When My Alpha Chose His Fake Luna Over Me

Cal summoned me before the breakfast bell.

I knew the shape of the summons before the Omega finished delivering it. Sienna would have gone to him at first light with her voice pitched low and worried, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea she wouldn't drink. *He was locked out, Elder. In that rain. She screamed at me in the yard, I didn't know what to do.* Something like that. Something clean enough that no one who wanted to believe her would think to check.

I walked into the Elder's study with Barnaby's warmth still ghosting the inside of my coat.

Cal did not offer me a seat. Sienna stood at his left shoulder in that same cream sweater, sleeves still pushed up, eyes lowered like she couldn't bear to watch. Elise sat by the window with her hands folded around a teacup and did not look at me at all.

"Lara." Cal's voice had the Elder cadence, slow and public even when the room was small. "There was an incident last night. A disruption in the yard. The Luna"—the word landed heavy, deliberate—"reports that you were shouting. That the pup was distressed because of your handling."

I folded my hands in front of me. I kept my eyes on the wall just past his ear.

"I understand, Elder."

"This is a warning." He rolled a pen between his fingers. "One warning. If there is another disruption—another scene in the yard, another argument with the Luna, anything that requires me to sit in this room again—you will be removed from the pack house. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Elder."

Inside my chest my wolf snarled. Not a sound anyone else could hear. A vibration under my sternum, low and rolling, so loud in my own bones that my jaw tightened before I could stop it. Cal's eyes flicked to my mouth. He mistook the tension for something he could name.

"You are dismissed."

I turned and walked out with my hands still folded and my back straight, and I did not let the door slam behind me because a slammed door was a scene. In the corridor Sienna's perfume clung to the wall where she had leaned. I catalogued it. Rose. Something powdered under the rose. And under that, faint as a whisper, the bitter herbal thread I had first smelled in Dillon's glass.

She carried it on her.

*Ledger,* my wolf said. Not a word. A pressure. A place inside my head where a page turned.

---

The days went narrow after that.

I scrubbed. I served. I kept my face soft and my mouth closed and I listened. Every time I cleared Dillon's table I lifted his tumbler to stack it and let my nose linger for the half second it took to memorize the exact shape of the poison in the glass. Bitter. Chemical. Slightly sweet at the finish, like the wolfsbane had been mixed with something to hide it in the burn of the bourbon. I learned the smell so well I could pick it out of a room without turning my head.

I learned Sienna's voices too. Three of them. The soft one she used at dinner, breathy and grateful. The public one at pack meetings, warmer, more measured. And the third, the one that came through the wall of my basement when she thought no one was awake to hear it—flat, clipped, contemptuous, the voice of someone talking to a subordinate she was tired of managing. That was the voice I filed hardest.

And I walked the corridors of the pack house at the hours the Gamma ran his drills, and I let my eyes track the small dark eyes of the trail-cams tucked into the crown molding, the coat hooks, the light fixtures above the stairwell. I had watched Marcus review the footage once, standing behind him with a mop, invisible. I remembered where the blind spots were. I remembered where they weren't.

My wolf watched with me. She did not name herself yet. She was waiting for something, and I did not press her.

---

The pack run came on the sixth day.

Mandatory. Full pack. The shifted wolves peeled off the porch in a great gray-brown wave and vanished into the treeline, and I was left to jog the trail after them on two legs, in boots, with the Elders' eyes on my back as I started up the ridge alone.

I made it two miles before I smelled him.

Rogue. Not one I knew. Pine tar and cold iron and something older under it, road-dust and grief. I slowed on the narrow ridge path where the pines closed in and the drop opened to my right, and three shapes came out of the trees in front of me and one closed the trail behind.

The one in front had a scar along his left jaw.

He didn't speak. He didn't need to. He moved forward one step, and the two flanking him widened, and I understood without a word passing between us that they were not there to talk. They were there to herd.

I backed. The edge crumbled under my heel.

"Don't—" I said, and it was the only word I got out, and then the scarred one lunged and my boot went out from under me on the wet lip of the ridge and the sky pitched sideways.

Fifteen feet. Long enough to think three separate thoughts. *Kayson. Barnaby. Not like this.*

My shoulder hit rock. Something inside my chest cracked with a wet pop that was almost a sound. My hand flailed and caught a root the thickness of my wrist and the jerk yanked my shoulder out of its socket with a white shriek that traveled from my collarbone to my teeth.

I hung.

Above me, boots crunched to the ridge edge. A pause. A long, considering pause. Then footsteps retreating into the pines.

The dark closed. My breath came in short bright shreds. Every one of them dragged a knife through my ribs.

And inside me, my wolf came up so fast and so hard I felt her hit the inside of my skin like a body slamming a door.

My fingers on the root moved. I looked at them.

The nails had gone long. Black. Curved. Not human. My knuckles had thickened and my palm had begun to darken with pads, and the pain in my hand was the pain of bone rearranging itself under skin that was not ready.

"No," I whispered against the wall. "No, no, not here, not yet—"

She fought me. I felt her fight me. I felt her want the drop, the trees, the scarred throat of the man who had herded me over the edge.

*Not yet,* I said, teeth clenched around the root. *If they find claws on this ledge they will kill us both before dawn.*

She understood. Slowly. Furiously.

My fingers shortened. The claws withdrew. The pads went pale and the nails went blunt and human again, and I hung against the root shelf with sweat freezing on my temples and one shoulder screaming and my ribs grinding wetly with every breath.

Alone. In the dark. Wolf and woman both breathing the same shallow breath.

Waiting for a dawn patrol that did not know yet to look for me.