After My Mate Chose the Other Woman

Three days after they burned my father's pelt, a pack pup collapsed in the eastern corridor.

I was in my room when the shout went up. I heard the scramble of feet, the low urgent voices, and I knew before I reached the hall what they would find. Wolfsbane poisoning. Same compound. Same weight. The pup was small, maybe six years old, his lips already blue by the time Edric got him onto a cot in the healer's wing.

I stood in the doorway and watched Edric work. The antiserum I'd bled myself to make sat on the shelf behind him, untouched. He didn't reach for it. He looked at me once, his face unreadable, then turned back to the pup without a word.

Makenzie was already there. She stood near the window with her hands folded, her face arranged into something that might have passed for concern if you weren't looking closely. Three senior warriors stood with her. I watched her lean in, just slightly, and say something too quiet for me to hear. One of the warriors glanced at me. Then another.

I felt the pack's weight shift like a physical thing. Not loud. Not sudden. Just — away from me, toward her, like water finding a crack.

"The compound matches what was in your rooms," Callum said from behind me. His voice was flat. "That's what they're saying."

I didn't turn around. "And you believe them?"

He didn't answer. That was answer enough.

I pressed two fingers to my left temple and kept my eyes on the pup's small chest, rising and falling too fast. "I've been dosing myself with wolfsbane for five years to keep this pack's warriors alive," I said quietly. "If I wanted to poison someone, I wouldn't need to hoard it in my rooms."

"Then why was it there?"

I turned to look at him. Callum met my eyes for maybe two seconds, then looked past me, toward Makenzie.

"Tell Lance I want to speak with him," I said.

Callum's jaw tightened. "He's already coming."

Of course he was.

Lance descended from the north ridge an hour later. Not for my father's cairn. Not for the dissolution I'd requested. For the pup.

He called the full pack to the great hall.

I stood near the back as they filed in — warriors, Omegas, pups, elders. The hall filled slowly, bodies pressing in until the air went thick with scent and heat. Lance took his place at the head of the room. He didn't look at me. He looked at the pack, his pack, and his face carried the kind of calm that comes right before something breaks.

Makenzie stood three feet to his left, her hands folded, her head slightly bowed. Modest. Concerned. Perfect.

"A pup was poisoned," Lance said. His voice filled the hall without effort. "Wolfsbane. The same compound found in the stores — and in the Luna's private rooms."

Luna. He used the title like it still meant something.

I felt every eye in the room turn toward me. I kept my face still and my hands loose at my sides. I would not give them the satisfaction of seeing me flinch.

"Sienna Reed," Lance said, and this time he did look at me. His eyes were cold. Deliberate. "Step forward."

I walked through the crowd. No one moved aside to let me pass. I had to angle my shoulders, press through gaps that closed behind me like water. When I reached the front of the hall, I stopped six feet from where he stood.

"You will apologize," Lance said.

I stared at him. "For what?"

"For poisoning a pup under this pack's protection."

The hall went silent. Not the kind of silence that waits for an answer. The kind that holds its breath.

"I didn't poison anyone," I said.

Lance's jaw tightened. He took one step forward, and I felt it before he spoke — the pull of the bond, unfinished but still there, still tethered somewhere deep in my chest. He was going to use it.

"Kneel," he said.

It wasn't a request. It was the Alpha tone, channeled deliberately through the mate bond that had never been sealed, never been completed, never been anything but a leash I'd worn for five years.

The compulsion hit me like a fist to the sternum.

My knees buckled. I went down hard, palms slamming into the stone floor to catch myself. My forehead nearly touched the ground. Every muscle in my body locked tight, shaking against the command, and I could not — I could *not* —

I heard someone gasp. Heard the shuffle of feet as the pack stepped back, giving him room, giving me space to submit.

"Apologize," Lance said again. His voice was quieter now. Almost gentle. Like he was doing me a favor.

I lifted my head. It took everything I had. My neck felt like it might snap under the weight of the tone pressing down on me, but I looked up at him from the floor and I did not apologize.

I did not say a word.

Lance's expression flickered — just for a second, something that might have been surprise, or frustration, or the first edge of doubt. Then it smoothed over again, blank and cold.

"You will apologize," he said, "or you will be removed from this pack."

I stayed on my knees. My hands were shaking. My breath came too fast. But I held his eyes and I said nothing.

Behind him, Makenzie's face was carefully, perfectly neutral.

The hall waited.

And I realized, kneeling there on the stone floor with every wolf I had bled myself to protect watching me break, that this was never about the pup. This was about making sure I understood exactly where I stood. Unmarked. Undefended. Beneath him.

I pressed my palms flat against the floor and pushed myself up. It took three tries. The Alpha tone dragged at me like hands around my throat, but I got my feet under me and I stood.

Lance's eyes went hard.

"If you want me gone," I said quietly, "then say it. But I will not apologize for something I did not do."

The silence in the hall turned brittle.

Lance took another step forward. Close enough now that I could smell the mourning-oil on his skin — no, not his skin. Hers. Makenzie's. Layered under his scent like she'd pressed herself into him before he came down from the ridge.

I looked past him, toward the shelf in the healer's wing where the antiserum sat in neat glass vials. Five years of my blood. Five years of monthly poisoning, controlled doses, calculated sacrifice.

I turned and walked out of the hall.

No one stopped me.