When the Alpha Chose Her Over His Fated Mate

I smelled them before I saw them.

Three miles into my northern perimeter patrol, the wind shifted, and the stench hit me—unwashed fur, old blood, the particular sour edge of wolves who hadn't belonged to a pack in years. Rogues. Multiple.

I didn't slow down. I recalibrated.

They came from three directions at once, which told me two things immediately: they'd scouted this route in advance, and someone had told them exactly where to be. I dropped low as the first one lunged, letting his momentum carry him over my shoulder, and drove my elbow into the back of his skull on the way down. He hit the dirt and didn't get back up.

The second caught me across the ribs before I could pivot. The impact cracked through my side like a gunshot, and I tasted copper. I kept moving. A Delta who stops moving is a Delta who dies.

For a while, it was close enough to manageable. I was faster, sharper, and I knew this terrain the way I knew my own heartbeat. But there were seven of them, and I was one, and by the fourth minute my left arm was bleeding from a gash I hadn't felt until I saw the blood.

I was on my knees when Legend arrived.

His wolves came in hard and fast, scattering what remained of the rogue formation. I heard his voice cutting through the chaos—commands, clean and authoritative—and then the sounds of fighting, and then quiet.

I was already back on my feet by the time he reached me.

'Juliana.' His voice was rough. His eyes moved over me the way they always did after a fight—quick, assessing, looking for damage he could catalog and then feel responsible for. 'How bad?'

'I'm standing,' I said.

He didn't look reassured.

I turned away from him and walked toward the nearest body on the ground. Something had caught my eye in the last seconds of the fight—a folded piece of paper half-crushed under a dead rogue's hand. I crouched down and pulled it free.

It was a map. Hand-drawn, precise. The Black Moon Pack House was marked with a circle. My patrol route was traced in red ink, every third-day variation accounted for.

And underneath the paper's surface, faint but unmistakable, was the smell of white peonies and warm vanilla.

Waverly.

I stood slowly and held it out to Legend. 'Her scent is on this.'

He took it from me. Looked at it. His jaw tightened.

'No,' he said.

The word landed like a door slamming shut.

'Legend—'

'No.' His voice sharpened, and I heard the edge of his Alpha tone underneath it—not fully deployed, but present, like a blade not yet drawn. 'This doesn't prove anything. Rogues are scavengers. They steal what they can from pack territories—clothing, gear, anything with a scent on it. They could have found something of hers at the border. They could have—'

'She told me she knew about our bond this morning,' I said quietly. 'She came to the training grounds and told me to my face.'

Something flickered across his expression. Not guilt. Frustration.

'You're looking for reasons to blame her,' he said. 'After everything with the code, after last night—you want it to be her. I understand that. But Waverly would not do this.'

I looked at him for a long moment. The bleeding from my arm had slowed to a steady drip that was pattering onto the frost-hardened ground between us. I watched it fall.

'Okay,' I said.

Just that. Nothing else.

I walked back toward the pack house alone.

---

The infirmary was empty when I got there. I preferred it that way.

I sat on the edge of a treatment table and worked through the gash on my arm with a needle and medical thread, my movements methodical and unhurried. The pain was manageable. Pain usually was, once you stopped fighting it and just let it exist alongside you.

I was halfway through the third stitch when I heard footsteps in the doorway.

'You're going to want to pull that tighter,' Nolan said. 'Or it'll scar crooked.'

I didn't look up. 'I know how to stitch a wound, Rodriguez.'

He came inside anyway, dropping into the chair across from me with the unhurried ease of a man who had decided he was staying regardless of whether he was welcome. He was quiet for a moment, watching me work.

Then: 'I tracked the rogues' trail back to the eastern ridge before Legend's team cleared the scene.' A pause. 'Her scent was on three of them. Not just the map. The wolves themselves.'

My needle stopped moving.

'Clothing transfer doesn't work that way,' he continued, his voice flat and matter-of-fact. 'Not that concentrated. Not on multiple targets.' He let that sit for a second. 'You weren't imagining it, Jules.'

I finished the stitch. Tied it off. Set the needle down.

Outside the infirmary window, the afternoon light had gone gray and thin, the kind of light that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be day or something else entirely. I stared at it for a moment.

'I know,' I said.

The problem was, so did Legend.