After My Mate Chose His Mistress

The kitchen was dark except for the pendant light over the island.

I liked it that way. No overheads. No warmth. Just a single circle of yellow light falling on the stack of documents in front of me and the pen I'd chosen that afternoon—a plain black one, nothing sentimental, nothing Elias had ever touched.

It was two in the morning. The pack house was asleep. Somewhere upstairs, Elias was in our bed, or maybe he wasn't. I didn't check anymore.

I turned the first page.

*Deed of Transfer, Duncan Ancestral Territory. Grantor: Emily Duncan, sole heir. Grantee: Northreach Pack.*

My aunt's Lycan attorneys had drawn everything up in forty-eight hours. Northreach was Shadowvale's oldest rival—the pack Elias despised most, the one he'd spent years trying to squeeze out of the northern trade routes. That was the point. When he found out, I wanted him to feel it in his teeth.

I signed my name.

My handwriting was steady. My hand did not shake once. I noticed that with a strange, distant curiosity, the way you might notice a stranger's calm at a funeral.

Page after page. Land grants. Water rights. Timber leases. The stone den where my mother used to bake bread. The clearing where my father taught me to shift for the first time. I signed all of it away with the same clean, unhurried strokes.

When it was done, I stacked the pages, slid them into the envelope, and set it aside for the courier who would come at dawn.

My wolf did not stir. She was still curled somewhere deep inside me, thin and quiet, listening.

*It's all right,* I told her. *We're almost done.*

I think she heard me. I couldn't be sure anymore.

---

The messages started the next morning.

I was drinking tea on the back porch when my phone buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then again. Six times in a row.

I already knew who it was.

The first photo loaded slowly. Natasha, in what I recognized as one of the guest suites at my parents' den. Sheets tangled around her hips. Elias behind her, his mouth on her shoulder, half-asleep. The angle was wrong for a candid—she'd propped the phone up. She'd wanted a good frame.

The second photo was of Berkley. Small, dark-haired, laughing at something off-camera, sitting on Elias's shoulders in a park I didn't recognize. The caption read: *Daddy's girl.*

The third was a screenshot of a text thread between them. Casual. Domestic. *Pick up milk on your way home, love.*

Then the voice message.

"I hope you're eating well, Emily." Natasha's voice was syrupy, deliberate. "You need your strength. My mom's already responding to the treatment, by the way. Dr. Thorne is a *miracle*. Elias made the right call. I hope you understand." A pause. A little laugh. "Actually, I hope you don't. It's more fun that way."

I set the phone face-down on the porch railing.

I didn't cry. I didn't reply. I did what I'd started doing a week ago, when the first burner-phone message came through: I opened the encrypted folder Winifred had set up for me and dragged every file into it. Photos. Voice notes. Timestamps.

The timestamps were the part I kept coming back to.

The cruelest message—the one where she'd told me my wolf would probably die and it was, in her words, *for the best*—had been sent at 11:47 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Dr. Thorne's redirection order was signed at 2:15 p.m. that same day.

Natasha had known before it happened.

I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist and counted my heartbeats until my breathing evened out.

Then I saved the folder, closed the phone, and went back inside to finish packing.

---

Thanksgiving morning, the pack house smelled like nothing.

By this hour, every other year, the ovens had been running since dawn. Cinnamon, roasted meat, the yeast rise of the dinner rolls I made from my mother's recipe. Elias would have walked through and squeezed my waist and told me it smelled like home.

Today, the counters were bare.

The gown he'd chosen for me—deep burgundy, cut low at the back, hung in the closet upstairs, still in its garment bag. I hadn't touched it. I wouldn't.

I moved through the house one last time, quietly, the way you move through a museum. My hand brushed the doorframe of the office. The mantle where our mating photograph sat. The stairwell where he'd once carried me up laughing on the first anniversary of our bond.

I didn't linger. I didn't cry. There was nothing left to grieve that I hadn't already buried.

I carried the single suitcase down to the kitchen.

On the island, I laid out the rejection papers.

Three pages, notarized by a Lycan officiant two nights before. The language was clean, brutal, and final. *I, Emily Duncan, daughter of the late Alpha Marcus and Alpha Elena Duncan of the fallen Duncan Pack, reject you, Alpha Elias of Shadowvale, as my mate, my bond, and my future.*

I unclasped the Luna pendant from my throat.

It was heavier than I remembered. Or maybe I was.

I set it on top of the papers, right over my signature, so it would be the first thing he saw.

The front door was unlocked. I left it that way.

Outside, my car was already running. The cold air smelled like frost and pine and the far edge of something I hadn't let myself want in a long time.

I slid into the driver's seat.

My wolf shifted—barely, softly—inside my chest. Not a howl. Not a whimper. Just a small, exhausted breath, like someone finally letting go of a rope they'd been holding for years.

*We're going,* I told her.

And I drove.