My Alpha Rejected Me Before Stealing My Inheritance

Chandler Foster came to the pack house on a Tuesday, and Buster hated him on sight.

I carried the water pitcher into Damian's study with my eyes down, the way I'd learned to walk through every room now — small, quiet, invisible. Chandler sat across the desk from Damian, a leather folder between them, sealed with a wax stamp I didn't recognize. He was older than I remembered from the few pack gatherings I'd seen him at, gray threading through his beard, but his eyes tracked me the second I crossed the threshold. Not the way men usually looked at Omegas. Not dismissive. Assessing.

"Everything's in order," Chandler said, sliding the folder toward Damian. "Signed, sealed. Clean as it's going to get."

Damian opened it, scanned the top page, and I watched something like satisfaction settle into his jaw. He didn't look up at me as I refilled his glass. He never did anymore. I moved to Chandler's side of the desk, and that was when Buster, curled by the door where he wasn't technically allowed but where nobody bothered to move him, lifted his head and let out a low, steady growl.

Chandler's gaze flicked to the dog, then back to me, and for one full second neither of us moved. His nostrils flared — just slightly, just enough that I clocked it and filed it away with everything else I was learning to notice. Then he smiled, thin and practiced, and looked back at Damian.

"She's a good little pourer," he said, like I wasn't standing three feet away with a pitcher in my hand.

Damian locked the folder in his safe without a word. I finished the water glasses and left the room the way I'd learned to leave every room — like I'd never been in it at all. I was almost to the hallway when I heard Chandler's voice drop, pitched low for Damian alone.

"The records are clean. She'll never find anything."

I kept walking. I didn't slow my step. I didn't look back. But I heard it, and I kept it, the way I kept the vials, the way I kept everything now — filed away in the cold, steady place where my grief used to live.

The anniversary of my father's death came four days later.

I'd kept two things of his through everything — the pocket watch and his final letter, still sealed, because some part of me couldn't bear to open it and find out that was truly the last of his voice I'd ever have. I kept them both tucked deep in the stuffing of Buster's dog bed, the one place in that house Paris had never touched.

Until that morning.

I heard the commotion before I reached the kennel wing — Paris's voice, bright and theatrical, carrying through the hall. "I *smell* something. Contraband scent. Omegas aren't permitted personal items, are they?" Two other Omegas stood pressed against the wall, eyes down, as she tore through my cot, then Buster's bed, fingers digging through the stuffing like she already knew exactly what she was looking for.

She found the letter first. Then the watch.

By the time I reached her, she was already walking toward the kitchen with both items raised over her head like trophies, calling out for an audience. My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

In the kitchen, ranked wolves gathered — drawn by her voice the way flies gather to something sweet and rotting. Paris broke the letter's seal with a theatrical flourish and cleared her throat.

"'My dearest Catherine,'" she read, pitching her voice into a mocking warble, batting her lashes at her audience, "'if you are reading this—'" She paused for effect, and someone near the stove laughed.

"Give it back." My voice came out steadier than I felt, my hand already outstretched. "That is my father's letter. Give it back."

Paris looked at me — really looked, the way a cat looks at something it's already decided to kill — and then, slowly, deliberately, she tore the page in half. Then in half again. She let the pieces fall, one by one, fluttering to the stone floor like snow that would never melt back into anything whole.

I didn't scream. I didn't move. Something in my chest simply went very, very quiet.

Then she picked up the watch.

"No," I said, and I heard my own voice crack for the first time in weeks. "Paris — please —"

She brought it down against the edge of the counter.

The glass face shattered first, a bright, ugly sound, and the silver casing dented inward with a crunch that I felt somewhere behind my ribs. Something rattled loose inside — a small metallic click, a seam I'd never noticed springing open along the watch's base — and I lunged forward, hand already reaching, my whole body moving before my mind caught up.

I never got there.

Damian's hand closed around my arm first, fingers biting down hard enough to bruise, hauling me back a full step before I could see what had fallen loose from inside my father's watch.