My Alpha Replaced Me with His Pregnant Mistress

The house was cold when I got back.

I hadn't turned the heat on in days. It didn't seem to matter anymore. I stood in the entryway with my keys still in my hand, and I thought about Nash's face when he walked out—that flat, dismissive look, like I was a footnote in a story about someone else's life.

Luna whimpered somewhere deep inside me. A distant, threadbare sound.

The landline rang.

I almost didn't answer it. My legs were already shaking from the walk home, the LAS grinding through my joints like something mechanical and rusted. But something made me cross the room, pick up the receiver, press it to my ear.

"Ms. Mitchell?" The voice on the other end was professional. Careful. "This is Silverfang General. Your father, Gerald Mitchell, was brought in approximately forty minutes ago. Cardiac arrest. He—" A pause. That specific kind of pause. "We need you to come in."

I was already moving before she finished the sentence.

---

I was too late.

The attending physician said it happened fast. He said it was peaceful. He kept talking, and I stood in the hallway outside Room 14 with my hand pressed flat against the wall because my knees wanted to go and I wasn't going to let them. Not here. Not in front of strangers.

My father had died alone.

The nurse, trying to be kind, mentioned that they'd attempted to reach Alpha Nash first—protocol for a pack warrior's next of kin. His phone had gone to voicemail. Later, through the pack grapevine, someone mentioned they'd seen him that afternoon at a baby boutique three towns over. Picking out cribs. Anastasia on his arm, laughing at something, her hand resting on her barely-there bump.

While my father's heart stopped.

I sat in the plastic chair next to his bed for two hours after. I held his hand, which was already cooling, and I told him I was sorry I wasn't there. I told him he would have hated the fluorescent lights in this room. I told him Luna was sick, and Nash was gone, and I didn't know what I was going to do.

I don't think I cried. I think I was past that.

---

The funeral pyre was three days later.

I stood at the front of the gathered pack, my legs braced against the wind, and I watched the flames take the last person who had ever looked at me like I mattered unconditionally. My body ached from standing. LAS didn't care that this was my father's funeral. It ground through my muscles anyway, slow and merciless.

Nash arrived late.

I heard the murmur move through the crowd before I saw him—that subtle shift, packmates stepping aside, making room the way they always did for an Alpha. I didn't turn around. I kept my eyes on the fire.

But I felt when they stopped beside me. Both of them.

Anastasia wore black, but it was the kind of black that still managed to flatter. Her hand was hooked through Nash's arm, and she wore her bump like an announcement, one palm resting beneath it with practiced tenderness. Nash's jaw was set. He didn't look at me.

The pack noticed. Of course they did. I could feel the whispers at my back like small cold fingers.

When the ceremony ended, Anastasia stepped forward and pulled me into a hug before I could move away. Her arms wrapped around me, tight and performative, and she pressed her cheek to mine.

"I'm so sorry for your loss," she said, loud enough for the people nearest us to hear. And then, dropping her voice to barely a breath against my ear: "He knew, you know. What you were becoming. A wolfless disappointment. He was ashamed of you before the end."

She pulled back with wet eyes, dabbing at the corners with her thumb.

The pack saw a grieving woman offering comfort. I stood perfectly still and let the words do what they were designed to do, settling into the cracks in my chest like something corrosive.

---

The week that followed was the quietest I had ever known.

I stopped answering the door. I stopped eating at regular hours. I sat at the kitchen table sometimes for so long that the light outside would change, and I'd realize I'd lost hours without noticing.

And then the images started.

It began as a flicker—like catching movement in your peripheral vision. A feeling of intrusion at the edge of my mind. At first I thought it was Luna's symptoms worsening, some new phase of the decay. But then the images sharpened, and I understood.

Anastasia.

She was using the pack mind-link. Unauthorized, unprovoked, and with precise, surgical cruelty. The images she pushed into my mind were not accidental. They were chosen.

I tried to block her. Luna tried to help. But my wolf's defenses, already fragile, were dissolving like wet paper. I'd throw up a wall and she'd walk through it. I'd curl into myself and she'd find the seams.

I stopped sleeping.

By the sixth night, I sat on the bathroom floor at two in the morning with my hands pressed over my eyes and Luna barely a flicker in my chest, and I thought: I cannot survive another week of this.

The thought didn't scare me.

That was what scared me.