My Mate Ordered Me to Drink Wolfsbane in Public

I should have left.

Every rational part of me screamed to walk away—to gather what remained of my dignity, climb into the car Langston had waiting two towns over, and never look back. But I couldn't. Not yet. Not without understanding how ten years of letters, of sacrifice, of silent love had somehow become hatred in his eyes.

So I stayed.

The Omega quarters were exactly what the name implied. A row of narrow rooms at the pack's outer edge, where the walls were thin and the mattresses were thinner. I told the pack's intake coordinator I was passing through, that I had nowhere else to go. She looked at me with tired pity and handed me a room key without asking questions. Omegas never asked questions.

I unpacked almost nothing. I folded the torn gown carefully—the way you'd fold something sacred—and tucked it into the bottom of my bag. Then I sat on the edge of the stiff mattress and listened to the pack breathe around me.

Deep in my chest, my wolf curled tight and silent. She hadn't spoken since the gravel. Since him.

I pressed a hand to my sternum and tried to remember why I came.

Because I needed to know if the boy I loved was still somewhere inside that cold, beautiful stranger. Because I had given ten years to a promise, and I needed to look it in the eye before I let it go.

Because some part of me was terrifyingly foolish.

---

The pack gathering happened three days later in the grand courtyard—some weekly ritual of reports and announcements, Alphas performing their authority for the crowd. I kept to the back, near the hedgerow, trying to make myself invisible the way I'd practiced for a decade.

But scent doesn't care about invisibility.

I noticed it before he did. The slight shift in his posture. He was mid-sentence, addressing Marcus about eastern border rotations, when his nostrils flared—just barely, just for a second—and his eyes went dark.

He didn't look for me. He was too controlled for that. But his next sentence came out half a beat slower, and his jaw tightened in a way that had nothing to do with pack logistics.

I watched Victoria notice it too.

Her smile didn't waver, but her fingers tightened around his forearm like a vice. Her blue eyes swept the crowd with surgical precision until they landed on me, half-hidden behind the hedgerow. Something cold and calculating moved behind her gaze.

Then she smiled wider and leaned up to press a slow, deliberate kiss to Arian's jaw.

His focus snapped back to her immediately. He covered her hand with his, said something low near her ear. She laughed—that practiced, musical laugh—and the crowd relaxed.

But her eyes never left mine.

---

The assignment came the next morning.

A pack Omega named Petra delivered it personally, her eyes fixed on the floor the entire time. She held out a folded note like it might bite her.

*Report to the grand hall. Full floor scrub. Report to Head Luna Victoria Foster upon completion.*

I read it twice. Then I folded it neatly and put it in my pocket.

"Thank you, Petra."

She scurried away without responding.

The grand hall was enormous—forty feet of marble flooring that probably gleamed on normal days. Today it did not gleam. Someone had made sure of that. Muddy boot prints tracked in deliberate patterns from one end to the other, overlapping and layered. A bucket and a bristle brush sat waiting near the entrance, along with a single rag that had seen better years.

No gloves.

I looked at it for a long moment. My fingers—which had signed documents reorganizing entire pack financial structures, which had pressed royal seals into wax—curled at my sides.

Then I knelt down and started scrubbing.

An hour in, heels clicked on the marble behind me. I didn't look up.

"Missed a spot."

Victoria's voice was sweetness and razors. I heard her crouch to my eyeline—close enough that the diamond pendant at her throat caught the light.

"You know," she said, almost gently, "I don't usually bother with Omegas. But you're a special case, aren't you?"

I kept scrubbing.

"He looked at you during the gathering." Her voice dropped, the sweetness evaporating. "Don't think I didn't see it. Whatever scent trick you're using—"

"I'm not using anything." I said it quietly, still not looking at her.

Silence.

Then her heel pressed down—slowly, deliberately—onto the back of my already raw hand.

"Finish the floors," she said. "And stay away from what's mine."

She walked away. Her footsteps echoed until the hall swallowed them.

I stared at the marble. At the small pink smear where my knuckle had split again.

My wolf stirred, finally. Not with grief this time.

With something else entirely.