After My Alpha Slept with His Former Mate

I was still sitting up against the pillows, fork in hand, when I heard the soft thud from the hallway.

Muffin had gotten out of his carrier.

I started to push back the covers, but Joaquin was already on his feet, moving toward the door with that unhurried ease that seemed to be his natural state. I heard the small click of claws on hardwood, and then silence.

When I finally made it to the doorway, wrapped in the blanket Joaquin had left folded at the foot of the bed, I stopped.

Muffin was in Joaquin's lap.

Not creeping toward him. Not sniffing cautiously from a distance. Fully, completely in his lap, curled into a tight circle, his eyes already half-closed. Joaquin sat in the reading chair by the window, one large hand resting lightly on Muffin's back, stroking him with the same unhurried patience he seemed to apply to everything.

I stared.

Muffin was terrified of high-ranking wolves. Always had been. He'd spent three weeks in Hunter's quarters pressing himself into corners, flinching at footsteps, never once approaching Hunter voluntarily. I'd told myself it was just his omega nature. That he'd warm up eventually.

He hadn't. Not once.

But here he was, purring loud enough that I could hear it from the doorway.

'He just jumped up,' Joaquin said, without looking at me. 'Didn't ask permission.'

'He never does that,' I said.

'Maybe he knows something you don't yet.' He glanced up then, and the amber of his eyes caught the afternoon light. 'Come sit down before you fall down. You're still running warm.'

I sat on the couch across from him, pulling the blanket tighter. Muffin cracked one eye open, registered my presence, and went back to sleep. Traitor. Absolute traitor.

But watching Joaquin's hand move slowly across his fur, I felt something loosen in my chest. Something I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

They were safe here. Both of us.

---

Across town, I didn't know any of this yet. I only pieced it together later, from Declan's messages and the gaps between what Hunter eventually admitted.

The morning briefing had apparently been a disaster.

Declan had tried to run the warrior rotation the way I'd structured it — the color-coded schedule, the injury log cross-referenced with patrol assignments, the backup contact chain for border incidents. He'd managed about twenty minutes before the whole thing unraveled. Two warriors showed up to the wrong quadrant. The eastern patrol overlap I'd flagged three weeks ago went unaddressed. Someone filed a supply request in the wrong format and it got lost entirely.

Hunter had stood at the head of the briefing room and felt the absence like a missing tooth — not painful yet, just wrong. The shape of something that should have been there.

He'd tried to mind-link me.

I felt it, distantly, like a knock on a door I'd already locked. I didn't answer. I'd blocked the channel before I'd even reached the rental house, some instinct for self-preservation finally overriding years of availability. The silence I sent back must have been its own kind of answer, because Luna stirred in my chest when I felt him try again — and then stop.

I wondered, briefly, what his face had looked like in that moment.

Then Muffin shifted in Joaquin's lap, and I stopped wondering.

---

It was Joaquin who told me about the ledgers, later that evening, when he brought me tea and sat across from me with the careful stillness of someone choosing their words.

'Declan reached out,' he said simply. 'Thought you should know.'

Apparently Adriana had decided that reorganizing the pack house was the fastest route to establishing herself as Luna. She'd moved through the administrative office with the confidence of someone who had never once maintained a filing system, and in the process had thrown out three years of pack financial ledgers I'd kept by hand. Incident logs. Supplier contracts. The breeding records for the pack's working dogs.

Hunter had walked in to find her cheerfully dismantling the infrastructure of his pack and had, for the first time since her return, snapped at her.

I should have felt something about that. Satisfaction, maybe. Or grief.

Instead I just felt tired.

'He tried to link me,' I said.

Joaquin nodded once, unsurprised. 'I know.'

'I didn't answer.'

'I know that too.' He set his mug down and looked at me steadily. 'You don't have to explain yourself to me, Jolie.'

The words landed somewhere quiet and deep. I looked down at my tea, at the small curl of steam rising from the surface, and tried to remember the last time someone had said something like that to me and meant it.

From across the room, Muffin opened both eyes, looked directly at Joaquin, and purred once — loud and deliberate — before closing them again.

Even the cat was trying to tell me something.