My Alpha Husband Drugged Me to Keep Me Wolfless

Three days was not enough time.

Three days to absorb the fact that everything I believed about myself—the wolflessness, the barrenness, the fundamental inadequacy that Georgia had named in front of the pack so many times it had started to feel like my own name—was a device. A small, engineered device, now sitting in a sealed specimen container in Elias Warrick's cabinet.

Three days was not enough. But Spencer didn't give me four.

The summons came mid-morning. All elders to the great hall. Pack members welcome to observe. I dressed carefully, the way I always did when Spencer called an assembly—neutral colors, nothing that invited comment, nothing that suggested I thought my presence mattered either way. Old habit. I pressed my thumb to my wrist once in the corridor and walked in.

The hall was already full.

Spencer stood at the front, his posture carrying that particular ease he wore when he'd already decided how a scene would end. Beside him stood a woman I had never been formally introduced to, though I had seen her photograph in the territorial files I wasn't supposed to have access to. Sloan Perkins. She was composed and warm-looking in the practiced way of someone who had rehearsed the expression. Her son stood at her side—seven years old, dark-haired, watching the room with the quiet alertness of a child who had learned to read adult tension early.

Jrue.

I looked at his face for exactly one second before I looked away.

Spencer spoke. A rogue attack on Sloan's home territory. Devastating losses. A mother and child with nowhere to go. Ironridge's values of protection and community. His voice was smooth and certain, and around the hall I could see elder heads nodding in the slow, approving rhythm of people hearing what they already wanted to believe.

Georgia sat on the elder's bench with her hands folded in her lap and an expression of complete satisfaction.

I stood near the back and cataloged faces.

Then Spencer turned to me.

He crossed the floor in six steps—unhurried, deliberate—and his hand came down on my shoulder. Not gentle. Not rough. Simply present, the way a hand is placed on something it owns.

"My mate," he said, and his voice shifted registers. Just slightly. Just enough. The Alpha tone threaded in beneath the words like a current under still water—not a shout, never a shout, just that low compelling frequency that pressed against the will like a thumb against a bruise. "She will formally claim Jrue as our pup. To give this child the family and the future he deserves."

The pressure was immediate. A weight behind my sternum, pushing me toward yes, making yes feel like the only shape my mouth could form. Around the room I could feel the pack's attention sharpen—waiting, watching, the collective expectation of an audience that had already decided what the ending was.

Seraphina slammed against the inside of my ribs like a wave hitting stone.

*Don't,* she said. Hot and immediate. *Don't you dare—*

*I know,* I thought back. *I know. Not yet.*

His hand tightened on my shoulder. A fraction. Barely perceptible. But I felt it.

I raised my eyes to his and smiled the smile I had spent seven years perfecting—soft, grateful, a little overwhelmed, the exact expression of a woman who understood she was lucky to be included.

"Of course," I said.

The hall exhaled. Georgia unfolded her hands. Sloan's composed warmth didn't flicker, but something behind her eyes settled—a tension releasing, a calculation completing. Spencer's grip on my shoulder eased.

I kept my thumb pressed hard into my wrist and looked out at the assembled faces one more time.

I memorized every single one.

---

I couldn't sleep.

Not surprising. I lay in the dark for two hours listening to the pack house settle around me—Spencer's breathing, even and unbothered, from across the room—and felt Seraphina pacing. Not metaphorically. I could feel it, a restless circling energy in my chest that made it impossible to stay still.

I got up. Pulled on a coat. Walked.

I didn't plan to go to the forest clearing. I just walked until the pack house lights were behind me and the perimeter trees were ahead and the cold air hit my face and something in me simply—opened.

Seraphina didn't ask.

She took the opening like she'd been waiting for exactly this—and the shift came through me like a detonation. Not painful, or not only painful—more like every bone in my body had been waiting its entire life to be something else and was finally, finally allowed. Silver-white light cracked across my vision. The frozen ground split beneath me as I came down on four paws.

For a long moment, I just breathed.

The forest smelled like pine and cold stone and a hundred things I had no human words for. I was enormous. I could feel it—the size of myself, the weight, the luminous heat of Seraphina's presence radiating outward like something that could not be contained or hidden or called small.

A branch snapped at the treeline.

I turned.

Marcus stood at the edge of the clearing. He wasn't reaching for a weapon. He wasn't running. He was completely still, looking at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before—not fear, not surprise, but something older and more careful. Recognition.

He stepped forward into the moonlight. And then, slowly, he went down on one knee in the snow.

"Those are Lycan-blood markings." His voice was quiet. Steady. The voice of a man who had already decided what he was going to do before he finished the sentence. "I served near the Lycan court in my youth. I know exactly what I am looking at."

The clearing was silent except for the wind.

I shifted back. It took longer than the first time—Seraphina didn't want to go, and I couldn't entirely blame her. When I was standing again, human and cold and breathing hard, Marcus was still on one knee.

"Get up," I said.

He did. He looked at me the way people look at something they've been trying to solve for a long time and have just understood.

"How long have you known something was wrong?" I asked.

"Years," he said simply.

I nodded. The cold pressed in around us. Above the treeline, the moon was very bright.

"Then we have work to do," I said. "And no one can know about tonight."

Marcus held my gaze for a moment. Then he inclined his head—not the deferential nod of a Beta to a Luna, but something older, more deliberate.

"No one will," he said.