After My Alpha Declared His Mistress Luna

Camille's wolf was beautiful. I hated that I noticed.

She was pure white — not the dirty, yellowish white of old snow, but the clean, blinding white of fresh paper. Her coat was thick and glossy, every strand catching the moonlight as she ran. She moved like water, effortless and fast, her paws barely seeming to touch the ground.

I was still limping somewhere in the middle of the pack when she circled back.

I didn't see it coming. I was watching my own feet, trying to keep my trembling legs from folding under me, when something massive slammed into my left shoulder. The impact was clean and deliberate — not an accident, not a stumble. A check. The kind you throw when you want someone to go down.

I went down.

The mud came up fast. I hit it face-first, sliding several feet before I stopped, my small body half-buried in the cold, wet earth. The impact knocked the air out of me completely. I lay there for a second, stunned, tasting mud and dead leaves.

Above me, Camille's white wolf paused. She looked down at me with pale, cold eyes. Then she shook herself — a single, elegant motion that sent a spray of mud across my already ruined fur — and ran on.

The rest of the pack thundered past me without breaking stride. Paws hit the ground inches from my head. No one stopped. No one looked down. I was just an obstacle in the path, something to step around.

I pushed myself upright. My legs shook badly. My left shoulder screamed where she'd hit me. I stood there in the dark, covered in mud, watching the last wolves disappear into the trees.

Then I started walking.

I didn't run. I couldn't. I just walked, slowly, through the dark forest, following the distant sound of the pack until the trees thinned and the lights of the pack house came back into view.

---

The post-run dinner was held in the great hall, long tables set end to end, the air thick with the smell of roasted meat and woodsmoke. Wolves filled the benches in their human forms, loud and flushed from the run, still buzzing with that particular energy that came after a shift.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, still damp, my shoulder aching, a streak of dried mud along my jaw that I hadn't been able to fully wipe away.

A young Omega boy appeared at my elbow. He pointed wordlessly toward the far end of the hall, where a single narrow table sat pushed against the back wall, half-hidden behind a support pillar. The Omega table. Four other Omegas were already seated there, heads down, eating quietly.

I walked to it.

At the Alpha table, Colt sat at the head, Camille pressed close against his side. She had changed into a white dress that matched her wolf form, her dark hair loose and perfect, her hand resting on Colt's forearm like she'd been doing it for years. She was laughing at something he said, her head thrown back, the sound carrying across the entire hall.

She made sure it carried. That was the point.

I sat down and looked at the empty space in front of me.

A few minutes later, a plate appeared. It was set down hard enough that it scraped against the wood. I looked up.

One of Camille's girls — a Delta named Priya, with sharp cheekbones and sharper eyes — stood over me with her arms crossed. She looked at the plate, then at me, with the expression of someone who had just done something they found deeply amusing.

The plate held kitchen scraps. Literally. Bread crusts. A few spoonfuls of something that might have been stew, scraped from the bottom of a pot. A bruised apple.

Priya smiled. "Eat up," she said, loud enough for the nearby tables to hear. "The Moon Goddess already said no. Least you can do is not waste good food on a lost cause."

Someone at the next table snickered.

"Three years," Priya continued, tilting her head like she was genuinely puzzled. "Three whole years, and you still don't get it. He was never going to mark you, Nyomi. You were just... convenient."

I picked up the bread crust. I took a bite.

Priya waited for a reaction. When she didn't get one, the amusement on her face curdled slightly into something uglier. She leaned down, dropping her voice. "You should leave. Staying just makes you look pathetic."

I chewed. Swallowed. Reached for the apple.

She made a disgusted sound and walked away.

I ate everything on the plate. Not because I was hungry — I was, but that wasn't why. I ate it because putting something in my stomach was a practical thing, and practical things were the only things I could manage right now. One practical thing at a time.

At the Alpha table, Camille laughed again. Colt smiled down at her.

I didn't look away. I made myself watch for exactly three seconds, long enough to let it be real, long enough to stop pretending it might still hurt less if I didn't look directly at it.

Then I looked back at my plate.

---

The storm came in fast, the way October storms do in upstate New York — no warning, just a sudden drop in pressure and then the sky opening up all at once.

I was still at the Omega table when the rain started hammering the windows. Most of the pack had already drifted away from dinner, back to their rooms, back to their lives. I was in no hurry. The Omega quarters were cold and damp even on dry nights.

The young Omega boy found me again. He looked genuinely uncomfortable this time, his eyes not quite meeting mine.

"Miss Camille gave orders," he said quietly. "The pack house is locked for the night. Omegas without assigned duties are to shelter in the yard outbuilding."

I looked at him. "The outbuilding doesn't have a roof on the east side."

He swallowed. "I know."

I stood up.

The guards at the back door were two men I recognized — Deltas who had eaten at my table when I was still in the Alpha suite, men I had served coffee to on Sunday mornings. They didn't look at me as I walked past them into the rain. One of them reached back and pulled the door shut behind me. I heard the bolt slide home.

The cold hit me like a wall. The rain was heavy and driving, the kind that soaks through everything in seconds. I stood on the back steps for a moment, blinking against it, then walked.

Barnaby found me at the border tree.

I didn't know how he'd gotten out — someone must have left a gate unlatched, or he'd pushed through a gap in the fence the way he sometimes did when he was anxious. He was soaked, his golden fur plastered flat against his body, his tail wagging low and uncertain. When he saw me, the tail went faster.

I sat down under the tree. The roots were thick enough that the ground beneath them was only half-wet. Barnaby climbed immediately into my lap, all forty pounds of him, pressing his damp head against my chest.

I put my arms around him.

The rain came down in sheets. The pack house lights glowed warm and yellow through the trees, every window lit, the sound of music and voices drifting faintly through the storm. In there, Camille was probably curled against Colt's side in front of a fire, wearing my sheets, breathing in the room I had kept for three years.

Out here, I sat in the mud with a wet dog and a titanium ring that wouldn't come off.

Barnaby licked my jaw, right over the dried mud streak. Once, twice. Methodical and gentle, the way he always cleaned my face when I was upset, as if he could fix things with enough patience.

I pressed my face into the top of his head and breathed.

The rain kept falling. The border trees swayed. Somewhere deep in the dark forest behind me, something shifted — a sound, or maybe just a feeling, the faint, distant impression of being watched by something very large and very still.

I didn't turn around.

Barnaby's ears pricked forward. His tail, which had gone still, began to wag again — slow, curious, not afraid.

I held him tighter and stared at the pack house lights through the rain.