When My Alpha Chose His Mistress Over Me

Ten years. That was how long I had stood beside Jameson at Silverfang banquets, holding a wineglass I barely drank from, wearing a smile I had practiced until it no longer felt like a lie.

The hall was full tonight, candlelight catching on silver hair and silver rings, the whole pack turned out in their finest for our tenth anniversary. Ten years since the Moon Goddess had given me to Jameson, Alpha of Silverfang, in the marketplace of a scent I would have known blind. Ten years, and my neck was still bare.

Elder Marsh raised his glass first, his old eyes sharp despite the wine already in him. "To Alpha Jameson and Alina," he said, "a decade of devotion. Though I confess, Alpha, the council has been asking. When does the girl finally get her mark?"

Laughter rippled through the room, the kind that pretended to be gentle and wasn't.

Jameson's hand found the small of my back, warm and certain, the same hand that had steadied me at a hundred gatherings just like this one. "All in good time, Marsh," he said, and his voice carried that easy, commanding warmth that made rooms lean toward him. "Some bonds don't need paperwork to be real."

More laughter. Approving nods. I smiled, because that was my role, and let my fingers drift to the bare skin of my throat before I caught myself and lowered my hand.

I had told myself for years that the ache of that unmarked neck was patience. Tonight, standing so close to him that his cologne filled every breath I took, patience felt like something else. It felt like waiting for a door that had never once been unlocked.

Then, as he lifted his glass to answer another toast, I smelled it.

Under the cedar and iron of him — the scent I had memorized the day the bond snapped into place between us — there was something else. Jasmine. Black orchid. Faint, but not faint enough. Threaded through it, unmistakable to a healer's nose trained on subtlety for a decade: the low, particular musk of a body recently and thoroughly satisfied.

I knew that jasmine. I had smelled it on Giuliana's coat in the foyer not an hour ago, when she'd swept past me murmuring some hollow compliment about my dress.

My wolf did not whimper. She did not whine the way she had at every other small, deniable slight over the years. She rose up inside me and said one word, flat and absolute.

*Betrayal.*

The wineglass did not shake in my hand. I want that noted, even now — it did not shake. I finished my toast, laughed at Marsh's next joke, let Jameson's mother, Margaret, squeeze my hands and tell me how lovely I looked. I ate the anniversary cake. I said goodnight to the elders one by one. Inside, something that had taken ten years to build came down without a sound.

Jameson left before midnight, murmuring something about a late patrol along the northern border. I told him to be careful. I always told him to be careful.

I waited until his car cleared the gate before I went to his study.

His laptop sat open on the desk, unguarded, the way it always was because he had never once imagined I would look. I sat in his chair. I opened the mind-link archive.

I read for two hours.

*Convenient cover for the council,* he had written to her, three years ago. *She keeps them from asking questions I don't want to answer.*

*The placeholder is getting suspicious,* Giuliana had written last spring. *Handle her.*

There were hundreds of messages. Years of them. Some tender in a way that made my stomach turn. Some coldly logistical, arranging times, arranging alibis. I was in almost none of them, and when I was, I was never Alina. I was the placeholder. The cover. The convenient thing that kept his throne steady while he warmed himself elsewhere.

My wolf howled, somewhere deep and private where no one could hear her but me.

I closed the laptop gently, the way you close a door on a room you don't intend to enter again. Then I went to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and made tea with hands that did not tremble even once.

By morning I moved through the pack house the way I always had — checking the warrior recovery bay, restocking dried yarrow and wolfsbane-free comfrey into the herb cabinet, nodding to the young deltas who greeted me with the easy familiarity of a decade. No one looked twice at me. No one saw anything different.

But something in me had finished waiting.

I was no longer hoping. I was counting.