When My Mate Tortured Me Before Discovering I’m Royal

At 9:47 on a Saturday night, I watched my mate sink his teeth into another woman's neck.

I was still standing in the doorway of the great hall. My boots were caked with mud from three pack territories. My legs ached from four days of walking. In my hands I held a set of leather bracers, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. They were my best work. Every stitch carried my lavender scent, so his wolf would stay calm in battle.

I thought this was the Pack Banquet. I thought I was a surprise.

But the hall was blazing with white candles. Hundreds of wolves stood in their formal clothes. A silver banner hung above the dais, and the words on it were stitched in gold.

*Mate Ceremony.*

At the center of it all stood Alpha Callahan Elliott, leader of the Ironveil Pack. My mate of five years. The man whose wounds I had cleaned and whose dinners I had cooked. The man who had never once let me stand beside him in public.

He had one hand in Giselle Porter's dark hair. Giselle, the Beta's daughter. His childhood sweetheart. He tilted her head to the side, gently, like she was made of glass. Then he bit down.

The crowd roared.

Giselle gasped and smiled. When he pulled back, blood beaded on her pale neck. Her eyes swept across the hall, slow and proud. She didn't look surprised to see me. She looked like she had been waiting.

My fingers went numb. The bracers slipped from my hands and hit the stone floor with a sharp crack.

The sound cut through the noise. Callahan's head turned.

Our eyes locked.

For one long second, he was just Callahan. The boy-faced man who used to fall asleep with his head in my lap after border fights. I stepped forward. I didn't mean to. My lips parted, but no words came.

Then I caught his scent. Charred oak and tobacco, the way it always was. But under it was something new. Jasmine. Thick and sweet and fake, layered over his skin like a second coat. It was on his neck. His hands. His mouth.

He had been wearing her for a long time.

Callahan's face went still. Then it went hard, like a door slamming shut.

"Stay where you are," he said. His Alpha tone rolled through the hall and pressed down on my shoulders like iron.

My knees bent. But something in my chest snarled. For the first time in my life, my wolf moved. She threw herself against that weight, angry and wild, and I locked my knees and stayed standing.

His eyes narrowed. He saw it. He knew I had pushed back.

So he did the one thing I couldn't stand against.

"I, Callahan, Alpha of Ironveil," he said, loud and clear, so every wolf could hear, "reject you, Sydney Mendez, as my mate."

The bond broke.

It cracked through my chest like a window hit by a stone. The spot on my neck where his mark should have been went cold. Then it went empty, like a door closing on a room no one would ever walk into again. My wolf let out one sharp howl inside me. Then she simply stopped. Like something alive had quit breathing.

The floor came up fast. My cheek hit the stone.

No one moved to help me. Not one wolf in that hall. I heard someone laugh. I heard Giselle say, in a soft, sweet voice, "Oh, poor thing."

Then hands grabbed my arms. Two guards dragged me backward across the floor. Behind me, the pack started cheering again.

"Luna! Luna! Luna!"

---

They dumped me in the back corridor like a sack of trash. The air was freezing. The stone walls sweated with cold.

I lay there and pressed my palm to the side of my neck.

Five years. Five years I had waited for his teeth right there. He always said *soon*. He always said *when the pack is ready*. I had believed him every time.

I let myself feel it. All of it. The hollow where the bond used to hum. The silence where my wolf used to sleep. The ache in my ribs, like someone had scooped out something important and left the hole open to the wind.

I counted to sixty.

Then I stopped.

I pushed myself up onto my hands. Then my knees. Then my feet. My legs shook, but they held.

The bracers lay a few feet away, near the wall. A guard must have kicked them out after me. The paper was torn. One strap had a muddy boot print across it. I picked them up and brushed the dirt off with my sleeve. Then I tucked them under my arm.

I didn't cry. I was too cold to cry.

One of the guards was still standing at the end of the hall, watching me. Young. Nervous. He wouldn't meet my eyes.

"Tell your Alpha something for me," I said. My voice came out quiet and steady. It surprised me.

He swallowed. "What?"

"The bracers in his armory have about three weeks of my scent left. The salves in his cabinet, maybe a month." I held up the bundle under my arm. "These were the next set. He won't get them. He won't get any more. Not ever."

The guard's mouth opened. Every Ironveil warrior knew those bracers. Every one of them knew Callahan's wolf went half-mad in battle without them. And no packsmith in Virginia knew how I made them.

I turned my back on him and walked toward the rear exit.

The door was heavy oak, with an iron handle. Beyond it was the dark tree line, and past that, the border. I put my hand on the cold metal.

That was when I heard footsteps behind me. Light. Quick. Heels on stone. And then the smell hit me, sweet and sharp and choking.

Jasmine.

"Leaving so soon?" Giselle's voice floated down the corridor, soft as silk. Then it dropped low, into a hiss I had never heard her use in front of him. "Guards. Lock that door."