My Alpha Drugged Our Mate Bond Before Marking Me

The morning after Amber's first Pack Banquet, a senior Omega named Petra came down to the basement with a bucket and a stiff-bristled brush.

"The great hall floor," she said. She would not meet my eyes. "Luna's orders. Hands and knees."

I took the bucket.

The great hall floor was flagstone, wide and cold and still faintly sticky in places from spilled wine. I knelt at the eastern doorway—the doorway I had walked through on my Mate Ceremony night, five years ago, in a dress the color of river ice—and I began to scrub.

The brush was harsh. My knuckles opened again within the first ten minutes. I kept my breathing even and I worked in a grid pattern, west to east, the way I had once organized alliance seating charts. The stone gave up its stains slowly.

As I scrubbed, I counted.

Amber had scent-marked the eastern arch. The base of the dais. The corridor lintel outside the war room. The doorway to the kitchens. The seat cushion of the Luna's chair. The stair railing. The threshold of the pack office. The trophy alcove. Both windowsills flanking the great hearth. And—I paused, sniffed once, controlled—the interior of the coat closet.

Eleven marks. In spaces a truly bonded Luna would have needed to touch once, maybe twice, for the pack's comfort. Eleven was the behavior of a wolf who did not believe her scent would hold.

Older pack members drifted through the hall on their morning errands. Gerta from the archives paused at the eastern arch, wrinkled her nose, and glanced at me with an expression I filed away carefully. Ansel, one of Reid's senior warriors, walked the length of the corridor and did not once look at Amber's mark on the lintel—he looked instead at his own boots, which was its own form of speech.

I kept a list in my head. I would move it to my journal that night.

My knees ached. My hands stung. I finished the grid and started the second pass without stopping.

---

That night, the pack ran.

I could not attend—Omegas were not summoned to the pack run—but the Omega quarters had a ground-level vent that opened into the assembly clearing, and I knelt beside it in the dark with my cheek near the grating and watched.

Easton stood at the head of the pack in his human skin, Amber beside him wearing my collar and a small, expectant smile. The moon was three-quarters full. Someone in the crowd cheered when Easton shifted—the black-furred bulk of his wolf rising from the man in one long, familiar motion—and Amber shifted a beat behind him, her lighter grey coat threading forward to take the flank position.

My position.

My wolf stirred against the inside of my ribs. Not grief. Not the hot flood I had expected. Cold. Focused. The way she had gone when we watched border incursions from the tree line—the same steady, analytical presence, gathering data.

Watch, she said inside me. Look at his shoulder.

I looked.

Easton's wolf moved out of the clearing at a lope, and Amber's wolf fell in beside him at the flank—but his shoulder ran a hand's width wider than it should have. A truly bonded Alpha ran with his Luna's flank touching his—the physical closeness was involuntary, a bond-driven magnetism no wolf could fake. I had run beside him for five years. I knew what that felt like from the inside.

His wolf was performing the ritual. It was not responding to it.

At the tree line, he corrected himself—closed the gap by a deliberate half-step, the movement too smooth, too conscious. Amber leaned toward him. He did not lean back.

I pressed my thumb against the warm mark on my neck and watched them disappear into the trees.

The vent smelled of pine and wet stone. My knees still hurt from the flagstones.

I stayed at the grating until the last wolf vanished, and then I went back to my journal and drew a small diagram of the assembly clearing. I marked the distance between their shoulders. I dated it. I wrote Ansel's name beneath it, and Gerta's, and three others I had catalogued during the morning scrub.

The witness list was seven names long now.

---

Amber reassigned me the next day.

Petra brought the message with her hands folded in front of her apron. "Luna's personal wardrobe," she said. "By hand. She's specified cold water for the silks."

I had never washed silk in my life. My mother had died when I was small and my father had sent our laundry out, and as Luna I had a staff. I looked at the pile of ceremonial garments Petra set on the stone floor of my quarters and I understood the assignment for exactly what it was.

I ruined the sleeve of a moonstone-embroidered blouse within the first hour. The thread caught on the washboard and pulled, and by the time I saw it the damage was a long silver run down the length of the cuff.

At dinner, Amber held the blouse up in front of the assembled pack.

"The former Luna," she said, her voice pitched to carry, "cannot even manage basic domestic duties."

A table of young warriors laughed. Not all of them. Enough.

I did not look at Amber. I looked at the blouse—at the ruined sleeve she was displaying like a trophy—and then I turned very deliberately to my left.

Ansel was seated two places down, his soup untouched.

"Ansel," I said quietly, under the ambient noise of the hall. "Last night. During the run."

He went still.

"Did you notice anything unusual about the Alpha's form?"

He did not answer. He did not turn his head. But he did not look away from me either, and after a long moment his throat moved once, swallowing.

Behind me, Amber was still talking, still holding up the sleeve. The laughter had begun to thin.

Ansel picked up his spoon. He set it down again.

He still had not spoken.

But I had my answer.