My Alpha Rejected Me for His Pregnant Mistress

By my third shift, I'd learned the lounge the way I'd learned everything else that mattered — quietly, by watching, never asking more than I needed to know.

I was refilling the ice well behind the bar when the floor manager's voice dropped low near the reservation screen. "Top room's booked solid. Alpha party. Celebrating something." He scrolled, frowning. "Six enforcers on the list, plus the Alpha and his lady. Heavy spenders. Wants the best bottle service we've got."

The bartender beside me snorted. "Which one of us is that supposed to be?"

"Not you. You spilled a tray on a Beta last week." He turned, scanning the floor, and his eyes landed on me the way they always did lately — not with interest, just calculation. Reliable. Steady hands. The kind of Omega who doesn't cause problems. "Fox. You're up."

I didn't ask who the Alpha was. I didn't need to. Money didn't come with a face attached, and I'd learned a long time ago that asking questions only slowed down the part where I got paid.

Something low and uneasy moved under my ribs anyway — my wolf, surfacing just enough to growl a single warning before I pushed her back down. I pressed my palm flat against my apron, breathed once, and told her the same thing I always did. *Not now. We need this.*

I pocketed the tip premium slip without looking at it and picked up my tray.

The private room's door was heavier than the others, soundproofed, the kind of door meant to keep a party's noise in and everyone else's business out. I balanced the tray against my hip, kept my eyes down the way I'd trained myself to for ten years, and pushed it open with my shoulder.

The pain hit before I even saw him.

It came up through the scorched mark at my throat like something had reached inside and struck a match against old nerve endings — white-hot, familiar, a decade old and somehow never healed at all. My hands locked around the tray. I didn't drop it. I have never once dropped it, not in ten years, not through worse than this.

Sterling Grant was sprawled in the center chair like the room existed to hold him up. Jacket open, collar loose, one arm draped along the back of the seat where Khloe sat pressed against his side, her hand resting on the curve of her stomach the way it always seemed to be resting these days. Six enforcers lined the walls, relaxed, laughing at something I hadn't heard.

I did not look at his face. I set the glasses down one by one, poured, retreated to the corner by the bar cart, and let my hands do what they'd been trained to do while the rest of me went somewhere very far away and very still.

The bond-echo kept hammering under my collarbone, slow and deliberate, like a second heartbeat that hated me.

I didn't let it show. Ten years of practice is good for exactly one thing — keeping your face empty when your whole chest is on fire.

Across the room, Khloe watched me over the rim of her glass.

I felt it before I saw it — the particular quality of her attention, patient, delighted, the way a cat watches something it's already decided to play with. She wasn't looking at an Omega server. She was looking at scars. At the exact shape of a burn she'd once stood close enough to smell.

I leaned in to pour her second glass, tray angled, careful, my sleeve pulled down as far as it would go.

Her arm moved.

It looked like an accident — a careless little jolt of her elbow against the crystal decanter beside her, the heavy wolfsbane one the enforcers had been pouring from all night. It tipped, tilted, and came down off the edge of the table in a long, slow arc that felt like it lasted far longer than it should have.

It shattered against the marble floor in a spray of glittering shards and a green-black mist that stung the inside of my nose even from three feet away. Wolfsbane, concentrated, the kind that isn't meant for drinking so much as for punishing.

"Oh," Khloe said, pressing a hand to her chest, voice pitched soft and mortified for the benefit of every enforcer in the room. "How clumsy of me." Her eyes found mine, and underneath the honey there was nothing soft at all. "Clean that up, won't you, dear?"

The room went quiet in that particular way rooms go quiet right before something bad happens — six sets of enforcer eyes swinging toward me, Sterling's attention finally, finally lifting off the middle distance to land somewhere near my direction, and my wolf slamming hard against the wall I'd built to keep her down.

I set my tray on the cart without a sound.

And I knelt.