My Mate Rejected Me to Crown Another Luna

The scent came first, before anything else changed.

By the third day, jasmine and cedarwood lived in the hallway outside Luca's study. It clung to the banister, to the couch cushions in the common room, to the collar of a jacket he'd left over a chair. I recognized what it was. A wolf doesn't drape her scent across a territory by accident. Every wolf in that pack house could smell what Maci was doing, and every wolf in that pack house pretended not to notice, because noticing meant choosing a side, and no one wanted to choose the losing one.

I kept working. I told myself the smell didn't matter. I told myself a lot of things that week.

The dinner happened on a Thursday. I know because I'd spent the afternoon boiling down a poisoned warrior's antidote, the smell of scorched silverleaf still under my nails when I walked into the hall twenty minutes late. My seat—the one beside Luca I'd held for five years, the one with the slight worn patch in the wood from where I always rested my elbow—was already full. Maci sat there, laughing at something Grant said, her hand loose and easy on the table like she'd always belonged.

Luca didn't look up. He didn't say a word.

The only open seat left was at the far end, past the healers, down among the Omegas who kept their eyes on their plates. I walked the length of that table in front of forty wolves and I sat down without a sound. Someone near the middle smirked. I heard it more than saw it—a soft exhale of amusement, quickly swallowed.

I didn't eat. I left before dessert. In the hallway, I took out my phone and photographed the seating chart posted on the corkboard outside the kitchen—the one the house staff updated weekly. Maci's name, freshly inked, beside Luca's. Mine, nowhere on the page. I saved the image, labeled it with the date, and went back to my shelves.

The records came next, and those hurt differently, because records were supposed to be permanent. I found the discrepancy while cross-checking a training manual I'd written myself two years ago—my grandmother's moonpetal stabilization method, simplified into three flat steps, my name gone from the header. Maci Carter, it read now. Lead Healing Innovator, Ironvale Pack.

I found the junior healer who'd helped me file the originals, a soft-spoken girl named Priya who used to ask me questions until midnight because she wanted to understand, not just memorize.

"Priya." I kept my voice even. "Who changed the attribution on the stabilization formula?"

She wouldn't look at me. Her hands twisted the hem of her sleeve. "Alpha's orders," she whispered. "We were told the formulas belong to the pack now. Not to any one person."

"Thank you for telling me."

"Serena—" She stopped herself, glanced down the corridor, and said nothing else.

I photographed the altered page that night, careful to capture the timestamp in the corner. I added it to the folder growing steadily on my secured drive, a folder with a name no one but me would ever think to search for.

The workshop was the clearest theft yet, and Maci didn't even bother to disguise it. She called it an Advanced Healing Workshop, printed materials with her name across the header in bold, gold-embossed letters, and stood in front of twelve of Ironvale's healers to present my grandmother's moonpetal stabilization method—the one that had taken her a decade to perfect, the one I'd spent nights translating into language modern healers could use—as her own innovation.

I sat at the back and said nothing. I recorded everything on my device, tucked low against my knee, and noted each stolen formula by name as she spoke them, her voice bright and confident, utterly untroubled by the fact that she didn't understand a single mechanism she was describing. She mispronounced silverleaf's binding compound. No one corrected her.

Halfway through, a healer near the front—young, new, uncertain—glanced back at me, her brow creasing like she was trying to solve something that didn't add up.

Maci caught the look. She smiled without missing a beat. "Our pack is so lucky to have such dedicated learners," she said, warm as syrup, eyes flicking to me. "Isn't that right, older sister?"

Every head turned. I smiled back, small and unreadable, and said nothing at all.

I recorded the workshop's final ten minutes, closed the file, and walked out into the corridor before the applause finished. Somewhere in my chest, quiet and small, something turned over—not grief this time. Something colder. Something patient.

The petition was already sent. The evidence was already growing. All that was left now was waiting for the night they would give me no choice but to use it.