My Alpha Poisoned Our Pups

The neutral pack archivist's office smelled like old paper and cedar oil. I sat across from him with my hands folded in my lap, my face carefully blank. He was an older wolf, grey-muzzled and precise, bound by inter-pack law to provide documentation requested by a sitting Luna.

Even a Luna nobody wanted anymore.

"The footage you requested," he said, sliding a sealed drive across the desk. "Border camera seventeen, the night of Maryam Snyder's death. Time-stamped and unedited."

I took the drive. My fingers closed around the small metal case. It was cool. Solid. Real.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded once. His eyes held something that might have been pity. I didn't want it.

I left his office and drove back to Shadowridge in silence. The drive sat in my pocket like a stone. I didn't look at it. I didn't need to. I already knew what it would show.

Omar's shifted form on the forest road. The exact time matching Lorelai's forced mind-link to my mother. The timeline that proved what everyone had decided was an accident was actually murder.

I added the drive to the evidence packet that night. My hands were steady. They didn't shake anymore. I was past the stage where my hands shook.

The packet was almost complete now. Wolfsbane purchase records. Healer's reports documenting three years of poisoning labeled as hormonal irregularities. Omar's rogue-payment ledger in Gareth's handwriting. Security footage. Witness lists. The Luna Accord clause I'd embedded in Shadowridge's alliance treaties two years ago, triggered automatically the moment I crossed pack borders without Council consent.

I sealed it. I addressed it to the Lycan Council. I did not send it yet.

I was waiting for one more thing.

---

Jace granted me a memorial pyre for my mother. I think he did it to make me stop asking. Or maybe he did it because even he understood that denying a Luna the right to honor her dead would look bad to the allied packs.

Either way, I got my pyre.

It was held on Shadowridge grounds at sunset. The platform was built near the forest line, away from the main pack house. Practical. Out of the way. The kind of location you'd choose for something you wanted to finish quickly.

Pack members arrived in small groups. They stood in uncomfortable silence, fulfilling an obligation. Gareth was there. Sable. The Gamma and his mate. Omegas from the kitchens. Warriors from the patrol rotation. All of them watching with the careful blankness of people who wanted to be anywhere else.

Lorelai stood beside Jace with her hand in the crook of his arm. She wore a soft grey dress. Her face was composed into quiet grief. Performed. Perfect.

I stood on the pyre's opposite side, alone.

The fire burned hot. The flames climbed high, consuming the simple wooden frame that held my mother's body. I watched the smoke rise into the darkening sky. I didn't cry. I had no tears left.

When the flames burned low, I stepped forward with the ceremonial urn. My hands were shaking now. Not from grief. From rage. From exhaustion. From the effort of holding myself together in front of thirty-seven witnesses who had watched me kneel in the courtyard three weeks ago and done nothing.

I gathered my mother's ashes with a small copper scoop. Grey dust. Fragments of bone. This was what remained of the woman who had raised me alone, who had sung to me when I was small, who had looked at me with perfect clarity in her final weeks and told me she knew what was happening.

The urn filled slowly. I worked in silence. No one spoke. The only sound was the crackling of dying embers and the wind moving through the trees.

I was gathering the last of the ashes when Lorelai moved.

She stepped closer to the memorial table—too close, her body angled wrong—and her elbow caught the urn's edge. The ceramic vessel tipped. Tilted. Fell.

My mother's ashes scattered across the wet mud.

Grey dust coated the ground. It mixed with boot prints and rain and the crushed grass where the pack had been standing. The urn rolled to a stop at Lorelai's feet. Empty.

The assembled pack went silent.

I lunged forward. I didn't think. I didn't plan. Something primal and shattered drove me. My hands reached for Lorelai's throat. My wolf slammed against the inside of my chest, snarling, awake, furious.

Jace stepped between us.

His Alpha aura hit me like a physical blow. The weight of it drove the air from my lungs. My body stopped moving. My hands froze mid-reach. My wolf was crushed back into silence.

I stood there, locked in place, staring at Jace's chest.

"Stop causing a scene at your own mother's memorial," he said. His voice was calm. Controlled. The tone you'd use with a child throwing a tantrum.

I looked down. My mother's ashes were on my shoes. Grey dust mixed with mud. Boot prints crossed through the scattered remains. Unrecoverable.

The Alpha aura pressed down harder. I couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Couldn't even lower my hands.

Lorelai stepped back, her face carefully arranged into shock. "I'm so sorry," she said softly. "It was an accident. I didn't mean—"

"It's fine," Jace said. He didn't look at her. He was looking at me. "Teagan understands."

The aura released.

My body was mine again. My hands dropped to my sides. I looked at the mud. At the ashes. At the empty urn lying on its side.

Something inside me did not break.

It ceased to exist.

I turned and walked away from the pyre. I didn't look back. I didn't acknowledge the witnesses. I walked through the pack house, down the service corridor, to the small room with the window facing the laundry yard.

I sat on the bed with my mother's quilt pulled around my shoulders. My shoes were still covered in ash. I didn't take them off.

I pulled out the evidence packet. I added one final entry: Memorial desecration, witnessed by thirty-seven pack members. Alpha intervention to protect perpetrator. Ashes unrecoverable.

Then I sealed the packet for the last time.

Tomorrow, I would cross the border into neutral territory. The Luna Accord clause would activate automatically. The evidence would transmit to the Lycan Council. Every alliance Shadowridge held would dissolve simultaneously.

And I would be gone before anyone realized what I'd done.

I lay down in the dark with my mother's ashes still on my shoes and waited for dawn.