After My Alpha Replaced Me With His Pregnant Mistress

The ground turned to scrubland an hour past the Shadowridge border. Loose gravel. Dry grass. No trees. Nothing to hide behind if someone came after me.

No one did.

I walked until my legs stopped shaking. Then I walked farther. The dead mark on my neck had stopped bleeding, but the skin around it felt wrong. Cold. Like frostbite that wouldn't warm. I pressed my palm against it without thinking, and the touch sent a spike of nausea through my chest.

Inside my head, my wolf howled.

She wasn't calm. She wasn't peaceful. She was raw and disoriented, oscillating between grief so deep I couldn't breathe and a fury that made my hands shake. She had no words—just emotion, primal and unfiltered. She'd been dormant my entire life, and her first conscious experience was rejection. The severing of a bond she'd never chosen.

I made myself pull my hand away from the scar. My fingers came back sticky. Not blood. Something else. Lymph, maybe. The wound was trying to close over nothing.

*Keep moving.*

I turned north. Three years of mapping rogue patrol routes in secret—work Myles took credit for in every strategy meeting—had taught me where the unclaimed corridors were. The strip of land between Shadowridge and the Lycan border was too narrow for rogues to camp and too exposed for pack patrols to bother with. No one would follow me here tonight.

No one wanted to.

I dropped to my knees in the dark. The gravel bit into my skin through the thin dress. I couldn't stand anymore. My legs wouldn't hold me. I pressed both palms flat against the ground and tried to breathe.

The bond was silent now. Not the silence of peace. The silence of absence. A missing limb. A door that used to be there and wasn't anymore.

My wolf snarled inside my skull. She wanted to go back. She wanted to rip Ariyah's throat out and make Myles watch. She wanted blood.

I didn't stop her rage. I let it wash through me, hot and vicious, until it burned itself out and left only exhaustion.

Then I stood. My knees locked. My spine straightened.

I started walking north again.

---

The Lycan convoy found me before dawn.

I heard the engines first. Low. Powerful. Not the rusted trucks Shadowridge used for border patrol. These were military-grade vehicles, heavy enough to shake the ground. I turned and saw headlights cutting through the pre-dawn gray.

I should have run. I should have shifted and disappeared into the scrubland. But my wolf was too unstable, and my body was too tired. I stood in the middle of the dirt road and waited.

The lead vehicle stopped twenty feet away. The door opened.

A man stepped out.

He was tall. Broad-shouldered. His hair was dark with streaks of silver, and his eyes—golden, unmistakably Lycan—locked onto me with an intensity that made my wolf go still.

He didn't approach immediately. He stood beside the vehicle and breathed in. Once. Deeply.

Then his face changed.

His expression cracked open. His eyes flooded. He took one step forward, then stopped himself, his hands flexing at his sides like he was physically restraining himself from moving.

Behind him, a line of Lycan guards in formal black uniforms stood at attention. None of them spoke.

The man's voice came out rough. Broken. "I know your scent."

I stared at him. My throat was too tight to answer.

He reached into his breast pocket with a trembling hand and pulled out something small. Wooden. He held it out toward me, and I saw it clearly in the growing light.

A hand-carved wolf toy. Old. Worn smooth at the edges.

"You are my daughter," he said.

My wolf went completely silent.

The man's voice strengthened, and when he spoke again, it carried a resonance that made every guard behind him drop their gaze. "I name you before my Guard as Princess Luciana of the Ashford line."

I looked at the toy in his hand. I looked at his face. I saw grief there. Twenty years of it, carved into every line.

I didn't embrace him. I couldn't. I was too hollowed out. Too broken. But when he stepped forward and draped a heavy royal cloak around my shoulders, I didn't pull away.

I let him.

---

The Lycan Court was nothing like Shadowridge.

The halls were wide and clean. The stone was polished. The wolves who passed me in the corridors didn't sneer or whisper. They bowed.

I hated it.

Dominic—I couldn't call him Father yet—installed me in the royal wing. A suite of rooms with windows that overlooked a forest I didn't recognize. He assigned me a healer. Evelyn Drake. She was older, sharp-eyed, and didn't waste time with pleasantries.

"Lie down," she said on the first day. "This is going to hurt."

She wasn't lying.

The wolfsbane purge took three days. Evelyn used a combination of herbal tinctures, forced shifts, and something she called "blood-cleansing" that felt like fire in my veins. My wolf thrashed through every session, and I had to grip the edges of the bed to keep from screaming.

But it worked.

On the third day, I woke up and smelled something new. Not the bitter tang of poison. Something floral. Sweet. Evelyn leaned over me and inhaled, then nodded.

"There it is," she said quietly. "White honeysuckle and winter pine."

I sat up slowly. My head swam, but the fog that had lived in my skull for three years was gone.

Evelyn sat on the edge of the bed and met my eyes. "The dosing wasn't accidental, Luciana. It was systematic. Years of it. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing. They kept your wolf dormant on purpose."

I already knew. I'd known since the rejection night, when my wolf exploded into existence the moment the bond broke and Ariyah's poison finally cleared my system.

But hearing it confirmed—documented—made it real.

"I need you to write it down," I said. My voice came out steady. Cold. "Every finding. Full medical record. Dated and sealed with the Court's authority."

Evelyn studied me for a long moment. Then she nodded.

"I'll have it ready by tonight," she said.

I lay back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling. My wolf was quiet now. Not peaceful. But focused.

Waiting.