My Alpha Poisoned Our Pups for His Mistress

They didn't take me to a throne room.

I noticed that before I noticed anything else about Bloodcrest — the marble floors, the guards who didn't quite manage to stop staring, the cold that felt different here, cleaner somehow than Silverfang's winter. The escort led me down a side hall instead of toward the tall doors at the end of the entrance corridor, the ones carved with a crest and flanked by two Deltas standing too straight to be decoration. We went the other way, to a smaller door, unmarked, and I understood the choice before anyone explained it to me.

A throne room means a supplicant kneeling. A study means two people at a table.

Callum was already standing when I walked in, which was its own kind of statement. He didn't make me approach him. He came around the desk instead, and for a second I remembered him at the academy — quieter than the other princes, watching more than he spoke, the kind of stillness that made you forget he was the most dangerous person in the room until you needed him to be.

"Zoey Mitchell." He said my full name the way Theodore used to, like it cost him nothing to bother learning it right. "Sit."

I sat. I put the satchel on the table between us instead of on my lap, because I wanted him to see it as an offering laid flat, not a thing I was still holding onto.

"You said full supply chain," he said. "I'd like to see if that's true before we discuss anything else."

Fair. I respected it more than I would have respected flattery.

I opened the satchel and started laying out ledgers in the order I'd learned them — six months of smuggling pages out one at a time, memorizing what I couldn't copy. "Three shell buyers. Vance Trading out of the eastern crossing, a fishery co-op that doesn't fish, and a private courier registered to a dead man's name in the Moonveil border towns." I turned the first ledger to face him. "Quantities here, dates here. Cross-reference with the healer's requisition logs and you'll see the discrepancy — what's logged as bought and what's logged as used never matches. The difference is what moves through Christopher's private study instead of the healer's stores."

"Who else in the pack knows."

"His Gamma handles the courier pickups. I don't think Marcus — the Beta — knows the full scope. I think he suspects." I said it plainly, no hedging, because hedging would have made it sound like I wasn't sure, and I was sure. "He's the only one I'd trust not to have known and stayed silent."

Callum studied the ledger without touching it yet, his eyes moving line by line with the particular patience of someone who has read a thousand documents looking for the one lie buried in them. "How long have you had these."

"Pieces of it for six months. I didn't know what I'd need them for." That was mostly true. I didn't say the rest — that some quiet, unkillable part of me had been building an exit for longer than I'd let myself admit.

"You could have sold this to a rival pack for considerably more than sanctuary."

"I don't want a rival pack. I want an hour of your time and somewhere to stand that isn't Silverfang ground." I kept my hands flat on the table. "You've had it. Both."

Something shifted behind his eyes — not surprise exactly, something quieter than that. He went very still, the kind of stillness I'd only ever seen in old wolves who'd stopped needing to prove anything with movement. I didn't know yet that his people had a name for it, that a Beta somewhere down the hall would later tell his Gamma, *the Prince is deciding something,* and mean it as a warning to leave him be.

"You'll have sanctuary," he said finally. "No conditions attached beyond what you've already given."

I waited for the rest — the price that always comes after the gift, because in seven years I had never once been given something without eventually paying for it twice. It didn't come.

"That's all," he said, reading my face with more accuracy than I liked. "I don't collect debts from people who just walked out of a fire."

I didn't know what to do with that, so I said nothing, and stood, and gathered the ledgers back into the satchel because they were still evidence, still mine to hold until someone needed them in a room with more weight than this one.

At the door I turned back once. He hadn't moved from where he stood by the desk, watching me with an expression I couldn't name and didn't try very hard to.

"Thank you," I said. Twice now, in one night, which was twice more than I'd said it in seven years to the man I used to call mate.

He inclined his head, and I walked out into the cold marble hall not knowing that behind me, something in his chest had gone taut and singing, the way a wire sings when the wind finds exactly the right angle — a scent he'd chased for years suddenly, impossibly, in the room he'd just let walk out of it.