My Mate Chose His Mistress Over Our Unborn Child

The guest room smelled like nothing.

Not clean nothing — empty nothing. The kind of nothing that happens when a room has been stripped of every scent that ever mattered in it. Someone had washed the sheets in unscented detergent, replaced the candles, maybe even repainted. There was no trace of me in here. There had never been a trace of me in here. I'd spent three years sleeping two doors down the hall, and this room had always been just a room.

I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and listened to the pack house settle around me.

I'd told myself I could do this. Six weeks. Stand beside him at the necessary events, let the pack see what they needed to see, and meanwhile the specialists would come north to Nana. That was the trade. That was all it was. A transaction I'd agreed to with my eyes open.

But it was past midnight and I couldn't sleep, and the Healer's reference book I'd left in Ronan's study months ago kept surfacing in my mind — Petra's handwriting in the margins, a chapter on bloodline complications I'd been reading before everything ended. I needed it. Not urgently. But I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't lying here calculating the exact number of days until I could leave again.

I got up.

The hallway was dark. The pack house had gone quiet hours ago — the kind of deep quiet that meant the night sentries had cycled through and everyone else had found their beds. My feet knew the route without thinking. Past the second staircase, past the portrait of Ronan's grandfather that had always watched me with the same flat expression Adele used in meetings, past the door that used to be mine and was now, presumably, Aura's.

I stopped in front of the study.

Light showed under the door. A thin line of it, warm and amber. I didn't think anything of it. Ronan worked late. He'd always worked late.

I opened the door.

The orchid scent hit me before my eyes adjusted — thick, fresh, smeared across the room like it had been applied with deliberate hands. Not the faint trace of someone who'd passed through. The full, deliberate weight of someone who had stayed.

Ronan was standing near the desk. His collar was open. His hand rested on Aura's waist with the easy, thoughtless familiarity of long habit — the same way it used to rest on mine, once, in rooms like this one.

They both looked up.

Ronan's expression shifted. Not to guilt. Not to shame. To something flatter and more honest than either of those things — the mild irritation of a man interrupted while doing something he'd never considered hiding, because it had never once occurred to him that he should.

Aura's lips curved. Just slightly. Just enough.

I stood in the doorway and looked at Ronan for three seconds. I counted them. One. Two. Three. Long enough to make sure he understood I wasn't flinching, wasn't running, wasn't giving him the reaction he'd probably already filed away as predictable. Long enough to look at his hand on her waist and feel — nothing. Not the nothing of numbness. The nothing of a door that had already been closed for so long the hinges had rusted.

I pulled the door shut behind me. Quietly.

I walked back down the hall. Past the portrait. Past the staircase. Into the guest room that smelled like nothing.

I sat on the edge of the bed and reached for my grandmother's recipe book.

The Healer's report was still there, folded between sourdough and chicken broth, exactly where I'd left it. I didn't open it. I just held the book in my lap and breathed, slow and even, and let myself think.

He'd signed the papers. He'd tracked me to Nana's cottage. He'd leveraged a dying woman's care to buy himself a political prop for six weeks — and then, on the same night I walked back through his door, he hadn't even moved his hand.

I thought about the wooden wolf he'd carved in the hunter's cabin, the one I'd left on the bed in a straight, silent line with everything else. I thought about what it had meant to me then, and what it meant to me now, and the distance between those two things was the whole shape of the last three years.

My wolf was still silent. No growl, no warmth, no pressure at the back of my skull. Just the absence, the room with the furniture removed.

But underneath the absence — something else. The same thing that had turned over once at the pack house, restless, the night I laid out all his gifts on the bed like evidence. It didn't roar. It didn't surface. It just sat in the dark behind my ribs and waited, patient as something that has all the time in the world.

I opened the recipe book to a blank page near the back.

I found a pen in the nightstand drawer.

I started writing down everything I knew.