My Alpha Poisoned Our Pups for His Mistress

Callum found me in the library on the fourth morning, which was how I knew something had shifted. He never sought me out. He let me come to him, the way he'd let me do everything since I arrived—on my own feet, my own time.

He set a folder on the table beside my notes without asking if I was finished. "Marcus Hale wrote to Moonveil," he said. "Formally. Asking for Greta Simmons's pack registration."

I put my pen down. "And?"

"There isn't one." He watched my face while he said it, the way he watched everything, like the information mattered less than what it did to me. "No she-wolf by that name has ever been registered in Moonveil territory. No bloodline documentation. Nothing."

I sat with that for a moment. Seven years I'd heard the story—childhood sweethearts, separated by pack politics, a boy waiting to come home. I'd believed it the way you believe things you're too tired to question. "She was never who she said she was."

"No." Callum's voice stayed even, but something underneath it had gone taut. "I've called a Council tribunal. A fortnight from now. Bloodline fraud, the wolfsbane operation, violation of a registered blood-oath."

"What else." I knew there was more. I'd learned to read the shape of what a person wasn't saying almost as well as what they were.

He was quiet a second too long. "There's a piece you'll hear at the tribunal, not before. It'll land harder there. You'll understand why when it does."

I wanted to push. Seven years of being managed, of being told what I could and couldn't handle, had made me allergic to anyone deciding what I was ready for. But his eyes weren't doing what Christopher's used to do—weren't smoothing over a lie, weren't performing patience while actually exercising control. He was asking me to trust a timing I couldn't see the reason for yet, and something in me, still raw from every other trust I'd given away, chose to let him have it.

"All right," I said.

He almost looked surprised that I hadn't argued. He didn't say so.

The delegation arrived two days later, in the gray hour before noon.

I heard it before anyone told me—a change in the air, guards moving with more purpose in the corridors, the particular hush that settles over a place bracing itself. I went to my window and looked down at the outer courtyard, where Bloodcrest's own warriors had begun forming a loose perimeter, unhurried, unthreatened, the posture of a court that had never once doubted its own strength.

Three black vehicles idled at the gate. I watched Christopher step out of the middle one, and my stomach didn't drop the way I expected it to. It just went cold and still, the way water goes before it freezes.

Greta came out after him. She was wearing the Luna pendant—my pendant, the one I'd dropped at his feet in the pack house, now hanging against her collarbone like she'd always owned it. She'd dressed carefully. Soft colors, nothing severe, the kind of image built to make onlookers want to protect her.

And behind her, small and solemn in a coat too formal for a seven-year-old, was Kamden.

I pressed my right thumb into the fading scar on my neck without meaning to. The old habit, worn smooth by seven years of using it to think my way through things too large to feel all at once. Christopher's mark had gone cold the night he rejected me. It hadn't burned since. But my thumb still found it, out of some muscle memory that hadn't caught up to the rest of me.

A messenger crossed the courtyard below with a sealed letter, and I knew without reading it what it would say—a formal demand, worded to sound legal, requiring my signature to relinquish rights that Christopher didn't yet know he'd already lost. He'd come here believing he still held every card. He didn't know about Theodore's blood-oath. He didn't know what Marcus had found. He didn't know his own wolf was dying inside him a little more every day, and he certainly didn't know that the woman he'd broken had spent three days in an archive learning exactly how much power he'd handed her the moment he opened his mouth at that banquet.

Under my ribs, my wolf pressed forward—not frantic, not afraid. Something steadier than that. Heat instead of panic, a low coal instead of a flame.

"Not yet," I told her, my hand flat against my sternum. "But soon."

She didn't retreat this time. She simply waited, the way I had learned to wait, the way something patient waits when it already knows it's going to win.

I straightened my spine, smoothed the front of the coat Bloodcrest had given me, and walked to the door.

It was time to go downstairs.