My Alpha’s Mother Murdered My Fated Mate

Davis gave her the guest wing.

I stood in the corridor outside our bedroom and listened to him deliver the decision in that flat, final Alpha tone he used when he'd already made up his mind and was simply informing the room. Political pressure from the Lee family elders. A Truth Ritual to be arranged. Temporary accommodations until the matter could be resolved properly.

Temporary.

I said nothing. I let him finish, nodded once, and walked back inside.

The packhouse had always felt like a stage. Now it felt like a cage with two wolves in it.

Scarlett settled into the guest wing like she was reclaiming territory, which I supposed she believed she was. I could feel her moving through the corridors — not literally, but the way you feel a shift in pressure before a storm. The pack felt it too. I watched it in the way conversations stopped a half-second too late when I entered a room, in the careful neutrality on the Betas' faces, in the way the Omegas kept their eyes down a little harder than usual.

They were waiting to see which of us would break first.

Neither of us would. But only one of us knew that.

---

I found her in Davis's study on the second afternoon.

The door was ajar. I didn't rush. I stood in the hallway for exactly three seconds, listening to the low register of her voice — intimate, practiced, the tone of a woman who knew which frequencies worked on a particular man. Then I pushed the door open and walked in like I owned the room.

Because I did.

Scarlett was standing close to Davis's desk, one hand resting on the edge of it, her body angled toward him in a way that was calculated to look unconscious. Davis was behind the desk, his expression unreadable, his eyes moving to me the moment I appeared.

I didn't look at him.

"There you are," I said to Scarlett, pleasantly. "I've been looking for you."

She straightened. "This is a private conversation."

"This is my mate's study." I turned toward the doorway, where two of the packhouse guards had materialized at the sound of my voice. I hadn't called them. They'd simply come, the way guards do when a Luna projects the right kind of authority. "Please escort our guest back to the wing that's been prepared for her. She seems to have gotten turned around."

The guards stepped forward.

Scarlett's eyes went to Davis. Waiting. Asking.

Davis said nothing.

That silence cost him something, I think. I watched it register on Scarlett's face — the flicker of something raw and old, a wound that had never properly closed. Then her expression hardened back into the mask she wore, and she walked out between the guards with her chin up, not looking at me as she passed.

I waited until her footsteps faded down the corridor. Then I looked at Davis.

He was watching me with that unreadable expression, the one I'd spent four years cataloguing without ever fully decoding.

"Thank you," I said, and left before he could respond.

---

The kitchen was quiet when I went down that evening. I wanted tea. I wanted five minutes without performing anything for anyone.

I should have known better.

Scarlett was already there.

She was standing at the counter with a mug in both hands, and when she turned and saw me, something in her face shifted — all the careful control she'd been maintaining for two days cracking along a fault line I hadn't seen coming.

"You don't even have a scent," she said.

I kept moving toward the kettle. "Good evening."

"I mean it." Her voice was climbing. "You walk around this packhouse wearing my name, my title, my life — and underneath all of it, there's nothing. No wolf-scent. Nothing real. What are you?"

I set the kettle down. Turned to face her.

"I'm the Luna of this pack," I said. "Which is more than you are right now."

The mug left her hand before I finished the sentence.

I got my arm up in time. The coffee hit my forearm instead of my face — scalding, immediate, the kind of pain that whites out your vision for a half-second before your body catches up with what just happened. I heard the ceramic shatter on the floor. I heard Scarlett's breathing, ragged and too fast.

I looked down at my arm. The skin was already reddening.

Then I looked up at her.

Scarlett Lee, the woman whose name I had worn for four years, was shaking. Not with rage. With something that looked, underneath all the fury, a great deal like fear.

Good.

She should be afraid.

I was just getting started.