After My Mate Betrayed Me, I Took Back the Pack

The mark on my neck had been aching for three weeks. A dull burn, low and constant, like a coal someone forgot to put out. I told myself it was stress. Five years of running Ironveil while my body quietly failed me had taught me to explain away every ache as something manageable, something that could wait.

Tonight I almost believed it. I sat at my vanity in the dress I'd bought for our anniversary—deep green, the color Ashton once said reminded him of the woods around the pack house—and pressed two fingers to the mark without noticing I'd done it. Five years since he'd bitten down and sealed us together. Five years since I'd bled for him in ways he never had to know about.

My phone lit up on the table. Unknown number.

I almost ignored it. Then I saw the first image load—a hotel receipt, timestamped, a name I didn't recognize beside Ashton's. Then another. Then a photograph, grainy but unmistakable, my mate's hand curved along a woman's bare hip in a bed that wasn't ours. Then a scent. A folded blouse had come with the message, delivered to the pack house door that morning and set aside by staff as some forgotten package. I hadn't opened it. Now I understood why my stomach had turned every time I walked past it in the hall.

I counted forty-one entries before I stopped counting. Milani Johnston had itemized my marriage like a grocery list.

I called Ashton home.

He walked into our bedroom already knowing why, I think, because he didn't ask. He looked at the phone in my hand, at the evidence spread across the bed where I'd laid it out with the same forensic calm I used on pack financial audits, and he didn't flinch.

"You're not even going to deny it," I said.

"No." He said it simply, like agreeing to a meeting time. "Milani is my true mate, Ivy. I know how that sounds. I know what it costs to say it. But the Goddess made a mistake with us, and she corrected it."

"A mistake." My voice didn't rise. It never rises when it matters most. "Five years of a mistake, Ashton?"

"I didn't choose the timing." He rubbed the back of his neck, the same gesture he'd made a hundred times when he was hedging in pack meetings, trying to sound certain about things he wasn't. "I think—I think we could make this work. Modern packs do it differently now. Milani could come into the house. Co-Luna, maybe. You'd keep your position. Nothing has to end."

"You want me to share a title with the woman who sent me a spreadsheet of your affair."

"I'm not rejecting you." He said this like a gift. "You should be grateful for that, at least."

Something in my chest went very still and very cold. I looked at him—really looked, the way I used to look at contracts before I signed my name to something that would cost me everything.

"Do you remember who paid for your life?" I asked. "Do you remember whose blood bought you out of Salazar's territory?"

His jaw tightened. For one second I saw something that might have been shame, and then it was gone, sealed over. "That debt is settled. It's ancient history. Don't bring it into this like I owe you my whole life because of one bad decision five years ago."

I didn't answer him. There was nothing left to say to a man who'd already decided the story he was living in. I picked up my coat and left him standing in our bedroom surrounded by the evidence of everything he'd taken from me.

I went looking for Kohen.

The Luna suite door was open when I passed it, and I stopped because nothing in it was mine anymore. The blue curtains I'd chosen were gone, replaced with something cream and floral. My mother's quilt, folded at the foot of the bed for four years, had vanished. Every object I'd touched had been erased and replaced within—what, days? Hours?

I found Kohen in the living room, laughing at something Milani was saying to him, her hand resting easy on his small shoulder like she'd earned the right to it.

"Mommy!" he shouted—and ran to her, not me.

I knelt anyway, reached for him on instinct, the way I always had. He turned on me with a snarl I didn't recognize on my own son's face and bit down on my hand hard enough to draw blood.

I didn't cry out. I just knelt there, blood welling between my fingers, staring at the boy I'd carried and marked and loved past reason.

Mrs. Ford stood in the doorway, arms folded, watching with the composed satisfaction of a woman finally getting her house back in order.

"You were never worthy of the Luna title," she said, gentle as a weather report.