My Alpha Betrayed Me for the Lycan King’s Daughter

The territorial border river was black in the early morning dark. Not the peaceful kind of black—the kind that swallowed sound, that churned and foamed against the rocks below with a violence that made even my warriors take a half-step back when they first looked down.

Nadia Brown did not take it well.

She was screaming before Damien's men even finished securing the rope around her wrists. High, desperate sounds that scattered birds from the pines overhead. Her dark hair whipped across her face in the wind off the water. She twisted against the rope, her feet dangling, the icy spray already reaching her from thirty feet below.

I stood at the edge of the cliff and watched her.

"Luna." Damien's voice was low, steady, the way it always was when he was waiting for a command. "She's secure."

"Good."

I pulled out my phone and opened the pack mind-link.

It's a strange thing, sending a message through the link rather than speaking it aloud. It goes everywhere at once—every wolf in the pack feels it like a vibration behind their eyes. I'd used it to coordinate battle formations. To call retreats. To announce births and deaths and territorial shifts.

I'd never used it like this before.

I let my voice carry through it the way a Luna's voice is supposed to—clear, cold, and absolute.

*Asher. I know you can feel this. Come to the northern border. The river crossing at Marker Seven. You have thirty minutes. If you're not here, I cut the rope.*

A pause. Then:

*Don't come alone. Come with your Beta, your Gamma, whoever you want. Bring witnesses. I want witnesses.*

I closed the link.

Nadia had stopped screaming. She was staring up at me now, her arms straining above her head, her face pale and wet from the spray. Her eyes were calculating even now, even dangling over freezing water. That bothered me more than the screaming had.

"You won't do it," she said. Her voice shook, but her chin was up. "You're a Luna. You have a code."

"I have a dead child," I said quietly. "My code died with her."

Something flickered across Nadia's face. Not fear, exactly. Something more like reassessment.

Good. Let her reassess.

I heard him before I saw him. The sound of a truck engine pushed past its limit, tires skidding on the gravel access road. Then footsteps—fast, heavy, purposeful. The kind of footsteps that shook the ground a little, that made wolves step aside automatically without being told.

Asher burst through the tree line with Marcus at his shoulder and two Delta warriors behind him.

He stopped when he saw her.

For one second, I watched something move across his face. Relief that she was still alive. Fury at me. And underneath both of those, something rawer and more complicated that I refused to examine.

"Scarlet." His Alpha aura hit me like a wall of heat, aggressive and commanding. It pressed against my skin the way it always had—but I was a Luna, and I had my own aura, and I had stopped flinching at his a long time ago. "Cut her down. Right now."

"Say the words." I kept my voice even. "That's all I want. Say what you wouldn't say at the cabin. Finish the rejection. In front of your Beta, your warriors, your—" I glanced at Nadia "—companion. Say it here, say it now, and I'll pull her up myself."

"This isn't the way—"

"Say the words, Asher."

His jaw locked. That muscle in his cheek jumped, the one that only appeared when he was fighting himself. I knew every tell he had. I had spent six years learning them.

He took a step toward the edge.

I moved my hand to the rope.

He stopped.

"Don't." The word came out rough, stripped of Alpha authority. Just a man's voice. "Scarlet, please don't."

"Then say the words."

The silence stretched between us like the rope itself—taut, trembling, capable of snapping.

And then Nadia screamed.

Not the desperate screaming from before. This was different. Deliberate. Aimed.

"I'm pregnant!" Her voice cracked across the clearing like a gunshot. "Asher, tell her—tell her I'm carrying your heir! Tell her what you told me at the shrine—that you wanted this—that you prayed for this—"

I felt the words hit Asher before I saw him move.

He launched himself forward with a force that sent Marcus stumbling sideways. He hit my warriors like a wave hitting a seawall—one down, then another, his Alpha strength operating on pure instinct, pure animal drive, the kind that didn't negotiate or calculate.

Damien stepped in front of me.

Asher went through him.

His hands found the rope.