My Alpha Husband Let His Mistress Burn Me Alive

Greta Voss set her bag down on our kitchen table and didn't open it right away. That was how I knew.

She was a small woman, sixty-some years old, with hands that had gone permanently stained from decades of crushed root and bark. She'd been coming to us for six years, paid in installments I scraped together from whatever work would have me. She'd never once looked at me the way the housekeeper had, or the way Kendall had. She looked at me like a colleague. I'd learned to treasure that.

"How bad," I said. Not a question. I didn't have room left for questions that pretended not to know the answer.

Greta exhaled through her nose. "Her wolf's retreating faster than the last scan. I don't say that lightly, Sofia. I've been tracking the same signature for six years and it's never dropped like this." She finally opened the bag, pulled out a folded page covered in her small, careful handwriting — numbers, notes, the private language of a healer who didn't trust anyone else to read her results correctly. "Her sixteenth birthday is in eleven weeks. If her wolf hasn't stabilized by then, it doesn't come back. Ever. She'll register Omega for life. Or worse."

Rogue. She didn't say the word. She didn't have to.

I kept my hands flat on the table so they wouldn't shake. "What kind of intervention."

"Lycan-level healing. It's the only thing that reaches a fracture this deep — it's not herb work anymore, it's not even pack-healer work. I don't have the training and I don't have the access." She hesitated, and that hesitation told me there was more. "There's a healer two territories north who's treated fractured spirits before. Real results. But her fee—" Greta named a number that made the room go very quiet.

I did the math I always did. It didn't work. It hadn't worked in a decade.

Greta watched me do it. Then, carefully, like she was setting something breakable on a high shelf: "There's a gathering. Underground — Alphas operating outside pack law, on disputed ground near the old railyards. They pay Omega staff obscene money for one night's work. Cash, no records, no questions. The kind of money that gets you two territories north in eleven weeks instead of never."

"What's the catch."

"Discretion. Disposability." She met my eyes. "You don't ask what you see. You don't matter to them beyond what you're serving. I'm only telling you because I know what number you need and I don't see another way to get you there in time."

I didn't hesitate. Hesitating was a luxury for people with time.

"Give me the contact," I said.

---

The warehouse smelled like cold concrete and money — a strange combination, but I'd learned that money had a scent of its own, cologne and leather and something faintly metallic, like it wanted you to know it could buy anything, including silence.

My contact was a woman named Priya who'd once needed help when her own child ran a fever no pack healer would treat for free. She got me through the door and then disappeared into her own rotation, and I didn't see her again.

The rules were explained to me in under a minute. Servants knelt. Servants did not meet an Alpha's eyes. Servants existed as furniture that occasionally poured champagne. I nodded, took my tray, and knelt at the edge of the main floor with six other Omegas, my knees against bare concrete, my spine straight, my eyes fixed on the middle distance the way I'd trained myself to do a long time ago.

I thought about the number. Eleven weeks. I thought about Ella's laugh, the one that hadn't changed since she was six, and I let my hands stay steady on the silver tray while men who ruled entire territories laughed too loud and drank too much and didn't look at me twice.

It was almost peaceful, in its way. Almost.

Then I heard her voice.

"Well," Kendall said, somewhere above and behind me, pitched just loud enough to carry. "Isn't this a coincidence."

I didn't turn my head. Rule one. But I felt her circle around, felt Enzo's group somewhere near the bar, felt the particular quality of attention that gathered whenever Kendall decided a room needed watching.

She stopped in front of me. Champagne flute in hand, pale gold liquid catching the light.

"You know," she said, conversational, almost gentle, "I always did think you had lovely hands. Even now."

The glass slipped from her fingers.

It wasn't an accident. Nothing about Kendall was ever an accident. It shattered against the concrete an arm's length from my knees, fragments scattering bright and small across the floor between us, and the sound cut through every conversation in the warehouse the way I'd known crystal on marble could.

Heads turned. Alphas turned.

Kendall crouched, just slightly, so her voice would land soft and cruel and perfectly audible.

"Pick it up," she said. "On your hands and knees. Earn your scraps like the Omega you are."

Somewhere behind her, a low ripple of laughter started — Alphas, glasses lifting, already enjoying the show.