When My Alpha Chose His Fake Luna Over Me

Dawn patrol found me at first light. Marcus's Gamma nose caught the blood on the root shelf before his eyes found me, and he hauled me up over the ridge with two of his warriors and a rope. He did not ask what happened. He set my shoulder in the dirt with one clean wrench that made me bite through my lip, and he wrapped my ribs with strips torn off his own shirt, and the whole time his mouth was a flat line that told me he had already guessed at least half of it.

"Elder's study," he said. "Now."

I walked. Every step was a knife under my ribs. I kept my chin up because my wolf would not let me put it down.

Dillon was already standing behind Cal's desk when I came in, arms crossed, ring rolling on his finger. Sienna was on the couch with a blanket over her knees like she'd been the one who fell. Elise was pouring tea.

"There were rogues on the ridge," I said. "Three of them. One with a scar on the left jaw. They herded me over the edge. The trail-cam on the northeast marker will have—"

"Enough." Dillon's voice cut across mine before I reached the word *cam*. He did not look at me while he said it. He looked at the wall over my shoulder, the way a man looks at a picture he has decided not to hang. "You will not stand in this house and accuse the Luna's watch of ignoring a threat that no one else scented. You will not."

"I'm not accusing the watch. I'm asking you to pull the footage."

"You are dismissed."

"Dillon—"

"*Alpha,*" Cal said, quiet and sharp.

I closed my mouth.

The disciplinary hearing was called for that same evening. Not for the rogues. For me. Slandering the Luna. Disrupting pack discipline. The words were read out in the main hall in front of every wolf in Ironvale, and my ribs ground against each other every time I breathed and I stood there in the same torn shirt Marcus had wrapped me in, and I watched Cal step down off the dais toward me with his sleeves rolled and I understood, one whole second before it happened, what he was going to do.

He hit me open-handed. Across the mouth. The crack of it rang off the vaulted ceiling and came back doubled.

My head snapped sideways. Blood filled the space between my teeth. I did not stagger. I did not lift a hand. I turned my face slowly back to center and looked at him, and I did not cry, and I did not blink, and the hall went so quiet I could hear Elise set her teacup down on the bench behind her.

Inside me, my wolf did not roar. She dropped. Colder than fury. Colder than anything I had ever felt in my own chest.

*Remember this,* she said. *Every face. Every hand at their side that did not lift. Remember all of it.*

I remembered.

I remembered Sienna's small, sorrowful shake of the head. I remembered Elise looking down into her lap. I remembered Dillon staring at the far window as if the glass were more interesting than the sound of his father-in-law's palm on my mouth. I remembered the two young Deltas by the door who flinched, and the three who didn't. I catalogued them all.

"You are confined to the pack house for one week," Cal said. His voice did not shake. Mine wouldn't have either, in his place. "Speak of rogues in this hall again and you will be confined to the basement."

"Yes, Elder," I said. The blood on my tongue made the words wet.

I walked out. I did not touch my face.

---

Two nights later I mapped the paneling in the corridor outside the Alpha's quarters with my fingertips in the dark, and I found the gap I'd been looking for—a hairline seam between two crown-molding sections that Marcus's sweep camera missed because the angle was wrong. I wedged the little repurposed unit into the seam, tilted the lens through the gap, and closed the panel over it with the flat of my palm. The whole placement took ninety seconds. My ribs screamed the entire time.

I went back to the basement. I sat on the cot. Barnaby climbed into my lap and pressed his cold nose under my jaw, and I opened the receiver in my hand and watched the small gray square of corridor come to life in green night-vision.

I watched for three hours. Nothing but the Alpha's door.

I watched the next night too. And the next.

My wolf watched with me. She did not speak. She was learning to wait the way I had learned to wait.

---

The supply run came at the end of that week.

Cal signed the order himself. Routine. Two crates from the outer depot. A task for an Omega. I walked out through the yard alone in a borrowed coat with my ribs still taped, and the sky was low and gray and my wolf came up close under my skin the whole way down the access road, humming.

*Something,* she said. *Something is wrong.*

I reached the supply shed at the edge of pack territory and I stepped inside and the door closed behind me before my hand left the frame.

Three of them. Different rogues this time. Bigger. The one who moved first got a fistful of my collar and slammed me back against the shelving so hard the crates jumped, and my ribs went white behind my eyes, and I heard my shirt tear at the shoulder before I felt it.

A hand covered my mouth.

Outside, very clearly, right on schedule, I heard Sienna's voice calling my name.