My Mate Drugged Me to Mark Another Woman

The needle mark in my hip still throbbed when I climbed into bed that night.

Three years of weekly injections, and the bruising never really faded. Dr. Hollis, our pack healer, said my wolf was too fragile to take the bond. She said the medicine would prepare me. She said to be patient.

I had been patient for thirty-six months.

I tried to mind-link Dante again. My fated mate. The Alpha of Ironvale Pack. The man who took a rogue's claws to the chest three years ago shielding me, the man who said his wolf had broken in the fight and couldn't complete the marking yet.

The link went nowhere. Just static, like calling into an empty hallway.

I picked up my phone. No texts. No missed calls. He'd told me he was working late in his study on the alliance paperwork. Three weeks until the Pack Alliance Ceremony, and the sixty million dollar resource deal still needed my signature.

My wolf shifted under my skin. A weak, drugged shift, the kind I'd grown used to. She felt like a candle in a jar.

Something made me reach for the tablet on the nightstand. The pack house had cameras in every common space. Dante had insisted, security reasons. Only the Alpha and Luna had access. I told myself I just wanted to see if he'd fallen asleep at his desk.

I opened the live feed for his study.

The screen filled, and my hand stopped working.

Fiona was on his lap.

Fiona Bell. The Omega I pulled out of a rogue camp ten years ago when she was a starving teenager. The girl I'd named, fed, sent to college on the Foster Foundation. The young woman who hugged me last week and called me her sister.

She was straddling Dante in the leather chair behind his desk. Her hair was loose down her back. Her shirt was open. And his teeth, Goddess, his teeth, were buried in the curve of her neck. Right where a mark goes. Right where mine should have been three years ago.

He wasn't damaged. He was marking her.

The mind-link channel he'd left open for late-night work crackled in my head. Not to me. To her.

"Easy, baby. The injections have her out cold by now. She couldn't smell us if we mated on her bedroom floor."

Fiona laughed. A small, satisfied sound.

"That healer's worth every coin I pay her," he said. "Eloise's wolf is so dulled she can't tell I'm unmarked. Three more weeks. She signs the alliance papers, the Foster territory transfers clean, and then we can stop pretending."

I watched my own hand on the tablet. Steady. I didn't know it could be steady.

I tapped the record button.

I went very still in the dark.

By two in the morning I was at my desk in the small office off my bedroom, the door locked.

My father had been Alpha Gerald Foster. He was dead now four years, but he taught me one thing I never forgot. A Luna who can't follow the money is a Luna who can be robbed.

I logged into the pack's shared medical database with my Luna credentials. Dante had never bothered to revoke them. He thought I was too sick and too sad to look.

There it was. Three years of dosage logs under my name. Hollis had called it mark preparation therapy. The compounds listed on the labels were sedative suppressants used in rogue containment. I had been taking rogue tranquilizer once a week for thirty-six months and calling it medicine.

I pulled the financials next. Foster territory had its own accounts, separate from the Ironvale general fund. My father had built it that way for exactly this reason. I cross-checked outgoing transfers. Six payments over eighteen months, routed through a shell company registered to a name I knew. Bryce Tanner. Dante's Beta.

I downloaded everything. Medical logs. Bank trails. Forty-seven minutes of camera footage of Dante's mouth on Fiona's throat. The mind-link audio. I emailed copies to a private cloud account my father had set up under a name that wasn't mine.

When I closed the laptop, I noticed my hands. They weren't shaking.

Inside my chest, low and dim and absolutely awake, my wolf was growling.

She hadn't growled in three years.

I went down for water before sunrise. The kitchen was dark. I had walked through it a thousand times.

Tonight I stopped at the island and breathed in.

There it was. Faint, old, but my wolf caught it now that the latest injection was wearing off and adrenaline had me sharper than I'd been in years. Musk and a powdery floral scent that wasn't mine.

The kitchen counter.

Thanksgiving.

I had spent the entire day cooking for Dante. I'd come off an injection that morning so brutal I'd had to sit on the bathroom floor for an hour before I could stand up. I made him turkey anyway, and stuffing, and the cranberry thing his mother used to make. I lit candles. I went upstairs to lie down for just twenty minutes and slept three hours.

When I came back down the food was cold and untouched and the kitchen smelled wrong, and I couldn't tell why, because my wolf was a candle in a jar.

They had been on this counter. While I slept upstairs in our bed. While the food I made him cooled six feet away.

I put my palm flat on the marble. Cold and clean now. They'd wiped it down.

I didn't cry. The thing that was happening in my chest was past crying.

At eight o'clock I sat across from him at breakfast.

Dante looked up from his coffee and gave me the soft smile I used to live on. "How's the hip, sweetheart? Hollis said yesterday's dose was a higher concentration. She thinks we're getting close."

"It's sore," I said. I poured myself orange juice with a hand that did exactly what I told it to. "But better."

"Good." He reached across and squeezed my shoulder. The same shoulder his Beta's bank account had been bleeding through for eighteen months. "Three weeks, Ellie. We sign the alliance, we secure our future, and then we focus on you. On us."

"Our future," I repeated.

"You've sacrificed so much," he said. He held my eyes a beat too long, the way he always did when he was lying. I'd never noticed before. "I'm going to make every day of it up to you."

"I know you will." I smiled. It felt like putting on a coat I hadn't worn in a long time.

The front door chimed. Heels on the foyer tile.

"Eloise?" Fiona's voice, warm as fresh bread. "I brought the gala donor list. Sorry, am I early?"

She came around the doorway in a cream sweater I'd bought her for Christmas, smiling at me with the same careful warmth she'd been performing for ten years. Her neck was high-collared. I knew exactly what was under that collar.

"Not early at all." I stood. I let her hug me. Her hair smelled like Dante's cologne. "Come in, sweetheart. We have so much to go over."

Over her shoulder, Dante was watching me. Counting his lies.

I smiled at him. Inside my chest, my wolf bared her teeth.

He didn't see her yet.

He would.