My Alpha Rejected Me and Called Me a Traitor

Trevor didn't wait for me to shift. He knew I couldn't.

His hand clamped around my upper arm and he hauled me forward, his grip tight enough to bruise. The warriors fell in around us without a word. I recognized their boots. Steel-toed, standard issue. I had ordered them two years ago after a rogue attack left half the patrol limping.

"Move," Trevor said.

I moved.

We left the square behind. The humans with their phones. The inn owner standing in her doorway. The square got smaller and smaller until the trees swallowed it whole.

The wilderness opened up cold and silent. Pine and granite and the kind of quiet that makes you hear your own heartbeat. Trevor set a brutal pace. My legs were human. His were not. Every few minutes he would yank me forward when I stumbled, his fingers digging into the same bruise.

I didn't beg. I didn't ask where we were going. I memorized the route.

Left at the split pine. Right where the creek cuts under the trail. Elevation climbing. North-northwest by the position of the sun through the canopy. We were heading into the mountains, into the old rogue containment zone that Ironvale maintained for prisoners too dangerous to hold near populated pack land.

No one went up there unless they wanted someone to disappear.

The cold bit through my jacket. My breath came in clouds. Trevor's didn't. He wasn't even winded.

After two hours we reached the outpost.

It was small and ugly. Concrete reinforced with steel, half-buried in the mountainside like something that had tried to hide and failed. A single door. No windows. The kind of place that gets used once every few years and then locked up again.

Trevor shoved me inside.

The interior was worse than the exterior. A narrow hallway. A storage room. And at the end, a trapdoor set into the floor with a heavy iron ring.

Marcus pulled it open. The smell hit me first—damp stone and something bitter and green that made my eyes water. Wolfsbane. Fresh, not dried. Someone had prepared this.

Trevor pushed me toward the opening. I looked down into darkness and the top of a ladder that disappeared into it.

"Climb," he said.

I climbed.

The ladder was iron and freezing under my palms. Twelve rungs. I counted them. At the bottom my boots hit stone. The cellar was small—maybe ten feet by ten feet. The walls were damp. The only light came from the trapdoor above, and then Marcus slammed it shut and the light died.

I heard Trevor coming down behind me.

He had a flashlight. The beam cut through the dark and landed on the far wall, where silver chains hung from an iron ring bolted into the stone. The chains were old but functional. The cuffs at the ends were open and waiting.

I didn't fight. There were two of them and one of me, and fighting would only make it worse.

Trevor locked the cuffs around my wrists.

The silver bit immediately. It burned cold and then hot, the way silver always does against wolf skin. I pulled in a breath through my teeth and held it.

"Wolfsbane in the walls," Trevor said. His voice was flat. "Concentrated. It'll keep your wolf down. Not that you have much of one."

The poison was already working. I could feel it—a low, creeping numbness spreading up my arms from the points where my skin touched the damp stone. My wolf, the one that had howled and died at the banquet, didn't stir. There was nothing left of her to stir.

But underneath, in the place where that older, bigger thing had rolled over in the dark, something shifted. Just once. Then it went still again.

Trevor stepped back and looked at me. His face was hard. His jaw was set. He looked like a man who had made a decision and was going to see it through no matter what it cost him.

"You stay here until you confess," he said.

I met his eyes. "I didn't do it."

"Then you'll die here."

He turned and climbed the ladder without looking back. Marcus followed. The trapdoor slammed shut. I heard the bolt slide home.

Then I was alone.

The dark was absolute. No light. No sound except my own breathing and the faint drip of water somewhere in the corner. The silver burned my wrists. The wolfsbane crept through my skin like cold fingers pressing into muscle.

I catalogued my injuries the way I always do.

First-degree burns on both wrists where the silver sat. Mild hypothermia beginning—I could feel it in my fingers and toes. Dehydration would set in within twelve hours without water. The wolfsbane concentration was high enough to suppress a shift but not high enough to kill outright. That was deliberate. Trevor wanted me alive long enough to break.

I pulled against the chains once, testing them. The silver seared deeper. I stopped.

The cold settled in fast. Mountain cold. The kind that gets into your bones and doesn't leave. I could feel it creeping up from the stone floor, through my boots, into my legs.

I thought about the nine years I had given to Ironvale. The treaties. The alliances. The warriors I had trained. The nights I had stayed up fixing things Trevor broke during the day. I thought about the ceremonial banquet and the pendant I had placed on the table.

I thought about Stormi standing in the study window with her phone pressed to her ear, saying "Thornridge."

Then I stopped thinking and started counting.

Guard rotation intervals. I could hear boots overhead every forty-three minutes. Two guards, based on the weight of the footsteps. They would change shifts. I would learn the pattern.

I had time. That was the one thing Trevor had given me.

Time, and cold, and dark, and the silver burning my wrists raw.

I closed my eyes and waited.