After My Mate Claimed His Mistress, I Planned My Revenge

They moved me to the Omega recovery room sometime before dawn. I know because the window faced east, and when I finally opened my eyes, the sky was the color of a bruise healing wrong—purple fading into something sickly and pale.

The cot was narrow. The blanket smelled like pack laundry soap and nothing else. No cedarwood. No rain.

I lay there and pressed two fingers to the inside of my wrist. Felt my own pulse. Steady. Still here.

The pup was not.

I didn't cry. My wolf was too quiet for crying. She sat somewhere deep inside me, very still, the way she'd gone still in that corridor when the jasmine-and-ash hit the air. Not broken. Watching.

So I watched too.

Cayson came to check on me that first morning. He stood in the doorway for a moment before he came in, like he wasn't sure he had the right. His hands were clean now. No trace of what they'd held the night before. But his eyes carried it.

"Luna," he said quietly.

"Cayson." I kept my voice even. "Thank you. For what you did."

His jaw worked. "I didn't—" He stopped. Started again. "I didn't do enough."

"You did everything you could." I meant it. He needed to hear that I meant it. "That's not the same thing as enough. But it's not nothing, either."

He left without saying anything else. But something shifted in his face before he turned away. I filed that too.

I was good at filing things now.

I spent three days in that room. Not because I was too weak to leave—by the second day I could walk the corridor without holding the wall. I stayed because the recovery room had a window that looked directly onto the pack house's main courtyard, and the courtyard was where everything happened.

I watched.

The warriors who'd been in the healing wing corridor that night—Bren, the broad-shouldered Delta who'd been first to respond to Cayson's shout, and two others whose names I was still learning—they crossed the courtyard every morning for training. They never looked up at my window. That was how I knew they knew which window it was.

Petra, the Omega who'd carried the moonflowers, walked past my door twice on the second day. She didn't knock. But she slowed each time, and once I heard her stop completely, just standing in the corridor outside, before her footsteps moved on.

Guilt has a specific texture in a pack. It's not loud. It's the averted eye. The conversation that stops a beat too early when you enter a room. The way a wolf's body angles away from you even when their face is turned toward you.

They'd all been there. Jackson's Alpha tone had locked their bodies in place, but it hadn't touched their consciences. And consciences, I had learned, were patient things. They waited.

I filed every face. Every flinch. Every hesitation.

On the fourth day, I walked out of the recovery room.

I didn't go to the Luna suite. I already knew what I'd find there. Jaylani's jasmine-and-ash scent soaked into my pillows, my curtains, the cedar-lined closet where I'd kept the mating ceremony shawl my mother had given me. I didn't need to see it to know. My wolf had already catalogued the loss.

I went to the pack dining hall instead.

Jackson was there.

He stood at the head of the long table, not eating, just present—the way Alphas are present when they want the room to feel their authority. Jaylani sat three seats down. Not at his right hand. Not yet. But close enough that his body was angled toward her, one shoulder turned in her direction, a posture so instinctive he probably didn't know he was doing it.

Possessive. Unmistakable.

He didn't introduce her as anything. He didn't have to. The positioning said everything pack law didn't yet allow him to say out loud.

I took a seat near the far end of the table. A few wolves shifted uncomfortably. No one spoke to me directly. I picked up a piece of bread and ate it slowly and watched Jackson's face while he talked.

He was good at this. I'd always known that. The easy authority, the measured warmth, the way he could make a room feel like it was being held rather than commanded. He spoke about the pack's upcoming harvest exchange with the Pinehaven territory. He spoke about the warrior rotation schedule. And then, with the practiced gravity of a wolf who had rehearsed the moment, he said:

"Silvercrest has faced difficulty this week. Loss. But the Moon Goddess does not give us burdens without purpose. We move forward in unity. In Her grace."

Her grace.

I set down my bread.

My wolf noted it with cold, clinical precision: he invoked the Goddess's name most when he was furthest from Her law. It was a tell. I'd seen it before and not recognized it for what it was. Now I did.

Jaylani's eyes found mine across the table. Just for a moment. Her expression was soft. Carefully, perfectly soft.

I looked back at her without expression and watched her look away first.

That evening, I sent a message through the dead-drop system Silas and I had established three weeks ago—a specific arrangement of stones near the eastern boundary marker that meant *expand the search*. I'd prepared the secondary instruction set before the miscarriage, because I had always known, somewhere in the part of me that hired a rogue tracker instead of confronting my mate, that I would eventually need it.

I needed the bite mark documented. The unsanctioned marking Jackson had put on Jaylani's neck—the one that violated pack law so fundamentally that even the elder council would have no choice but to act once it was proven. I needed it photographed, timestamped, witnessed.

And I needed Jaylani's history confirmed. Every pack she'd passed through. Every Alpha she'd positioned herself near. Every attempt she'd made before Silvercrest.

Silas would go to Ironclaw first. Then Duskhollow. Then Thornfield.

He asked no questions. That was why I'd chosen him.

I walked back to the Omega recovery room—I wasn't ready to claim different quarters yet, not until I was ready to claim everything—and sat on the narrow cot and pressed two fingers to my wrist again.

Still here.

My wolf stirred. Not warm, the way she'd been when I first felt the pup flutter. Something colder. Sharper.

Ready.