My Alpha Betrayed Me for the Lycan King’s Daughter

I didn't plan it.

One moment I was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at my empty hands. The next I was moving—down the hallway, down the stairs, through the pack house corridor with my boots hitting the stone floor hard enough to echo.

I didn't think. I just walked.

Elena was standing outside the infirmary when I came around the corner. She saw my face and stepped directly into my path, both hands raised.

"Scarlet. Stop."

"Move."

"You need to calm down before you go in there. Whatever you're feeling right now—"

"Elena." My voice came out low. Controlled. Dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with volume. "I will walk through you if I have to."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she stepped aside.

I pushed open the infirmary door.

The room smelled like antiseptic and fresh linen and something floral that I was starting to hate the way I hated nothing else in my life. Nadia was propped up against pillows on the medical bed, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, her face soft and pale and carefully arranged into something that looked like fragility.

Asher was sitting on the edge of the bed beside her.

His hand was on her stomach.

He was talking to her in a low voice, the kind of voice he used to use with me when I was sick. When I was scared. When I was bleeding out on a different medical table in this same building while Elena tried to save what was left of our child.

He looked up when I came in.

"Scarlet—"

The locket around Nadia's neck caught the overhead light.

Something in me detonated.

I didn't reach for a weapon. I didn't scream. What came out of me was worse than either of those things—it was my aura, raw and uncontrolled, pouring out of me like a flood breaking through a dam. A Luna's aura isn't just presence. It's weight. It's authority. It's every year of sacrifice and loyalty and grief compressed into something that presses against the air itself.

Asher was off the bed and slammed against the far wall before he fully registered what was happening.

Nadia made a sharp sound behind me. I didn't look at her.

I walked toward him slowly. He was pinned—not by my hands, not by anything physical, but by the sheer force of what I was projecting. I watched him struggle against it. Watched his Alpha instincts war with each other, the part of him that commanded everything fighting against the part that recognized his mate's pain and knew, on some animal level, that it deserved to be answered.

His jaw was tight. His eyes were wet.

Good.

"That locket," I said quietly. "Tell me where you got it."

His throat moved. "Scarlet, I can explain—"

"Tell me where you got it."

He closed his eyes.

"You took it from the shrine." I said it for him since he couldn't seem to manage it himself. "The shrine where we buried her name. Where we lit candles for her every year. Where you held me while I cried and told me she would never be forgotten." My voice cracked on the last word. I let it. "You took her locket and you put it around another woman's neck and you prayed for a replacement."

"It wasn't like that."

"Then what was it like?" The aura surged again, and I heard him hit the wall harder. His feet barely touched the floor now. "Explain it to me, Asher. Use your words. You're so good at explanations."

"The alliance with the Lycan territories—" He stopped. Tried again. "What I'm building with Nadia is for this pack. For our future. For—"

"Our future." I laughed. It was a terrible sound. "Our future died on that table. I bled for you. I gave up our child for you. And you—" I pressed closer, close enough to see every line of his face, every scar, every familiar detail I had memorized over six years. "You gave her our daughter's locket."

His face broke.

Just for a second. Just enough for me to see it—the boy underneath the Alpha, the one who had bled for me, the one I had believed in with everything I had.

Then his expression locked back into place.

"I'm not letting her go," he said. Quietly. Steadily. "What I'm building is for this pack's survival, and I will not—"

"Fine." I stepped back. The aura receded slowly, like a tide pulling out to sea. "Fine, Asher."

I turned toward the door.

"Scarlet—"

"I'm summoning the elder council," I said without looking back. "If you won't end this between us, they will."

I walked out.

Elena was still in the hallway. She didn't say anything. She just watched me pass with those sad, knowing eyes.

I kept walking.