My Mate Drugged Me to Mark Another Woman

I stopped taking the injections the morning after Thanksgiving.

Not dramatically. I didn't pour the vial down the sink or throw it against the wall. I just set it on the bathroom shelf and walked away, and every day after that I felt my wolf wake up a little more — like a room filling slowly with light.

By the fourth day, I could smell things again. Really smell them. The coffee Dante made each morning. The specific cologne he wore on the days Fiona came by. The way those two scents had started to blur at the edges, the way they lived in the same air.

I noticed. I said nothing.

I had work to do.

The pack's mind-link communication system ran on a server Dante's IT team managed, but the archive logs — the deep storage, the channels flagged as inactive — those fed into a secondary backup that nobody had touched in two years. Dante didn't know it existed. He'd inherited it from my father's administration and never bothered to learn the infrastructure he'd moved into.

That was his first mistake. My father built things to last.

I spent three nights going through the archived channels. Dates, timestamps, message threads between Dante and Fiona stretching back fourteen months. They had been careful in the beginning — short exchanges, coded language, nothing that would read as damning to a casual eye. But people get comfortable. People get arrogant. By month four they weren't being careful at all.

I found the thread where Dante explained why he'd refused the pre-mating bloodline compatibility ritual.

I had asked him for it once, early in our second year. A standard screening — it checks wolf compatibility, flags hereditary conditions, confirms bond integrity. I'd read about it in my mother's old pack records and thought it was sensible. Dante had laughed. Called me neurotic. Said I was looking for problems that didn't exist.

In the archived thread, he told Fiona the real reason.

*The ritual would have shown my wolf was never damaged. She would have known the whole thing was staged. I couldn't let her run that test.*

Fiona's response: *Smart. She's so desperate to believe you love her. It's almost sad.*

I read that line twice. Then I copied it into the evidence file with the timestamp and the channel ID and moved on.

I didn't have the luxury of feeling it yet.

---

Sienna Cole had been my Beta for six years. She was the kind of person who showed up early and left late and never once asked for credit. During the three years of injections, she had sat with me through the bad mornings — the ones where I couldn't get off the bathroom floor — and she had never, not once, said the thing everyone else said. She never told me to be patient. She never told me my wolf would get stronger soon.

She just sat there. Handed me water. Didn't lie to me.

I asked her to meet me in the east wing library on a Tuesday afternoon, when Dante was at a border patrol briefing and Fiona had no reason to be in the building. I locked the door. I set the evidence file on the table between us.

I watched her face as she read.

Sienna was not a woman who showed much. But her jaw tightened on the dosage logs. Her hand went still on the page with the mind-link transcripts. When she got to the Thanksgiving counter — I had included the camera timestamp, the scent confirmation, all of it — she set the papers down and looked at the wall for a long moment.

"Did you ever believe it?" I asked. "What Hollis said about my wolf."

She turned to look at me. "No," she said. Just that. No softening, no qualification. "Your wolf was never defective, Eloise. I knew it. I just couldn't prove it."

Something in my chest loosened a fraction.

"I need access to the communication archive," I said. "The full backup server. Without triggering Dante's monitoring alerts."

"I can do that." She said it the way she said most things — quietly, like it was already decided. "I'll need two days to route it through a clean channel. He won't see a flag."

"Two days is fine."

She looked at the evidence file again. "How long have you been building this?"

"Since the night I checked the security cameras."

She nodded slowly. "The Alliance Ceremony is in eighteen days."

"I know."

We looked at each other across the table. Eighteen days. Sixty million dollars. Six allied packs in one room.

"I'll have the archive access ready by Thursday," Sienna said.

---

I scheduled the appointment with Dr. Hollis for Wednesday morning. Nine o'clock, the medical suite on the ground floor, the room that smelled like antiseptic and the particular floral compound she used in the injections. I had sat in that chair forty-seven times. I knew every crack in the ceiling.

I sat down across from her and folded my hands in my lap and smiled.

"I wanted to talk about the next cycle," I said. "I've been doing some reading. About the suppression compound. The mechanism."

Hollis was a careful woman. She had a careful face — neutral, professional, the kind of expression that gave nothing away. "Of course," she said. "What would you like to know?"

I asked her about the compound's half-life. About the interaction between the sedative suppressant and a wolf's natural aura production. About why the dosage had been increasing over the past six months rather than decreasing, if the goal was preparation rather than suppression.

Every question was technically reasonable. Every question had a technically accurate answer. She gave me those answers in the smooth, measured voice of someone who had rehearsed this conversation in some form, for some version of this moment, and was relieved that the version sitting across from her seemed calm.

But her left hand moved to her pen twice when it didn't need to. She broke eye contact on the dosage question for just a half-second before recovering. Small things. The kind of things a wolf with a dulled nose and a drugged instinct would never catch.

My wolf caught all of it.

"That's so helpful," I said warmly, when she finished. "I feel so much better understanding the process. Same time next week?"

"Same time next week," she confirmed.

I thanked her. I left. I added three behavioral notes to the evidence file before I reached the end of the hallway.

Thirteen days until the Alliance Ceremony.

I was almost ready.