After My Mate Slept with a Rogue, I Ended Us

I didn't sleep.

I sat in my office with the ledger open on my desk—the one I'd kept for ten years, every resource allocation, every pack fund redirected, every connection I'd leveraged on Lukas's behalf—and I read it from the beginning. Not because I needed to. I had the numbers memorized. I read it because I needed to feel the full weight of it before I did what came next.

By six in the morning, I had everything I needed.

Rowan was waiting in the hallway when I came out, his tablet already in hand, his expression the particular kind of neutral that meant he had already heard and was already furious on my behalf and had chosen, professionally, to set that aside. That was why I trusted him.

"Ready?" I asked.

"Whenever you are, Luna."

We went upstairs together.

I heard Lukas before I saw him. He was in the corridor outside the suite, one hand raised to knock, wearing the same clothes from the night before. He turned when he heard our footsteps and something moved across his face—relief, I think. The particular relief of a man who has made a catastrophic mistake and has decided, overnight, that the woman who has always cleaned up after him will do so again.

Ten years of that look. I had mistaken it for trust.

"Gwen." He lowered his hand. "I'm glad you're here. We need to talk—privately." His eyes moved to Rowan and his jaw tightened. "This doesn't need to be a formal matter."

"It already is," I said.

I opened the suite door.

Penny Munoz was sitting on the edge of my bed in one of my robes, eating from a plate of food that had been sent up from the pack kitchen on my account. She looked up when we entered, and for a half second, something calculating moved behind her eyes before she arranged her face into something softer.

She didn't get the chance to use it.

"Get up," I said. "Get dressed. You have ten minutes to remove yourself from this room and this packhouse. Leave the robe."

"Gwen—" Lukas stepped forward.

"Rowan." I didn't look away from Penny. "Start the documentation."

I heard the soft tap of Rowan's stylus as he began cataloguing. The robe. The food charges. The personal items of mine that had been moved or used. Penny stood slowly, her chin lifting, and I watched her make the calculation—whether I was someone she could push back against.

I let my aura settle into the room like a drop in temperature.

She went to get dressed.

Lukas moved to block my path to the closet. Not aggressive—he was too smart for that, with Rowan present—but deliberate. Positioning himself the way he always had when he wanted to manage a conversation.

"You're upset," he said, his voice low and careful. "I understand that. But you're making decisions in the middle of the night that affect both of us, and I think if we just—"

"It's six in the morning," I said. "And I haven't made a single decision I haven't thought through completely."

I stepped around him and opened the closet. His scholar's sash was hanging on the left side, next to the ceremonial items I'd had commissioned for him. I left it there. Rowan would log it.

"Your pack funding is suspended as of this morning," I said. "Your network access has been revoked. Your scholar's stipend, your research allocation, your packhouse privileges—all of it, gone. Rowan is recording the formal transfer now."

The color left his face. "You can't—"

"I can. I did. It was always mine to give, Lukas. Which means it was always mine to take back."

Penny emerged from the bathroom in her own clothes, her expression carefully blank. She moved toward the door without looking at either of us, which was the smartest thing she'd done since I'd met her.

"Leave the key card on the table," I said.

She left it.

Lukas stood in the center of the room—my room, my furniture, my ten years of careful arrangement—and looked at me with something that was trying very hard to be dignity.

"I have nowhere to go," he said.

"That's not my problem anymore."

"Everything I've built here—"

"Was built with my resources." I kept my voice even. "You leave with what you came with. The clothes on your back and whatever you can carry in your hands. Rowan will escort you out."

For a moment he didn't move. I watched him search my face for the version of me that would relent, that would soften, that would find a way to make this easier for him because that was what I had always done.

He didn't find her.

He picked up his jacket from the chair by the window—my chair, my window—and walked out without another word.

Rowan finished his documentation in silence. When he closed the tablet, he looked at me with the same careful neutrality as before, and then he said, quietly, "It's all recorded, Luna. Every line."

"Good," I said.

I stood alone in the suite for a moment after he left. The bed was unmade. The plate was still on the nightstand. The window was open and the cold morning air was coming in, and somewhere below, I could hear the pack beginning its day—voices, footsteps, the ordinary sounds of a world that had kept moving through the night.

I thought about Lukas walking out of this building with nothing.

I thought about how long I had been carrying everything he refused to hold.

Then I stripped the bed, opened the window wider, and called down to the kitchen to cancel the suite's standing food order.

There was work to do.