After My Mate Poisoned Me for Another Woman

The rain started just as they lowered the former Alpha into the ground.

I stood beside my husband, Alpha Trenton Stone, my head bowed in what everyone assumed was grief. The black veil over my face hid more than tears—it hid the careful blankness I'd perfected over three years of this marriage. Around us, the Greystone Pack mourned their fallen leader with howls that cut through the October wind.

I didn't howl. I couldn't. The wolfless Luna never could.

That's what they whispered, anyway. I caught the words drifting from the cluster of she-wolves near the oak tree: "Such a waste of space." "Poor Alpha Trenton, stuck with a dud." "At least she's pretty to look at."

I'd heard worse. I'd learned to let it slide off me like water off glass.

But Trenton—Trenton wasn't grieving either.

I could feel it in the way his body hummed with energy beside me, a manic vibration that had nothing to do with sorrow. His fingers drummed against his thigh in a rapid, irregular pattern. Every few minutes, he pulled out his pocket watch, checked it, then snapped it shut with a sharp click that made my teeth ache.

His gaze kept drifting toward the guest wing of the pack house, visible through the trees.

Where Kehlani was staying.

Kehlani Thomas. His "fated mate." The fragile she-wolf with her wild orchid and rain scent, the one who was supposedly dying from some rare Fading Wolf Syndrome. The one he visited every night while I slept alone in the Luna's quarters.

The one he loved.

I wasn't supposed to know about her. But I had a gift—one I'd hidden my entire life. My nose could deconstruct any scent down to its molecular components, could track a wolf through a rainstorm three days old, could smell a lie in someone's sweat.

And right now, Trenton reeked of anticipation.

The ceremony ended. Pack members filed past us, offering condolences that Trenton accepted with distracted nods. The moment the last wolf disappeared toward the pack house, he turned to me.

"Go inside, Natasha. I have business to attend to."

His voice carried that edge of dismissal I knew so well. Not quite an Alpha command, but close enough to make most wolves obey without question.

I lowered my eyes. "Of course, Alpha."

He was already walking away before I finished speaking.

I waited until he entered the pack house through the side entrance, then I followed.

The rain had picked up, turning the ground to mud. I moved quietly through the servant's entrance, the one Omega Larson had shown me years ago when I'd first arrived as the new Luna. The old housekeeper had been kind to me in ways no one else had bothered to be.

I climbed the back stairs to the second floor, my wet shoes silent on the carpet. Trenton's private study was at the end of the hall, the door slightly ajar.

I heard his voice before I reached it.

"—increase the dosage in her nightly nutrient shake." A pause. He was on a mind-link call. "We need her womb fertile, but the wolf must remain comatose. Kehlani needs that umbilical blood."

The world tilted.

I pressed my hand against the wall, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I thought it might crack them. The nutrient shakes. The ones he'd insisted I drink every night for three years. The ones that were supposed to help my wolf emerge.

Wolfsbane. He'd been feeding me Wolfsbane.

To keep my wolf in a coma.

To use me as a—

"Marcus, I don't care about the risks to her health. This is about Kehlani's survival. Just do it."

The mind-link ended. I heard him exhale, heard the creak of his chair.

I forced my legs to move. Forced my face into the mask of the obedient Luna. I picked up the tea tray Larson had left on the hall table—he always left one there after pack events—and knocked softly on the study door.

"Come in."

I entered, keeping my eyes down. Trenton sat behind his massive desk, and there—right there in plain view—was an open file.

Project: Broodmare / Subject: Luna Lane.

The words burned into my retinas.

"Your tea, Alpha," I murmured, setting the tray down.

He barely glanced at me. His hand moved to close the file, but not before I saw the medical charts, the dosage schedules, the timeline marked "Optimal Conception Window."

"Drink your vitamin tonic before you go," he said, gesturing to the small bottle on the corner of his desk. "You missed this morning's dose."

I looked at the amber liquid in the bottle. Wolfsbane. Poison.

Three years of poison.

"Of course, Alpha."

I picked up the bottle with steady hands, unscrewed the cap, and drank it down in one swallow. It burned my throat like acid, but I didn't flinch.

Trenton nodded, already turning back to his papers. Dismissed.

I walked out of his study, down the hall, into the nearest bathroom. I locked the door, fell to my knees in front of the toilet, and shoved my fingers down my throat.

The Wolfsbane came up in a bitter, burning rush.

I stayed there on the cold tile floor, shaking, as the truth crystallized in my mind with perfect, terrible clarity.

My marriage wasn't just loveless.

It was a death sentence.