My Alpha Made Me Bear His Mistress’s Child

I start the next morning.

The map comes out of my coat pocket and onto the kitchen table. Naomi's figures go beside it. I have a yellow legal pad, three different pens, and a fresh pot of coffee. Buster lies under the table with his chin on my foot.

I work the way I used to work in the war room. Each transfer gets a date. Each date gets cross-referenced against Grayson's official pack calendar — the one I kept for him for ten years, because he could never be bothered. Pack training weekends. Diplomatic trips. Border patrols. I pull every itinerary I have ever filed for him and I lay them out in a long, neat row.

The pattern shows up faster than I expected.

Every transfer to Jemma's account lands within forty-eight hours of a trip Grayson took without me. Every single one. Some are small — a few hundred dollars, the kind of thing you wouldn't notice. Some are larger. Rent. A car. A trip somewhere warm in February of the year I was too sick to leave the house.

I write it all down. My handwriting stays steady. My wolf does not.

She has been quiet for ten years. Now she paces. I feel her in my chest, in my shoulders, a low restless circling that does not stop when I tell it to. She wants to look at the page. She wants me to keep looking at the page. She does not want me to put my thumb on my wrist and breathe through it the way I used to.

For the first time in a decade, I let her stay loud.

*Good girl,* I think, and I feel her flick her ears.

I work for nine days. I eat almost nothing. Naomi drives over twice and puts dark chocolate on the table without saying anything, and the second time she also puts down a sandwich and stands there until I take a bite.

"You look like hell," she says.

"I'm building a timeline."

"I can see that." She looks at the legal pad, at the map, at the rows of dates. Her jaw tightens. "How far back does it go?"

I tap the earliest entry.

It is dated four months after Grayson marked me.

Naomi sits down. She does not say anything for a while. Then she says, very quietly, "Sadie."

"I know."

"Four months."

"I know, Naomi."

She puts her hand on the back of my neck — warm, steady, the way she used to do on the worst nights of the war. I let her. I do not lean into it, but I let her.

---

The package arrives at her place on the tenth day.

Naomi calls me from her front step. "There's a parcel at my door," she says. "No return address. It's got your name on it."

"My name."

"In handwriting. Not anyone I know."

I drive to her apartment without changing out of yesterday's clothes. Buster comes with me. The package is sitting on her kitchen counter when I walk in, plain brown paper, the size of a hardcover book.

Naomi watches me from across the counter. "Want me to open it?"

"No."

I cut the tape with a kitchen knife. Inside, two things. A sealed envelope — thick paper, the kind clinics use. And a small black USB drive in a clear plastic sleeve.

I open the envelope first.

It is a DNA report. Three pages. The header is from a private lab I do not recognize, somewhere out of state. There is a maternal sample marked with a number, a paternal sample marked with a different number, and a fetal sample marked with a third.

The paternal match is one hundred percent. Grayson Alexander.

The maternal match is also one hundred percent.

It is not me.

I read the name beside the maternal number twice. Then a third time, because the letters are not arranging themselves correctly.

Jemma Taylor.

Naomi makes a small sound across from me. I do not look up. I read the report a fourth time, all the way through, because there has to be a footnote, an asterisk, some line of small print that explains why this is wrong. There isn't.

The pup inside me shares no genetic material with me at all.

I think, very distantly, about the conception ritual. The first one and the second one and the third. The healer's hands. The pain — the kind of pain that made me bite down on a leather strap until my jaw ached for a week, because they told me supernatural conception was different, that the rare incompatibility between Grayson's bloodline and mine made it necessary, that this was the only way. I think about the months of sickness afterward. The mornings I could not stand up. The way my wolf went so quiet I sometimes wondered if she had left me.

I think about Grayson's hand on my stomach. The expression he made for the pack. The smile.

I sit down on Naomi's kitchen floor. I do not remember deciding to.

Buster comes over and presses his whole body against my side. I put my hand in his fur. The DNA report is still in my other hand. I have not put it down.

"Sadie." Naomi's voice is careful. "What does it say."

I hold it out to her without speaking.

She reads it. I watch her face do the same thing my face must have done — the small twitch at the corner of her mouth when the maternal name registers, the stillness afterward.

She looks at me. She does not say anything stupid. She does not say *I'm sorry* or *oh god* or any of the things people say when there is nothing to say. She just sits down on the floor next to me, close enough that her shoulder touches mine, and she waits.

After a long time, I reach for the USB drive.

---

Naomi's laptop is on the coffee table. I plug the drive in. There is one folder. Three video files, time-stamped, dated to the three conception rituals I endured.

I open the first one.

The footage is high-resolution. The healer installed his security system himself — I remember him telling me about it once, proud of the upgrade, calling it a professional precaution. The angle is from the corner of his clinic ceiling, looking down at the procedure table.

I am on the table. I recognize the gown. I recognize the way my hand grips the rail.

The healer moves around me with quiet, clinical competence. He prepares an instrument. He prepares a sealed container that I had assumed, at the time, held a sample taken from Grayson and me earlier that morning.

Grayson is in the room. Standing against the far wall, arms crossed. Watching.

The healer performs the procedure. I watch myself flinch on the screen. I remember that flinch in my body. I remember the sound I made.

When it is over, Grayson walks across the room. He hands the healer a sealed envelope. The healer takes it without looking inside, the way you take something you have already counted.

I watch the footage twice.

My thumb is pressed against the inside of my marked wrist hard enough that I will find a bruise there in the morning. My wolf is not quiet anymore. She lets out a sound inside me that is not a growl and not a whimper but something older than either — a long, tearing howl that reverberates from the base of my skull down into my ribs, and I feel it in every bone I own.

Naomi reaches over and takes my hand. She does not squeeze. She does not speak. She just holds it.

The second video is still queued on the screen.

I do not open it yet.