Rejected by My Alpha for His Fake Luna

By the tenth day, I'd lost enough weight that my ribs showed through my shirt.

I noticed it when I pressed my palm against the wall during a coughing fit—the wolfsbane had gotten into my lungs deep enough that every breath rattled—and my hand looked skeletal in the dim light filtering through the door's slit. My skin had gone sallow, the color of old parchment, and there was a tremor in my fingers I couldn't control. It started in my right hand first, then spread to the left. Small. Constant. Like my body was trying to shake something loose that had burrowed too deep to reach.

I made myself eat the food they brought anyway. Forced it down even when my throat closed against it. I needed the strength.

The guard rotation changed at dawn and dusk. I'd been tracking it since the second day, counting the minutes between shifts, noting which pairs were sloppy and which ones checked the den properly before settling in. Tyler was always careful. The other young Omega—a she-wolf named Kira—less so. She talked too much during changeover, and her partner usually just wanted her to finish so they could sit down.

It was during one of those changeovers, on the twelfth day, that I heard it.

"—Challenge Rite's in six days," Kira was saying, her voice carrying through the wooden door like she'd forgotten I had ears. "They're setting up the grounds tomorrow. Lycan delegates get the observer platform, same as always."

"Elder Carla wants extra patrols during the ceremony," her partner muttered. "Like anyone's going to cause trouble with a Lycan Prince watching."

"Is he really coming? I heard it was just the King's emissaries."

"Prince Westley confirmed last week. Alpha Brayden's been in meetings about it for days."

Their voices faded as they moved away from the den, but I didn't need to hear more.

Six days. Lycan delegates. Observer platform.

I pressed my palm flat against the rotted corner of the wall frame and felt the soft give of wood that had been soaking in wolfsbane oil for weeks. I'd been working at it every night during the dead hours when the guards were least attentive, scraping with my fingernails until they bled, millimeter by millimeter. The frame was nearly compromised. Another two nights, maybe three, and I could pry a section loose wide enough to crawl through.

Six days until the Challenge Rite. Three nights to finish the wall. That left me seventy-two hours to drag myself to the grounds and invoke the challenge before Sydney's fraudulent claim became permanent under pack law.

The math was tight. But it was there.

I pulled my hand back and made myself breathe slow, counting the seconds between inhales. My wolf stirred—barely, a flicker so faint I almost missed it—and then went quiet again. She was still there. Hanging on.

I just had to hold on with her.

Elder Mira came on the fourteenth day.

I heard her voice outside the den first, clipped and authoritative in the way only pack healers can manage, cutting through whatever objection the guards were trying to raise. Then the door opened and she stepped inside, a leather satchel slung over her shoulder, her face carefully neutral.

"Welfare visit," she said, not quite looking at me. "Pack protocol."

She knelt beside me, pulled a small light from her satchel, and began the examination in silence. Her hands were steady—healers' hands, trained not to flinch—but I saw the way her jaw tightened when she checked my pulse. When she noted the tremor. When she lifted my eyelid and saw whatever color my eyes had turned.

"How long has the tremor been present?" she asked quietly.

"Four days."

"Nausea?"

"Constant."

"Weight loss?"

"Yes."

She wrote nothing down. Just kept examining, her face unreadable. When she finally sat back, I saw something flicker in her expression—confusion, maybe, or the beginning of a question she didn't yet know how to ask.

I reached into the pocket of my shirt and pulled out the folded piece of paper I'd torn from a supply log three days ago. I'd written on it in careful, tiny script during a guard shift change, using a sliver of charcoal from the bucket channel.

"Research notes," I said, handing it to her. My voice was raw from the wolfsbane air. "For a case study. I need you to cross-reference these markers against Silvercrest Citadel's Lycan healer database. Through the inter-pack medical network."

Mira unfolded the paper. Read it. Her face went very still.

The symptoms I'd listed were specific: prolonged micro-dosing of wolfsbane, cumulative toxicity, suppression of wolf emergence, scent marker masking. I'd framed it clinically, like a hypothetical, but anyone with healer training would recognize the pattern. And anyone who cross-referenced it against Silvercrest's royal bloodline records would see something else entirely.

Mira looked at me for a long moment. Then she folded the paper, slipped it into her satchel, and stood.

"I'll look into it," she said.

She didn't promise anything. Didn't ask questions. Just left.

I didn't know if she would act. I'd given her the information. That was all I could do. I pressed my palm flat against the dirt floor and let myself breathe.

Brayden came on the sixteenth day.

I heard his boots first, heavy on the path outside, and then his voice—low, clipped, annoyed—as he dismissed the guards. The door opened. His pine-and-rain scent rolled in, dulled by the wolfsbane saturation but still unmistakable, and the hollow ache in my chest flared sharp enough to make me gasp.

He stood in the doorway, backlit by late afternoon sun, and stared.

"Goddess," he muttered.

I didn't move. I was sitting against the wall, my knees drawn up, my hands folded in my lap to hide the tremor. I watched him take in the den—the wolfsbane channel, the rotted wood, the bucket in the corner—and saw his face shift through something that might have been shock or might have been guilt. It was hard to tell.

"This isn't—" He stopped. Started again. "The dosage wasn't supposed to be this high."

"Sydney tripled it," I said. My voice came out steady. Quiet. "She bribed the guards."

His jaw tightened. "That's a serious accusation."

"It's true."

"Do you have proof?"

I looked at him. At the man whose bond I'd carried in my chest for years. At the Alpha who'd rejected me on an altar and marked another woman without hesitation.

"Punish her," I said.

Brayden's expression didn't change. "I can't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because she's Luna. Because the pack needs stability. Because I can't have you destabilizing her position with accusations you can't prove." He said it the way he said everything—authoritative, final, like the decision had already been made and I was simply being informed. "I'll reduce the dosage. Non-lethal levels. But you need to cooperate. Accept your rank. No more disruptions."

The hollow ache in my chest pulsed once, sharp and cold.

I dropped my eyes. Bowed my head. Let my shoulders curve inward the way I'd learned to do when I was small and afraid and needed someone to stop looking at me.

"I understand," I whispered.

Brayden's shoulders relaxed. He thought I was submitting. He thought he'd won.

"Good," he said. "I'll have the guards adjust the dosage tonight."

He left. The door closed. I sat in the dark and pressed my palm flat against the dirt floor, feeling the cold bite into my skin.

Something solid. Something real.

Four days until the Challenge Rite. Two nights to finish the wall.

I made myself breathe.