After My Mate Replaced Me With the Alliance Bride

The eastern border patrol came back just after dawn with a report David didn't want to hear.

I wasn't in the room when they delivered it, but the pack mind-link carried enough fragments that I could piece it together from the supply room where I'd slept the last two nights. Unusual rogue movement. Probing the perimeter. A section of the ward-line that should have been solid.

David's voice came through the link, clipped and certain. Seasonal pressure. Double the patrol rotation. The wards will hold.

I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist, over the thin white scars, and felt the river crossing ward-anchor sit cold and dead in my blood. Not flickering. Fully dark. I'd felt it go out sometime after midnight, a small extinguishing I registered the way you register a tooth that's stopped aching because the nerve finally died.

I didn't get up to repair it.

Below me, in the main hall, David laughed at something Gracie said. The mate bond transmitted it into my chest, warm and easy, like he'd forgotten I was still close enough to feel it. Maybe he had.

I pulled the thin blanket tighter and stared at the ceiling until the sky outside the narrow window turned gray.

Judith came for me just after breakfast.

She didn't knock. The door to the supply room swung open hard enough to hit the wall, and she stood in the frame with the particular stillness of someone who's decided exactly how the next five minutes are going to go.

"The satchel you brought into this house," she said, her voice smooth and reasonable, "is pack property under resource audit protocol. You understand that, don't you?"

I sat up slowly. My hands were still faintly blistered from the last ward-work I'd done, four days ago, before I walked into David's room and found Gracie Henderson looking at me like furniture.

"I understand," I said.

"Good." She stepped inside, her gaze sweeping the small room with the efficiency of someone conducting inventory. "Then you'll also understand that the pendant you wear—your grandmother's moonstone—is an heirloom of significant value. David intends to present it to Gracie at the mating ceremony. As a Luna token."

Something in my chest went very still.

"No," I said.

Judith's expression didn't change. "Excuse me?"

"No," I said again, quieter this time, because my voice didn't need to be loud to mean what it meant. "The pendant stays with me."

Her hand moved faster than I expected. The slap caught me across the cheek, sharp and clean, and my head turned with the force of it. My eyes watered reflexively. I didn't make a sound.

Judith's breathing stayed even. "Where is it?"

I looked back at her. My cheek burned. "Not here."

She didn't believe me. I watched her decide not to believe me, watched her gaze sweep the room again, this time with intent. She crossed to the narrow shelf where I'd folded my spare clothes, pulled everything down onto the floor, shook out each piece like she expected the pendant to fall from the seams. She checked the blanket. The pillow. The small wooden box I'd kept my grandmother's letters in, now empty because Judith had confiscated those six months ago.

She found nothing.

The pendant was sewn into the hem of my inner sleeve, exactly where it had been since the day I'd understood that nothing I loved was safe if Judith could see it.

She straightened, brushed her hands against her skirt, and looked at me with something that wasn't quite anger. It was colder than that. More efficient.

"You're making this harder than it needs to be," she said.

I didn't answer.

She left without closing the door behind her.

The Deltas came for me the next morning.

Two of them, both young enough that they wouldn't meet my eyes when they knocked. "Formal resource audit," the taller one said, his voice careful and neutral. "Great hall. Alpha's orders."

I knew what a resource audit meant. It meant David had found a way to strip me of the last things I owned in front of witnesses, to make Gracie's claim to the Luna position look clean and justified. It meant bureaucracy as a weapon, which was Judith's specialty.

I stood. My hands were still visibly burned at the edges, silver-proximity scars that hadn't fully healed because I hadn't bothered to see the pack healer. The Deltas glanced at them, then away.

"All right," I said.

They walked on either side of me down the corridor, not touching me but close enough that it looked like an escort. Pack members stepped back as we passed. A few turned their faces toward the wall. None of them met my eyes.

I kept my expression smooth, my hands loose at my sides where everyone could see the burns. I didn't walk like someone being led to judgment. I walked like someone who had already decided what the judgment was worth.

The great hall doors stood open ahead. I could see David on the platform, Gracie beside him in a dress the color of early spring. Rows of pack members filled the space, all of them standing because no one sits during a formal audit.

I stepped through the doors, and two hundred wolves turned to look at me.

I looked back.

And I waited.