Rejected by My Alpha, Forced to Serve His Mistress

The nights became a shape I learned to survive.

It always started the same way—a warmth low in my belly that didn't belong to me, spreading fast until it wasn't warmth anymore, it was heat, wrong heat, someone else's pleasure poured straight into my body through a bond I hadn't asked for and couldn't cut. I would be lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and then Cullen's satisfaction would hit me like a wave breaking over rocks. My back would arch off the mattress. My hands would fist in the sheets. I never made a sound.

I pressed my thumb into the mark until my nail cut little crescents into my own skin, and I rode it out the way you ride out a fever—rigid, silent, waiting for it to break. Some nights it lasted minutes. Some nights it lasted longer than I could count. When it finally passed, I would lie there shaking, my nightgown stuck to my skin, and I would think: *he doesn't even know I'm here.* That was the worst part. He wasn't doing it to me. He was just doing it, and I happened to be tethered to the wreckage.

During the day, he made sure I remembered I was his.

"Nice color today," he said once, at breakfast, and before I could answer he'd already reached across the table and hooked two fingers into my collar, dragging the fabric aside to show the mark to the Delta visiting from Ashwood. The scar tissue there had never faded right—too much Alpha aura poured into one bite—and it caught the morning light like something raw. The Delta looked away, uncomfortable. Cullen smiled like he'd shown off a trophy.

I held my coffee cup steady and did not react.

Something low and furious rolled through my chest that morning—not the rumble I'd gotten used to, but something sharper. A growl. I felt my teeth want to show. I kept my face perfectly still and drank my coffee.

He escalated after that. He started cornering me anywhere he could find me alone—the kitchen at five in the morning when I came down for water, the library during pack council when everyone else had filed out, the hallway outside my own door where he seemed to materialize out of nowhere lately, like he was waiting for me specifically.

"Zuri's moving into the Alpha suite," he told me one morning, leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching my face like he was waiting for a crack to appear. "Next week. I want you to help her settle the west wing furniture—she likes things a certain way."

"Understood," I said, and reached past him for the kettle.

His jaw ticked. "We're renegotiating the northern border with Ashwood," he said, another day, another cornering, his voice dropping into something almost conversational, almost intimate, like he was sharing a secret with a friend instead of torturing his wife. "Zuri thinks we should push for the timber rights too. She's got good instincts for this. Better than I expected."

I listened. I nodded once, when a nod seemed required. When he finished, I asked, "Is there anything else you need from me in my capacity as Luna?"

The hallway lights flickered—all of them, a stuttering pulse that ran the length of the corridor—as his aura spiked so hard I felt the pressure of it against my skin like a physical shove. He stared at me for three long seconds, breathing hard through his nose, and then he turned and left without a word.

That night the bond carried his rage into me like swallowed fire, and my wolf didn't rumble. She snarled—low, continuous, a sound I felt in my teeth.

The evening it happened, I was carrying his coffee down the east corridor, same as every evening, the tray balanced the way I'd balanced it a thousand times before. The guards outside his study didn't even glance at me anymore. I was furniture. I was routine.

The door was ajar.

The bond hit me before I reached it—a scorching spike of pride, thick and self-satisfied, the emotional taste of a man congratulating himself. I stopped walking.

Through the gap in the door, his voice, lazy and warm, the voice he used when he thought no one important was listening. "—wolfsbane in the documents, planted them myself in his office, easiest thing I've ever done. Gareth took the money without blinking. Timed the arrest with the border renegotiation so the Council never looked twice at the land transfer." A pause. A low laugh. "Baby, I told you. He never saw it coming."

The coffee tray did not shake in my hands. I want that on record, even if only for myself. It did not shake.

But something inside me that had been alive since I was sixteen years old—hopeful, foolish, in love—simply stopped. No drama. No collapse. Just cold, and then nothing.

My wolf did not rumble. Did not growl. She roared, once, a sound that shook my ribs from the inside and belonged to no one but her.

I set the tray on the side table outside his door and walked back to my room.

I opened the ledger. I did not write a number.

I wrote: *He killed my father's honor to steal our land. Everything changes tonight.*