After My Mate Chose A Rogue, I Took Back My Crown

I didn't move.

I stood there in the doorway of Riley's private quarters, staring at the scene in front of me—his hand still resting on her waist, the Delta's throat still exposed, the air still thick with that scent—and something inside me finally, irreversibly, broke open.

Not my heart. That had been breaking in slow motion for two years.

My wolf.

She surged up inside me with a force I hadn't felt since the day I first met Riley, and the sound she made was not wounded. It was furious.

'Riley.' My voice came out steady. Too steady. 'What is this?'

He didn't answer right away. He just looked at me with that same flat expression, like I was a problem he was tired of solving.

The Delta stepped back fully now, her eyes darting between us, her scent shifting into something nervous. She knew what she had walked into. She knew who I was.

Riley didn't move.

'It's my birthday,' he said finally, his tone so casual it felt like a slap. 'I can spend it however I want.'

I took a step forward. My hands were shaking. I didn't bother hiding it anymore.

'You told me you needed time.' My voice was trembling now, two years of suppressed pain cracking through every word. 'You told me Anna was struggling. You told me you couldn't—' I stopped. Breathed. Tried again. 'You told me so many things, Riley. And I believed every single one of them.'

'That's not my problem.'

The words landed like a punch.

I stared at him. At the man I had poured everything into. The man I had elevated from Delta to Beta. The man I had baked cakes for at dawn and crossed territory lines for and suppressed my own Luna aura for because he didn't like it when I reminded people of what I was.

The man who was looking at me right now like I was nothing.

'You used me,' I said quietly.

His jaw tightened. 'You offered.'

'I loved you.'

'I didn't ask you to.'

My wolf snarled inside me, and for the first time in two years, I let her.

Riley must have felt it—the shift in my aura, the Luna presence I had been burying for so long suddenly rising to the surface—because his expression changed. Just slightly. Just enough to show me he had forgotten what I actually was.

But then his own aura slammed into me.

Beta dominance, cold and absolute, rolling over me like a wave designed to force submission. He took a step forward, his eyes hard, and growled low in his chest.

'Leave my territory.'

The command hit me in the center of my chest.

I staggered back. Not because his aura was stronger than mine—it wasn't, it never had been—but because the sheer disrespect of it, the casual cruelty of using a Beta tone on his own mate, was so profoundly wrong that my body reacted before my mind could catch up.

My wolf went silent.

Not broken. Not buried.

Awake.

I looked at Riley. I looked at the Delta standing behind him, her eyes wide and guilty and a little bit thrilled. I looked at the chocolate scattered across the floor, the gray-blue ribbon trampled under his boot.

And something inside me—something that had been bending and bending and bending for two years—finally snapped straight.

I didn't say anything.

I just bent down, picked up one of the chocolate squares that hadn't been crushed, and held it in my palm for a moment. It was already melting. I had made it with my own hands. I had driven across territory lines at dawn to bring it to him.

I dropped it back onto the floor.

Then I turned, and I walked out.

I didn't run. I didn't cry. I walked down the stairs, through the pack house, out the door. My wolf was very quiet now—not the patient, suppressed quiet I had trained her into, but the cold, crystalline quiet of something that had just made a decision and would not be talked out of it.

I got into my car and sat there for a long moment, my hands on the wheel.

Then I drove back to the small room I had been staying in on the edge of Silverfang territory—the one I had rented months ago because Riley said it was easier if I stayed close, and I had believed that meant he wanted me nearby.

I packed in silence.

It didn't take long. I hadn't brought much. I had learned early on that Riley didn't like it when I took up too much space.

Then I sat down on the bed and pulled up the mind link.

Riley's presence was there, faint and cold, the bond we had formed two years ago still technically intact even though he had never once honored it.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I deleted it.

The severance was immediate and absolute. I felt it snap like a cord pulled too tight, and the silence that followed was so complete it made my ears ring.

I stood up. Walked through the small room one last time. And then I did something I hadn't done in two years.

I let my Luna aura out.

It rolled through the space like a wave, lifting every trace of my scent from the walls, the furniture, the air itself. When I was done, the room smelled like nothing. Like I had never been there at all.

I picked up my bag, walked out, and locked the door behind me.

Riley's official mate ceremony was scheduled for tonight. The whole pack would be there. He would stand at the center of it all, and Anna would be at his side, and everyone would pretend this was what he had always wanted.

I wouldn't be there to see it.

I got into my car, started the engine, and drove away from Silverfang territory for the last time.

I didn't look back.