After My Mate Poisoned Me, I Took His Pack

The bond broke at 8:47 on a Saturday night, and I felt it happen from the inside out.

I was standing three feet from the head table I had arranged myself — the alliance seats angled just so, the ceremonial candles spaced by protocol, the toast order rehearsed with the Beta that afternoon — when Jameson rose from his chair with Daisy tucked against his side, and I saw what she was wearing.

My furs.

The silver ceremonial furs my grandmother-of-record had stitched for my Luna installation. Draped over Daisy's shoulders like she had been born into them. Her sweet-sharp scent, that overripe-fruit thing, had soaked into the fibers.

I didn't move. I had trained myself out of moving.

Jameson lifted his glass and smiled at the hall — that expansive, generous smile he wore when he was about to do something ugly.

"Ironveil," he said, and the Alpha tone slid under the word like a knife under a rib. Every wolf in the hall stilled. "Three years ago, I accepted a mate the Moon Goddess offered me. Tonight, I correct that mistake."

He turned. His eyes found mine across the polished floor.

"I, Jameson Baker, Alpha of Ironveil, reject you, Amora Montgomery, as my mate and Luna."

The mark on my neck went cold.

Not warm-to-cool. Cold — a full-body drop, like someone had opened a door onto winter in a room inside my chest. Then the cold went hollow. Then the hollow went dead. My wolf — that whisper of warmth I had learned to feel for in the dark — flickered once and shrank down to almost nothing.

I heard someone gasp. It might have been me.

My knees didn't buckle. I locked them. I pressed my thumb against the dead mark on my neck and I made my face do nothing.

"And," Jameson continued, smooth as poured oil, "I name Daisy Olson as Luna of Ironveil, effective now."

He gestured to the Luna's chair. My chair. Daisy walked past me — close enough that I caught the scent of her on my own furs — and sat down.

The hall was silent. Two hundred wolves, and not one sound.

I opened my mouth.

Under the Luna Accord, a rejection spoken without cause before the pack could be formally contested within the same session by the rejected Luna. I had read the clause seventeen times. I had the exact words ready.

"I contest —"

"Kneel."

The Alpha tone hit me like a hand at the back of my neck.

"Be silent."

My knees went out from under me. The stone floor bit up through the silk of my dress. My jaw locked shut so hard my teeth clicked. I couldn't get air past my throat to speak.

I could still see, though. I could see him watching me on the floor. I could see Daisy's mouth curve, small and satisfied, over the rim of her glass. I could see the pack — my pack, the one I had built — looking at their shoes.

"Take her out," Jameson said, already turning back to his toast. "She'll want privacy to grieve."

Two Deltas took me by the arms. I let them lift me because my legs weren't answering. As they dragged me across the hall I got one clear look back at the head table: Jameson raising his glass, Daisy leaning into him, her fingers curled possessively into the silver fur at her throat.

I memorized it.

---

The Omega quarters smelled like damp stone and old rope. They shoved me through the door and locked it, and the sound of the bolt was almost a mercy — a sound that meant nobody else was going to look at me for a while.

I let myself shake.

One minute. I counted it on the second hand of the clock above the door. Sixty seconds of my hands trembling and the mark on my neck burning cold like a brand and my wolf curled so small inside me I had to concentrate to feel her breathing.

At sixty-one, I stopped.

I crossed to the cot and slid my hand under the mattress. The leather of the journal was warm from being pressed against the wood. The recorder was still taped to the underside of the frame where I had left it.

I opened the journal on my lap.

Entry one, fourteen months ago: *Petra brings the morning supplement at 6:15. Bitter aftertaste under the honey. Confirmed wolfsbane trace — matches the sample I sent to the border healer under a false name.*

Entry forty-seven: *Overheard through the study door. Daisy: 'How much longer.' Jameson: 'After the Vale alliance closes. We escalate the dose in the fall. Bond collapse presents as natural in a suppressed wolf.'*

I turned pages. Dates. Dosages. Verbatim. The recording labeled *Study, 11:42 PM, October 3.* The copied treaty pages I had lifted from his desk drawer three weeks ago, folded flat against the back cover.

All of it. Intact.

I pressed my thumb against the cold mark on my neck one more time. Then I closed the journal, slid it into the inside of my dress, and went to the wall behind the cot.

The cellar passage I had mapped in September was three stones over, second course from the floor. Loose mortar. A crawlspace to the coal chute. From there, the forest.

Above me, muffled through the floor, I could hear Jameson laughing.

I didn't cry. I had one stop to make on the way out, and I wasn't going to make Buster smell it on me.