My Mate Traded Me to Rogues for His Mistress

The liquid burned going down.

Not like alcohol. Like acid. Like swallowing fire and broken glass and something that didn't belong inside a living body. I tried to drop the glass, but my fingers wouldn't obey. The crystal slipped from my hand and shattered on the floor.

Alexander caught me before I hit the ground.

"There," he said, his voice distant. "That wasn't so hard."

My legs gave out. He lowered me to the carpet, and I felt the softness against my cheek, but I couldn't move. Couldn't turn my head. My limbs had gone numb, heavy as stone.

The Wolfsbane was spreading fast.

I tried to speak, to beg him to call a healer, but my tongue was thick in my mouth. All that came out was a choked sound, barely human.

"Shh." He crouched beside me, brushing hair from my face with false tenderness. "It's just to help you sleep. You'll feel better in the morning."

Liar. I could feel it in my blood, in the way my heart was stuttering, in the black spots creeping into my vision. This wasn't sleep. This was dying.

He stood and walked to the dresser. When he came back, he was holding my grandfather's Silver Dagger.

"Can't have you keeping this," he said, turning it over in his hands. The blade caught the moonlight. "You've proven you can't be trusted with weapons. What kind of Luna brings a dagger to her mating suite?"

I wanted to scream that he'd stolen it. That it was mine. That it was all I had left of my family, of my heritage, of the mountain home I'd left behind for him.

But I couldn't make a sound.

He slipped the dagger into his jacket pocket. Just like that. My last line of defense, my grandfather's legacy, gone.

Then he disappeared from view. I heard him moving around the room, heard fabric rustling. When he came back, he was dragging something—the decorative rug from beside the bed.

He rolled me onto it. My body flopped like a corpse, lifeless and unresponsive. The world tilted as he wrapped the rug around me, cocooning me in darkness and the smell of dust and old wool.

"Solving the problem," he muttered. "Just like Jemma said. She was right. You're a threat. A jealous, unstable threat to everything I've built."

His footsteps moved away. A door opened—not the main entrance, but something else. The service exit, maybe. Cold air hit my face through the gap in the rug.

Then I was moving. He'd lifted me, thrown me over his shoulder like a sack of grain. Each step jarred my bones. I tried to fight, to struggle, but my body wouldn't respond. The poison had me completely.

We went down stairs. Through hallways. I caught glimpses through the rug's weave—stone walls, dim lighting, the back corridors where servants walked. No one stopped us. No one asked questions.

Why would they? He was the Alpha.

Outside, the night air was sharp and cold. Rain had started to fall, light but steady. I heard a car door open. He dumped me into what felt like a trunk—no, a back seat. The rug unrolled slightly, and I could see the leather interior of an SUV.

The door slammed. The engine started.

We drove.

I don't know how long. Time had gone strange, stretching and compressing. The Wolfsbane was doing something to my perception, making everything feel distant and unreal. I focused on breathing. Just breathing. In and out. Don't stop. Don't let it win.

His phone rang.

Alexander answered on speaker. "What?"

"Are you on your way?" Jemma's voice, sweet and poisonous. "Juan's people are getting impatient."

"I'm twenty minutes out."

"Good." A pause. "You're doing the right thing, you know. She would have destroyed everything. The bond, your power, us."

"I know."

"This way, the debt is cleared, and you keep what matters. It's strategic. It's what a real Alpha does."

I heard him glance back at me. "She's useless anyway. Wolfless. Paranoid. What kind of Luna tries to reject her mate at the altar?"

"Exactly. You're trading dead weight for your true source of power. For me."

"For you," he repeated, like a prayer.

They talked a few minutes more, but I stopped listening. The words had carved something out of me, left a hollow space where hope used to be. He wasn't confused. Wasn't under a spell he couldn't break.

He'd chosen this.

Chosen her.

Chosen to drug me, to steal from me, to trade me like property.

The SUV slowed. Stopped.

Alexander got out. I heard other voices—rough, male, speaking in low tones. The back door opened, and hands grabbed the rug, dragging me out.

I hit the ground hard.

The impact knocked what little air I had left from my lungs. The rug fell away, and rain hit my face. Cold. Clean. I lay there in the mud, staring up at a sky I could barely see through the darkness and the poison.

Footsteps approached. Boots. Expensive ones, barely touched by the mud.

Alexander looked down at me. His face was blank. Empty.

"The debt's cleared," he said to someone I couldn't see. "She's yours."

A different voice answered. Deep. Controlled. "You're trading your mate."

"She's defective. You're welcome to her."

Something changed hands. Paper rustling. A ledger, maybe.

The new voice spoke again, and this time I heard the disgust in it. "You're pathetic."

Alexander didn't respond. I heard his footsteps retreating, heard the SUV door slam, heard the engine start.

He left.

Just drove away.

I lay there in the rain and the mud, my body shutting down, my mate's mark burning on my neck like a brand. Around me, shadows moved—rogues, I realized. The ones Alexander had traded me to.

One of them crouched beside me. I couldn't see his face clearly, but I felt his gaze. Steady. Assessing.

"Get her inside," he said. "Carefully."

Hands lifted me. Gentle this time. Strange.

The last thing I saw before the darkness took me completely was the taillights of Alexander's SUV disappearing into the night.

And I thought: I hope the poison kills me before they do.