said. "That's my sister's mate."

Stella didn't move.

"He has a mating mark on his neck under that collar," Teagan said. "Cassidy put it there seven years ago. He's the Alpha of the Ironmaw Pack. He's the one who did all of it."

I felt it through my sister then — the moment the room tilted for Stella. Shock first, a clean flat wave of it. Then something dirtier underneath: the disgust of a woman realizing her own softness had been someone else's tool. Her hand went to her throat like she was checking for a mark that wasn't there.

And then something else moved across her face. Something I would come to know very well over the next months. It settled into her mouth and her eyes and the line of her shoulders, and it did not shake.

"He doesn't know who I am," Stella said quietly. "And that is the last advantage he will ever have over us."

Teagan waited.

Stella set her phone facedown. Slid her hand into her jacket pocket. Brought out a small silver case, the size of a compact, and set it on the table between them.

"These are scent suppressants," she said. "Court issue. I've been on them for four years."

"Court," Teagan said.

"Silvercrest." Stella held her eyes. "My father is Aldric."

Teagan didn't speak.

"Lycan King Aldric," Stella said. "I'm his youngest. I left court six years ago and I've been living quiet ever since. Nobody in Ironmaw knows. Jett doesn't know. He thinks I'm a civilian she-wolf with a rich uncle and vague royal gossip attached to my name." Her mouth moved — not quite a smile. "He's been very interested in the gossip."

Teagan said her hands started moving before her brain caught up. She pulled a paper napkin toward her. Uncapped the pen the waitress had left. And without looking down, without deciding to, she began to draw.

An outline. A border. A shape of unclaimed land north of Ironmaw that didn't exist yet but could be made to.

Stella watched her draw.

"Council jurisdiction over pack-level crimes," Stella said softly. "Alpha-bloodline forensic recognition on physical trophies. Tribunal authority that outranks every Alpha within four hundred miles." She tapped the napkin once. "He wants a crown, Teagan. Let's build him one."

Teagan's pen didn't stop.

When she finally looked up, the trap was already on the napkin. Rough. Ugly. Perfect.

She folded it in quarters. Slid it into her pocket.

"I have to call my sister," she said.