My Alpha Husband Poisoned Our Son for His New Luna

The Ironvale pack house smelled different.

That was the first thing I noticed as I stepped through the side entrance at dawn. The air had changed. Roses and something sharper, threaded through every room like a second wallpaper. Camille had been redecorating with her scent.

She was waiting for me in the front hall.

"Madeline." She smiled, one hand resting lightly on the banister. She wore cream today—soft, expensive, the kind of fabric that made servants nervous. "So kind of you to come. The kitchens are through the back. I'm sure you remember the way."

I didn't answer. I walked past her.

A housemaid I had trained myself three years ago crossed the hall carrying a tray of linens. Her eyes slid off me like water off glass. She didn't nod. She didn't speak. She stepped aside and kept moving.

At the base of the grand staircase, Marilyn stood with her fingers curled around the Luna crest pendant at her throat. She did not greet me. She only watched, the corner of her mouth lifting a fraction, as though I were a piece of furniture that had been correctly returned to its assigned room.

I pressed my fingers briefly to the scar on my neck and kept walking.

I was halfway down the east hallway toward the kitchens when I saw him.

Peyton stood in the doorway of the study, Shadow tucked under one arm. He was smaller than I remembered. That was the first thing my body understood before my mind did—smaller, thinner, the roundness gone from his cheeks. His skin had a grey undertone I had never seen on him. His eyes were dull in a way that made something inside me tilt sideways.

"Peyton."

He looked up. For a second, he didn't move. Then he flinched—actually flinched—when I stepped toward him.

I stopped.

Something passed across his face. Recognition, then something like collapse. He crossed the hallway in three uneven steps and buried himself against my hip. His small hands fisted in the fabric of my coat. He didn't cry. He just held on, hard enough that I could feel the tremor in his arms.

I dropped to my knees and gathered him against me. He smelled like Peyton, and underneath that, something else. Something faint and wrong. A trace of bitterness on his breath that shouldn't have been there.

"Baby," I whispered. "Baby, what is it?"

His chin tucked slightly to the left.

My stomach dropped.

"Peyton, look at me."

He didn't. His face stayed pressed against my shoulder.

"There you are, sweetheart."

Camille's voice.

She glided down the hallway in her cream dress, smiling the way she had smiled at the ceremony. She crouched—an elegant, practiced motion—and held out her hand to Peyton.

"Time for your afternoon vitamins, darling."

She produced a small gummy from the pocket of her dress. Red. Shaped like a tiny bear. She held it up between two manicured fingers like it was an ordinary thing.

My wolf smelled it.

I had spent six years being told my wolf was dormant. Weak. Barely there. But in that moment, something inside me lunged so hard against my ribs that my canines slid down before I could stop them. I felt the sharp press of them against my lower lip. I turned my face away, closed my mouth, forced them back. It took every ounce of control I had.

Camille didn't notice. She was watching Peyton.

"Go on," she said sweetly. "You know the rules."

Peyton's hand left my coat. He took the gummy. He put it in his mouth and swallowed it without chewing.

His eyes never lifted from the floor.

"Good boy," Camille murmured. She straightened, smoothed her dress, and smiled down at me. "He's been such a help adjusting. Haven't you, sweetheart?"

Peyton did not answer.

"The kitchens, Madeline." Camille tilted her head. "Marilyn expects the table settings done by noon."

I stood up slowly. I did not look at Camille. I looked at my son.

"I love you," I said quietly.

He nodded once, chin still tucked left.

I walked to the kitchens. I set the table. I folded three hundred cloth napkins and arranged the silver in the pattern Marilyn preferred. I said nothing to the two Omegas working beside me, and they said nothing to me.

In my coat pocket, my notebook waited.

By the time the kitchen emptied, I had made an entry. Three lines. A date. A time. A description of the red gummy bear and the smell I could not yet name aloud.

I waited until the pack house went still.

At half past midnight, I slipped out of the guest room they had assigned me at the end of the servants' wing and made my way down through the dark corridors on bare feet. The kitchens were unlit. The moon threw a pale rectangle across the floor through the high windows.

Peyton's food area sat in the corner nearest the pantry. A small counter. A labeled shelf. His own set of dishes. I had organized this myself, years ago.

Everything on the shelf was ordinary. Cereal. Dried fruit. A tin of the honey biscuits he liked.

Behind the biscuit tin, pushed back against the wall, sat a small unlabeled glass jar.

I lifted it down carefully. Red gummies. Bear-shaped. Perhaps thirty of them, jostling softly against the glass.

I took Sera's camera out of my coat pocket and photographed the jar in position. I photographed the shelf. I photographed the biscuit tin that had hidden it.

Then I unscrewed the lid.

I pried one gummy apart between my thumb and forefinger. The interior was slightly darker than the outside, a deeper red flecked with something almost black. I pressed my fingernail into it and lifted it to my face.

The smell hit me low and immediate.

Acrid. Botanical. A dry burn at the back of my throat that I had encountered exactly twice in my life—both times in Owen's healing wing, both times labeled and locked behind glass.

Wolfsbane.

Diluted. Buried under sugar and food coloring and whatever else Camille had used to mask it.

But present.

I set the gummy down on the counter very, very carefully, as though the porcelain beneath it might break.

My hands were perfectly steady.

My wolf was not. Somewhere behind my ribs, she was making a sound I had never heard from her before. Not a howl. Something older. Something that had teeth.

I photographed the pried-open gummy. I photographed the interior. I photographed the fingernail smear.

Then I pressed the two halves back together, wiped the counter with the hem of my sleeve, dropped the reassembled gummy back into the jar, screwed the lid on, and placed the jar exactly where I had found it. Biscuit tin in front. Cereal boxes aligned. Nothing disturbed.

I walked back to the servants' wing in the dark.

I did not sleep.

I sat on the edge of the narrow guest bed with the camera in my lap and my notebook open on my knee, and I wrote. Slowly. Precisely. Every detail. Every measurement. The color of the interior. The estimated dose. The location of the jar.

By the time the sky outside began to grey, I had filled four pages.

I closed the notebook. I pressed my fingers to the cold scar on my neck.

I did not cry. I did not shake.

Something in me had gone quiet in a way I did not yet have a name for—a stillness that felt less like grief and more like a decision that had already been made, waiting for my body to catch up.

Outside, the pack house was beginning to stir.

I stood up and got dressed for the day.