My Alpha Publicly Rejected Me for Another Woman

Three days is a long time when you have nothing but stone walls and your own memory.

I couldn't access the pack library. I had no phone, no texts, no one willing to slip me a copy of the pack-law registry. What I had was three years of managing Preston's territorial alliances—three years of sitting across from visiting Alphas and Elders and Lycan emissaries, smoothing over disputes, referencing clauses by number and precedent because Preston never bothered to memorize them himself.

He'd called me useful. I'd called it love.

I sat cross-legged on the narrow bed and started from the beginning. The Luna Accord, Article Seven, Subsection Three: groundless mid-ceremony rejection, witnessed assembly, forfeiture of true-Luna bonding rights. I'd invoked it correctly. I knew that. But there were adjacent provisions I needed to hold in my head for the tribunal—clauses about the burden of evidence in rogue-sympathizer charges, about the required chain of custody for seized materials, about what constituted a valid witness testimony when the accused had no advocate present.

No advocate. No access to evidence. No opportunity to examine what they'd planted in my room.

I filed that away. All of it. Every procedural violation was a blade I could use if I survived long enough to hold one.

But it was the other thing that kept pulling my attention back. The thing I couldn't file away.

Christina's teas.

I'd been thinking about them for two days, turning the memory over like a stone I wasn't sure I wanted to look under. She'd pressed them on me at such specific moments—after a particularly brutal sparring session in the training yard when I'd felt something almost surge inside me and then go flat. After the night I'd woken up with my hands glowing faintly at the palms and told Preston about it and he'd said, *Probably just stress, love, don't worry.* After every Council visit, every high-stakes alliance negotiation, every moment when my wolf had pressed close to the surface and then—nothing.

Always followed by tea.

Always from Christina's hands.

The pattern arranged itself in my mind with a terrible, quiet clarity. Not a theory. A shape. The shape of three years of careful, deliberate suppression. The shape of someone who'd seen what I was and decided to bury it before I could.

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum. The second heartbeat pulsed back. Steady. Furious.

*I know,* I thought. *I know now.*

I couldn't prove it yet. But I knew.

---

The morning of the tribunal, she came.

I heard her footsteps before the lock turned—measured, unhurried, the walk of a woman who had never needed to rush because the world had always bent around her. Elder Christina opened the door herself. No guards. No Zoey. Just her, silver hair pinned back, wearing dark wool like she was attending a funeral.

Maybe she was.

She didn't carry a mug this time.

She stood in the doorway for a moment, studying me. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, feet flat on the floor, hands loose in my lap. I'd been awake since before dawn. I'd stopped shaking sometime in the night.

"Accept the brand quietly," she said. Her voice was the same as always—cool, precise, wrapped in the kind of polish that came from decades of playing Elder. "Don't fight it. If you resist, Preston will make it worse."

She paused. Waiting for me to flinch, maybe. Or cry. Or beg.

I looked at her steadily.

"You've been putting wolfsbane in my tea," I said. "Since I moved into this house."

Not a question. I didn't make it a question.

Something moved across her face—too fast to name, too controlled to read. Her expression didn't crack. Her posture didn't shift. But her hand on the door handle went white at the knuckles, the tendons pulling taut beneath her skin.

She didn't deny it.

The silence stretched between us, and in that silence was her answer. All of it.

"You should eat something before the tribunal," she said finally. Her voice was completely level. "You'll want your strength."

She turned and left. The door clicked shut behind her.

I exhaled slowly.

She hadn't denied it. She'd stood in my doorway and offered me mercy and not denied it, which meant she knew I knew, and she'd decided it didn't matter anymore. Whatever she'd built with those teas—three years of careful, patient suppression—she believed it had already done its work.

She believed my wolf was gone.

I pressed my hand to my chest.

The second heartbeat answered. One heavy, deliberate thud.

Like a war drum that had been waiting a very long time to sound.

I stood up. My legs held. I straightened my back and looked at the locked door and thought about the tribunal hall waiting on the other side of it—the ranked wolves, the visiting Alphas, the Lycan Prince who had stayed when he didn't have to.

Christina was wrong about one thing.

I didn't need my strength for the tribunal.

I needed theirs to fail.