My Alpha Rejected Me Before Stealing My Inheritance

My mark went cold at 9:47 p.m., the exact second Damian said my name like it belonged to a stranger.

I was standing where I always stood at the Mate Ceremony, third row from the dais, when the double doors banged open and he walked in with her. Paris Hart. Her belly rounded under a silk dress two sizes too tight on purpose, her scent so thick with some cloying, flowery human perfume that my wolf — dormant, buried, barely a whisper most days — flinched inside me like she'd been slapped. I couldn't place the smell under it. Something wrong. Something that wasn't pup-scent at all, though I didn't have the words for that yet.

Damian didn't look at me. Six years, and he walked past me like I was furniture.

He led Paris to the center of the hall, torchlight catching the smug curve of her mouth, and turned to face two hundred pack members in dead silence.

"I, Damian Evans, Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack," he said, voice carrying that flat, final Alpha-tone that made the walls themselves seem to hold their breath, "reject you, Catherine Cooper, as my mate and Luna."

The mark on my throat — six years old, the place his teeth had once claimed me — went from warm to ice in under a second. Then it split. I felt it crack open like frost breaking stone, a hairline of fire tearing sideways under my skin. My knees buckled before I told them to. I hit the floor of the pack house I'd bled for, and not one ranked wolf so much as turned their head.

Deep in my chest, something that had been silent for a year let out a single strangled cry — my wolf, clawing up through whatever numbness had buried her — and then went quiet again, like a door shutting on an empty room.

PARIS smiled. One hand rested on her belly. She didn't even bother to hide it.

I got up. Nobody helped me, so I helped myself.

"Effective immediately," Damian said, before I'd fully found my feet, his voice dropping into the compulsion register that makes your bones want to obey whether you choose to or not, "Catherine Cooper is demoted to Omega. She will vacate the Luna quarters by dawn. She will serve Paris. She sleeps in the kennel wing."

Somewhere near the door, Buster — my golden retriever, the only one in that hall who still looked at me like I mattered — snarled at the Delta trying to drag him off by the collar. Damian didn't even glance over. "Throw him in the snow."

My jaw locked so hard it ached. I didn't cry. I didn't beg. I looked at Damian — really looked, at the man I'd fed my own strength into for six years until there was nothing left of my wolf to keep — and I said, "Understood, Alpha," in a voice that didn't shake.

Then I walked myself to the kennel wing. Nobody had to drag me.

I found Buster under a hedge before midnight, half-frozen, and smuggled him under my cot. Checking what little I had left — my father's letter, his silver pocket watch — I pressed a palm to my throat and realized the mark wasn't just cold anymore. It was hollow. Like something alive had been scraped clean out of it. I waited for grief. Instead something colder and steadier moved into the space where grief should've been.

I did not cry that night. I started keeping score.

By morning I was on my knees scrubbing floors I used to walk across as Luna, laundering Paris's silk while my stomach growled — Omegas don't eat at the table. At breakfast, Paris crooked one manicured finger at me. "Kneel and lace my shoes, Catherine. In front of company." Three Deltas watched. Damian said nothing, ate his eggs like I wasn't there.

I knelt.

My fingers found the laces, slow, steady — and then brushed something small and cool that had rolled off the edge of the table from the pocket of Damian's coat. A glass vial. I knew that chemical smell before I even lifted it half an inch off the floor. The same bitter-clean scent my father had put in my morning water every day of my life, the smell I'd never once questioned.

I palmed it without my face changing at all. Slid it into my apron pocket while Paris admired her own reflection in a spoon.

One vial. I already knew, without deciding it in words, that it wouldn't be the last.