My Alpha Husband Drugged Me to Keep Me Wolfless

The garden was quiet in the way pack house gardens are never quiet—too still, too deliberate, the kind of silence that means someone has been waiting.

Sloan was standing near the stone bench by the far wall when I came around the corner. She had a cup of tea in both hands and an expression of warm surprise that had been arranged there before she heard my footsteps.

"Genevieve." She said my name like we were old friends reconnecting. "I was hoping we might have a moment."

I stopped. Folded my hands in front of me. Waited.

She spoke for nearly four minutes. I counted. Her voice was soft and generous—the voice of a woman who has decided that magnanimity is the most useful performance available to her. She talked about the transition. About how change was hard, especially for a woman who had given so much of herself to a pack. About how she understood, truly understood, how difficult it must be to watch a family reshape itself around new people.

And then, with the careful delicacy of someone placing a knife on a table rather than in a hand, she told me she would speak to Spencer on my behalf. About the Luna title. After the adoption was formalized. She would make sure he understood the importance of continuity, of honoring what I had contributed.

She was offering to advocate for my continued existence in my own home.

I let her finish. Every word. I kept my face soft and my hands still and I listened to the entire architecture of her charity.

Then I said, "Thank you, Sloan. That's very kind."

Her smile settled into place, satisfied.

"I do have one question," I said. My voice was the same register—quiet, unhurried. "How long have you known about the implant?"

The silence lasted exactly one second.

One second where something behind her eyes went very cold and very fast, a door slamming shut on a room she hadn't meant to let me see. Her smile didn't break—she was too practiced for that—but the warmth behind it flickered. Just once. Just enough.

"I don't know what you mean," she said.

"Of course," I said. "I must have misspoken."

She left three minutes later, her tea half-finished on the stone bench.

I sat down where she had been standing and opened the cipher notebook on my knee. I wrote the date, the time, and one line beneath it.

*She knew.*

---

Marcus found me in the archive room just before noon. He didn't sit down.

"Creed is moving inventory," he said. "Secondary location. He started last night."

I closed the folder in front of me. "How much time?"

"If he moves fast? A day. Maybe less."

I thought about the implant in Elias Warrick's medical storage. The small, wolfsbane-laced device that was currently the most important object in Ironridge. Without proper attestation—healer's signature, sealed documentation, certified provenance—it was a piece of evidence that Creed could challenge from any direction. With it, it was a fact that no tribunal could set aside.

"I need to send Elias a message," I said.

I wrote it in cipher and handed it to Marcus. He read it, nodded once, and left.

Elias responded within the hour. The implant was documented, sealed, and signed under healer's attestation. He had added his own notation—a clinical description of the device's placement and its biological effects, written in the precise, careful language of a healer who had been quietly horrified for weeks and had been waiting for someone to ask him to do something about it.

I added his attestation to the file and moved the timeline forward by four days.

---

I found Spencer in his study just after three.

He was at his desk, territorial maps spread in front of him, and he looked up when I came in with the expression he wore when he was deciding how much of his attention I deserved.

I stood in the doorway and I made my voice soft. Slightly tentative. The register I had spent seven years making him comfortable with.

"I've been thinking," I said. "About Jrue. About what you're building for him." I paused, let a small breath into the sentence. "You've given me so much, Alpha. Let me give you this—a formal ceremony. A Pack Banquet. Something that presents Jrue to the pack and our neighboring allies as our son, properly, in front of everyone."

I watched it happen.

His posture shifted first—a loosening across the shoulders, the particular ease of a man whose plan is executing exactly as designed. Then his expression warmed, and the warmth was genuine in the way that only a narcissist's satisfaction is genuine: total, uncomplicated, completely blind.

"Handle the arrangements," he said. "Invite the neighboring Alphas. Make it significant."

"Of course," I said. "I'll make sure the Lycan King's court receives an invitation as well. For legitimacy."

He nodded. Already looking back at his maps.

I thanked him with appropriate deference and walked out.

In the corridor, Seraphina's voice came low and certain in my chest.

*He just handed us the stage.*

I opened my invitation list and wrote the Lycan King's name at the top.