My Alpha Husband Drugged Me to Keep Me Wolfless

Marcus was already in the archive room when I arrived.

The eastern archive was the quietest corner of the pack house—windowless, smelling of old paper and cedar, used mostly for records nobody wanted to look at. That made it perfect. I had told Spencer I needed to review the adoption paperwork. He hadn't even looked up from his phone.

Marcus had the territorial registry files spread across the table in a long, careful row. Seven years of them. He'd arranged them chronologically, and seeing them laid out like that—the sheer physical weight of the documentation—made something tighten in my throat.

I sat down and pulled the first folder toward me.

"Walk me through it," I said.

He did.

It took nearly two hours. Marcus spoke quietly and precisely, the way he did everything, pointing to entry after entry where lands registered through my mother's bloodline had been reclassified, transferred, rerouted. Her name appeared in the original deeds—Miriam Armstrong, deceased—and then disappeared, replaced by shell arrangements with names I didn't recognize that Marcus had spent months tracing back to Sloan's pack's financial accounts.

My mother's land. Funding the woman installed in her daughter's home.

I pressed my thumb to my wrist and kept reading.

"I couldn't act on it alone," Marcus said. Not apologizing—explaining. There was a difference, and I heard it. "Without a trigger that pack law would recognize—"

"I know," I said. "You're acting on it now."

He nodded once and slid a small card across the table. A frequency notation, handwritten. "The administrative mind-link channel Spencer uses for pack business. Standard Beta access. I've had it for years." A pause. "He doesn't know you have a wolf now."

I looked at the card for a moment. Then I opened the cipher notebook—small, leather-covered, the code my father's old Beta had taught me years ago as a game, something to pass the time, neither of us knowing then what I would eventually use it for—and I wrote the frequency down in the first column.

Then I placed my hand flat on the stack of registry files.

"I'll need copies of everything," I said. "Quietly."

"Already made," Marcus said.

I almost smiled.

---

The following morning, Spencer seated Sloan at his right.

The Luna's chair. My chair. He pulled it out for her before he sat down himself, and then he poured her coffee—black, no sugar, apparently he knew that—and said something low that made her smile, and the whole small performance happened in the time it took me to cross the kitchen doorway.

Seraphina detonated.

*Shift. NOW. Let me show him what he spent seven years burying—*

My hand found the teacup on the counter. I wrapped both palms around it. The ceramic was hot enough to sting.

*Not yet,* I thought back.

*He is sitting in OUR—*

*I know what he's doing. I need you to let me watch.*

She didn't subside. She never simply subsided. She pulled back like a tide that is only gathering itself, and the vibration of her fury sat in my sternum for the rest of the meal, low and constant, like a held note.

I sat down across the table—my usual seat, the one that faced the window, the one that had never been the right seat—and I drank my tea and I watched.

I watched the pack members file in for breakfast. I watched who glanced at the seating arrangement and looked away quickly. I watched who didn't glance at all, which was its own kind of answer. I watched Elder Georgia arrive and settle into her chair with the expression of a woman surveying a room that has finally been arranged to her satisfaction.

I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist until it left a small crescent mark in the skin.

Then I reached under the table and opened the cipher notebook on my knee and wrote three names under a heading I had been saving space for.

*Witnesses to complicity.*

---

The intercept came that afternoon.

I was in my room with the door locked and the cipher notebook open on the desk when I opened the mind-link channel for the first time. It took a moment to orient—the frequency felt different from the pack's general channel, narrower, more deliberate, like a private hallway running parallel to a public corridor.

And then Spencer's voice, mid-sentence, talking to someone I couldn't see.

*—the maintenance schedule needs to stay consistent. The Ironridge account covers it. Creed knows the timeline.*

I stopped breathing.

My hand was already moving, transcribing in cipher before my mind had fully processed what I was hearing. The maintenance schedule. The Ironridge account. Creed knows the timeline.

Not a single act. A schedule. Seven years of supply, sustained, funded, maintained.

My hands were trembling by the time the channel went quiet. Not from fear. I recognized the feeling now—it was the specific, clarifying fury of confirmation. The difference between suspecting something and holding the proof of it in your hands.

I sat very still for a long moment.

Then I closed the notebook, opened a fresh page, and wrote Marcus a single coded line.

*I found the thread. Pull carefully.*

I folded it small and pressed my thumb to my wrist once, steadily.

Seraphina was quiet in my chest. Not calm—never calm. But listening.

We both were.