After My Alpha Marked His Mistress at Our Anniversary

I walked until the forest changed.

The pines gave way to older trees—oak and ash with trunks wider than three wolves standing side by side. The air smelled different here. Cleaner. Colder. Like stone that had been standing since before packs had names.

Lunara guided me without words. Just a pull, steady and certain, in a direction I couldn't have named but felt in my bones. I didn't question it. I was too tired to question anything.

The boundary appeared without warning—a line of carved stones half-buried in moss, each one marked with symbols I didn't recognize but somehow understood. Old magic. The kind that predated the pack laws I'd grown up with.

I stepped toward it.

Two guards materialized from the shadows. Lycan guards, massive even in human form, wearing armor that looked ceremonial and functional at once. They moved to block my path with the practiced efficiency of soldiers who'd done this a thousand times.

Then they caught my scent.

Both of them went absolutely still. One of them—the taller one, with a scar across his jaw—dropped to one knee so fast I heard the impact. The other raised some kind of communication device to his mouth, his hand not quite steady.

"Alpha Caelan," he said, his voice quiet and very controlled. "You need to come to the east boundary."

I didn't explain myself. Didn't apologize for the intrusion or ask permission to wait. I just stood there, Marcus's coat hanging off my shoulders, and met their eyes with the calm of someone who had spent ten years explaining herself and was done.

The kneeling guard didn't get up. The other one kept his distance, his posture respectful in a way that had nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with instinct.

We waited.

---

The Lycan Prince arrived on foot, unhurried.

He was tall—taller than Damien, though he didn't carry it the same way. No performance. No Alpha posturing. Just height, worn like a fact. Dark hair, silver-threaded at the temples despite a face that couldn't have been past thirty-five. Traveling clothes, well-made but not formal. He moved with the particular stillness of someone who'd learned that emergencies rarely required running.

His eyes found me first. Then the guards. Then back to me.

He studied me for a moment—not invasive, just thorough. Taking in the torn dress, the too-large coat, the exhaustion I knew was written across my face. His expression didn't change. No pity. No judgment. Just assessment.

Then his scent reached me.

Dark cedar and cold rain.

It hit me like a second awakening—not painful, not overwhelming, just undeniable. The two scents layered together, his and mine, and something in my chest recognized it before my brain caught up. Lunara made a sound that wasn't quite a word. More like recognition. Like finding something she'd been looking for without knowing she was searching.

The Lycan Prince went very still.

I watched him process it. Watched the moment the scent-recognition landed, watched him choose—very deliberately—not to act on it. No claiming. No declaration. No Alpha-tone command or possessive gesture.

He just said: "You should come inside."

His voice was quiet. Steady. An offer, not an order.

I looked at him for a long moment. Measured the space between the words and the tone. Searched for the catch, the condition, the expectation that would come later.

I didn't find one.

So I walked through the gate.

---

They brought me to a room that was too elegant to be a holding cell and too sparse to be a guest chamber. Stone walls, a single chair, a table with water and bread. One of the guards—the one who'd knelt—poured the water himself and set it in front of me without meeting my eyes.

I drank it. Ate half the bread. Waited.

The door opened again maybe twenty minutes later.

The man who entered was older—silver hair, broad shoulders, wearing formal robes that marked him as someone important. His presence filled the room the way Caelan's had, but heavier. More settled. The kind of authority that didn't need to announce itself.

He took three steps into the room and stopped.

I watched his nostrils flare. Watched his entire body go rigid. Watched something crack across his face that looked like grief and relief colliding so hard they couldn't be separated.

He crossed the room in two strides and dropped to his knees in front of my chair.

The Lycan King. On his knees. In front of me.

"Your name," he said, and his voice was rough in a way that suggested he was holding something back with considerable effort, "before they took you, was Serena Ashvale. You are my daughter. You are home."

The words landed like stones in deep water. Each one sinking, rippling outward, reaching places I didn't know were empty.

Lunara made that sound again. Not a word. Something older. Something that smelled like before the seal. Like safety I couldn't consciously remember but recognized anyway.

I didn't cry. I'd cried enough in the hollow of that pine. But my hands were very still in my lap, and my throat was tight.

"Tell me everything," I said.

And he did.