My Alpha Husband Drugged Me to Keep Me Wolfless

The ground came up fast.

One second I was running—last in line, always last, positioned there by Elder Georgia's hand on my shoulder and her thin smile—and then my legs simply stopped working. Not a stumble. A full-body shutdown, like every circuit in me blew at once. My knees hit the dirt, then my palms, then my cheek was against the cold earth and I was staring sideways at a row of boots that had all turned to face me.

The pack run halted.

I heard Georgia before I saw her. That particular silence she made when something confirmed what she already believed.

"Get her up," Spencer said. Not *is she hurt*. Not my name. Just that—the flat irritation of a man whose schedule had been interrupted.

I pressed my thumb hard into the inside of my wrist. Felt the pulse there. Still alive. Still here.

Two Omegas lifted me by the arms.

---

Elias Warrick's medical quarters smelled like antiseptic and dried herbs. He was Ironridge's healer—young for the role, precise in the way of someone who had learned to be careful because no one was watching out for him either. He didn't speak while he ran the scan. I watched his face instead of the equipment.

I watched it go white.

He set the scanner down slowly. Picked it up again. Ran it a second time over my lower abdomen, just to the left of center. The device beeped the same result.

"Genevieve." His voice was steady. His hands were steady. But there was something happening behind his eyes that he was working very hard to keep out of his voice. "I need you to tell me—have you ever had a procedure here? Any reason someone would have opened—"

"I had a minor surgery," I said. "Seven years ago. Before the bonding ceremony. They said it was a cyst."

He closed his eyes for exactly one second.

Then he told me.

A device. Wolfsbane-laced, surgically embedded, designed to do two things simultaneously: prevent conception, and suppress a wolf's awakening entirely. Placed while I was unconscious. Placed *deliberately*. He said the composition was not accidental contamination—it was engineered. Maintained. Someone had been keeping it active.

I pressed my thumb into my wrist until the skin went white.

I did not make a sound.

Elias removed it in twenty minutes. His hands did not shake. I respected him for that. I lay on the table and stared at the ceiling tiles and counted them—fourteen across, nine down—while he worked, and I thought about nothing at all, because if I thought about something I would start and I could not afford to start yet.

The device was smaller than I expected. He placed it in a sealed specimen container without letting me see it clearly, but I had already seen enough.

Seven years.

Every pack run I couldn't keep pace with. Every elder meeting where Georgia called me *wolfless* in the same tone you'd say *broken*. Every night Spencer looked at me with that particular patience—the patience of a man managing a liability—and told me I was lucky he hadn't rejected me. Every morning I woke up and believed him.

All of it. Manufactured.

I pressed my thumb into my wrist and did not make a sound.

---

It started two hours later.

Elias had stepped out. I was still on the table, staring at the ceiling, when something moved in the center of my chest.

Not a flutter. Not a whisper. A *surge*—like something enormous had been held underwater for seven years and had just found the surface. Heat flooded up through my sternum, behind my eyes, down my arms to my fingertips. The examination table's edge bit into my palms as I grabbed it.

And then a voice. From somewhere beneath my ribs, from somewhere that had always been there and had never been allowed to speak.

*I am Seraphina. And I have been awake this entire time.*

She did not come gently.

She came like a wall of water through a broken dam—color slamming into my vision, scent hitting me in layers I had never been able to parse before, the antiseptic and the herbs and beneath those, old pine and cold stone and something else, something I had no name for yet, something that made the center of my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with rage.

My body shook. Not from pain. From *containment*—from the sheer force of holding something that large inside a frame that had spent seven years believing it was empty.

*Let me out,* Seraphina said. Hot. Immediate. *Let me out and I will tear him apart with our own teeth and—*

"Not yet," I breathed.

The door handle moved. Elias returning.

I exhaled slowly. Pressed my thumb to my wrist once, hard. Felt Seraphina pull back—not willingly, not quietly, but back.

When Elias came through the door, I was lying still, eyes half-closed, the picture of a woman slowly recovering from a collapse.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Weak," I said. "Same as always."

He nodded and made a note on his chart.

I stared at the ceiling and let Seraphina burn quietly in my chest, and I began to think about what I needed to do first.