After My Mate Poisoned Me for Another Woman

The borderlands smelled like wet earth and pine resin and freedom.

I'd built my lab here six years ago, before the marriage, before the Greystone Pack, before I became the wolfless Luna everyone pitied. The entrance was a rusted cellar door hidden beneath a collapsed oak, and the lab itself was carved into the hillside like a secret the forest was keeping for me.

I lit the lanterns with shaking hands.

The residue I'd collected from the bathroom floor—I know, I know, but I wasn't wasting evidence—went under the portable spectrometer first. The readout confirmed what my nose had already told me the moment the liquid hit my tongue.

High-grade Wolfsbane. Aconitine concentration at 0.4 milligrams per milliliter. Sustained dosage. Chronic suppression protocol.

Three years.

I set the readout down very carefully, the way you set down something fragile when what you actually want to do is throw it through a wall.

The Purgative Draught took me forty minutes to brew. It's not a pleasant formula—I designed it years ago as a theoretical antidote, never imagining I'd be the one drinking it. It smells like burnt copper and black pepper, and it works by triggering a full-system purge that makes the Wolfsbane expulsion look gentle by comparison.

I drank it in one go, sat down on the stone floor, and waited.

What followed was the worst hour of my life, and I've had some genuinely terrible hours.

But when it was over—when I was hollow and wrung out and shivering against the cold wall of my own lab—I felt it.

Deep in my chest. Below my ribs. A flicker of heat, small and furious, like an ember that had been buried under ash for so long it had forgotten it was fire.

My wolf.

She didn't speak. She was too weak for that, too disoriented from years of chemical sleep. But she was there. She was alive. And the rage coming off her was so pure and so ancient that it made my eyes sting.

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum.

"I know," I whispered. "I'm going to fix it."

I gave myself twenty minutes to recover. Then I opened my encrypted comm channel.

Elena picked up on the second ping, which meant she was already awake, which meant she'd heard something was happening in Greystone territory. Rogues always had better intelligence networks than pack wolves gave them credit for.

"Nyx." Her voice was flat and careful, the way it always was on open channels. "It's late."

"I need a deep-dive," I said. "Subject: Kehlani Thomas. Everything before she appeared at Greystone, roughly four years ago. I specifically need any connection to the Silver-Moon Pack."

A pause. "That's your birth pack."

"Yes."

Another pause, longer. "This is personal."

"Everything I do is professional," I said. "The rate is double. I need it fast."

Elena exhaled. "Two weeks."

"One."

"Fine. But Nyx—" She hesitated, which was unusual for her. "Be careful. Whatever you're walking into, be careful."

I closed the channel without answering.

---

The monthly Pack Run happened three days later, under a sky the color of a bruise.

I stood on the upper balcony of the pack house in my usual position—the wolfless Luna, watching from above, too broken to participate. I'd worn the role so long it fit like a second skin. I kept my expression soft and distant, the look of a woman who had made peace with her limitations.

Below me, the pack shed their human forms and flooded the tree line in a wave of grey and brown fur.

Trenton shifted last, the way Alphas always did. His wolf was massive, black as coal, and the pack instinctively gave him space. He was beautiful in the way that dangerous things are beautiful—all power and no warmth.

Kehlani stood at the edge of the lawn in her human form, too fragile to run, apparently. She wore white, because of course she did. She pressed her hand to Trenton's flank as he passed, and he paused, turned his great head toward her, and the tenderness in that gesture made something cold settle in my stomach.

Then the wind shifted.

It carried her scent up to the balcony, and my nose did what it always does—it took the scent apart, layer by layer, the way a jeweler examines a stone under magnification.

Top notes: Wild orchid. Rain-washed cedar. The exact signature of Tears of Selene.

My Tears of Selene.

My formula. My years of work. My masterpiece, worn on another woman's skin to steal another woman's husband.

But beneath the top notes, where most wolves would never think to look—

Sulfur. Synthetic musk. The unmistakable chemical signature of a formula in decay, breaking down at the molecular level because whoever had replicated it hadn't understood the stabilizing compound that kept the base notes from oxidizing.

She was wearing a copy. A degrading copy.

And underneath even that, something else. Something that had nothing to do with perfume.

I leaned forward slightly, pulling the scent deeper.

Aconitine. Trace amounts. And something else—a compound I recognized from my own research files. A slow-acting cellular suppressant, the kind that mimicked the symptoms of Fading Wolf Syndrome with remarkable accuracy.

Kehlani Thomas wasn't dying.

She was poisoning herself.

I straightened up and looked down at her—this small, white-dressed woman clinging to my husband's wolf with her borrowed scent and her manufactured tragedy—and felt something shift inside me.

Not rage. Not yet.

Something colder. More precise.

The ember in my chest pulsed once, hot and deliberate.

I finally knew exactly what I was dealing with.