My Alpha's Mistress Murdered Our Unborn Twins

I wore white to the memorial because that was the tradition—white for grief, white for the ones who came before and the ones who left too soon. Maren had helped me dress that morning, her hands gentle on the buttons at my back, careful not to touch the places where my body still hadn't forgiven me for surviving.

"You don't have to go," she'd said. "No one would think less of you."

"I have to go," I told her. "They were mine."

The great hall of the pack house had been stripped of its usual warmth—no fire in the hearth, no music, just rows of pack members standing in hushed clusters, their voices lowered to the register reserved for death. I took my place near the front, beside the small table where the healer had laid two white candles, unlit, waiting.

That was when Blakely walked in.

Red. Not maroon, not burgundy—a bright, deliberate red, the exact shade Ironveil tradition reserved for mating ceremonies. I'd worn a dress that color myself once, the day Elias marked me. I knew what it meant. Every wolf in that hall knew what it meant.

She found my eyes the second she crossed the threshold, and she did not look away. Not when she passed the elders. Not when she took her place beside Elias at the front, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. Not once.

My wolf lifted her head inside me, a low growl building in her chest, and for a moment I thought I might be sick right there in front of everyone. I pressed two fingers to my wrist and breathed through it. *Not here. Not yet.*

The elders began the old words for the departed, the ones about the Moon Goddess gathering young souls before their time. I heard maybe half of it. My eyes kept drifting to the candles, unlit, waiting for hands that would never come to light them.

When Elder Rourke asked, gently, where the pups should be laid to rest—whether in the pack's burial grove or somewhere more private, as some families preferred—I watched Blakely lean toward Elias and murmur something too quiet for the room to catch.

Elias's face didn't change. That was the thing I would remember longest. It didn't change at all.

"The Omegas can handle it," he said, waving one hand like he was dismissing a scheduling conflict. "Wherever's convenient."

The silence that followed had a texture to it. I felt the elders shift, felt Damon's jaw tighten where he stood near the wall, felt the collective held breath of a room full of wolves who knew, on some animal level, that something had just been said that could never be unsaid.

And inside me, my wolf—who had been keening without pause since the healer's ward, a grief so loud I'd had to muffle it just to function—went silent.

Not broken. Not surrendered. Silent the way the forest goes silent before a storm breaks it open.

I didn't cry. I didn't say anything. I just stood there in my white dress and watched the man I'd married wave away the only resting place our children would ever have, while the woman in red watched me do it.

*Something has to be done about this,* I thought, and the thought arrived without heat, without tears—just clean and cold, like water under ice.

---

Three days later, I asked Maren for a private consultation. She met me in the small treatment room off the healer's ward, the one with the good light and the herbs drying on strings above the window—the same herbs that had gone missing from my cabinet, I noticed, still hanging there in careless abundance.

"How are you healing?" she asked, checking my pulse with two fingers.

"Physically, fine." I watched her face while I said the next part. "I wanted to ask about the conception. The pregnancy itself. How it started."

Maren's fingers stilled against my wrist for half a second too long.

"What do you mean?" Her voice was careful, professionally smooth.

"I mean I want to understand the timeline. When exactly I conceived. What the process looked like from your end." I kept my tone light, curious, the tone of a grieving mother wanting to hold on to any detail she could. "You were involved from the beginning, weren't you?"

"Natasha." She set down her instruments. Her eyes wouldn't quite meet mine. "I signed a confidentiality agreement with the Alpha. Regarding certain... medical matters. I can't discuss specifics."

"I'm not asking you to break it," I said gently. "I'm just asking if there's anything unusual I should know. For my own healing. As your patient."

Maren's throat moved as she swallowed. She glanced at the door, then back at me, and I watched twenty years of pack loyalty war with something else in her face—something that looked, unmistakably, like guilt.

"There are things," she said finally, so quietly I almost lost it beneath the sound of the herbs rustling in the draft from the window, "that were arranged before you ever knew you were pregnant. Things I was told never to discuss with you. I'm sorry, Natasha. I can't say more than that."

She didn't need to. The map was already forming in my mind, every line of it pointing in the same direction—inward, toward Elias, toward whatever he'd built behind my back long before Blakely ever emptied my cabinet.

"Thank you, Maren," I said. "That's all I needed to know."