My Mate Tried to Replace Me at His Ceremony

The Lycan delegation arrived just before sunset.

I wasn't there to see it—I was still at the cabin, pinning the white attendant's dress to fit properly, my hands steady even though my pulse wasn't—but I felt it. Everyone did. The air changed first, pressure dropping so fast my ears popped, and then the aura rolled through the territory like a cold front, heavy and ancient and utterly unanswerable. It pressed down on the pack house, on the training grounds, on every wolf within a mile, and I watched through my cabin window as two young Deltas walking patrol suddenly stopped mid-step and bared their necks to nothing, to empty air, their bodies responding before their minds even understood what they were submitting to.

Lycan royalty. Here. At Daniel's ceremony.

I'd heard stories, the kind whispered in the basement among the Omegas who had no other entertainment—Lycans didn't visit pack territories unless something had gone very, very wrong, or unless they wanted to make sure you understood exactly how small you were in comparison. Daniel had spent weeks preparing for this, rehearsing his posture, his tone, the precise angle of deference that said *respect* without saying *fear.*

I wondered if he was afraid now.

I folded the dress carefully, slid it into a garment bag, and locked the cabin door behind me. The woods were silent in that unnatural way they get when a predator moves through—no birds, no wind, just the low hum of something old and patient watching everything that breathed.

By the time I reached the edge of the ceremonial grounds an hour later, the Lycan delegation was already seated.

I kept to the shadows at first, partly because Aviana's instructions had been explicit—*arrive last, enter from the side, do not draw attention until the processional begins*—and partly because I wanted to see him before he saw me.

Prince Kieran of the Blackthorn Court sat in the place of honor to the right of the altar stone, flanked by a broad-shouldered man I assumed was his Beta and two stone-faced guards whose eyes swept the crowd in slow, methodical arcs. He wasn't the largest wolf present—Daniel had size on him, and so did half the Silverfang Gammas—but size didn't matter when you carried an aura like that. It wasn't loud. It didn't push. It simply *was*, the way gravity was, the way you didn't argue with a cliff face.

He wore dark formal clothes, simple and precise, no decoration except a silver pin at his collar in the shape of a thorn branch. His face was still, unreadable, the kind of stillness that came from years of practice rather than calm. And he was scenting the room.

I saw it in the way his head tilted, barely, his gaze distant and unfocused the way a wolf's gets when they're reading the air instead of the crowd. He scented slowly, methodically, the way someone searches a room for a gas leak—not casual. Hunting.

Then he stopped.

His entire body went rigid, just for a second, shoulders locking, jaw tightening, and his eyes snapped into focus so fast I felt it like a physical jolt even from across the clearing. He didn't look at me—he didn't know where to look yet—but I watched his nostrils flare, his head turn slightly toward the tree line where I stood half-hidden, and something in his expression shifted. Not recognition. Confusion. And underneath it, something sharper.

Hunger.

I stepped back instinctively, deeper into shadow, my hand pressed flat against the nearest tree. My pulse hammered. He couldn't have scented *me*—I was downwind, too far, and I'd been careful. But the way he stared at the trees, the way his Beta leaned in and murmured something low and urgent, told me he'd caught something. A trace. A ghost.

White honeysuckle.

I forced myself to breathe slowly, to stay still, and watched as Prince Kieran said something quiet to his Beta without taking his eyes off the tree line. The Beta nodded once, his face grim, and pulled a small leather folio from his jacket. They bent their heads together over it, voices too low to carry, but I saw the way the Prince's hand curled into a fist against his knee, knuckles white.

Whatever he'd scented, it wasn't something he'd expected to find here.

And whatever was written in that folio, it had just made this ceremony a great deal more complicated than a political marriage.

I stayed in the shadows and waited, my hand still pressed to the tree, feeling the rough bark bite into my palm. Across the clearing, Daniel stepped onto the dais beside Aviana, his Alpha aura flared wide and proud, and he smiled at the crowd like a man who had no idea the ground beneath him had just begun to crack.

Prince Kieran did not smile.

He sat perfectly still, his gaze fixed on the altar stone, and did not look away.

Somewhere behind my ribs, low and certain, the warmth pulsed once—slow, deliberate, awake.

*Soon,* it seemed to say. *Very soon.*