My Alpha Publicly Replaced Me With His Luna

Two of Greyson's warriors closed on me before I had time to breathe.

They didn't speak. They didn't need to. One of them, a Delta named Rhett, grabbed my upper arm hard enough to leave prints. The other caught my elbow. They didn't drag me, exactly. They walked fast, and my feet had to keep up or trip.

The banquet hall doors swung open. Cold October air punched me in the face. The clearing behind the pack house was already lit—torches jammed into the dirt at even spaces, forming the old circle. Someone had prepared this. Someone had known.

The crowd parted to let us through. Faces I had served for six years. Wolves I had cleaned wine off after ceremonies, wolves I had brought soup to when they were sick, wolves whose kids I had watched during hunt nights. Not one of them met my eyes.

Except her.

Elara Penn, the pack Healer, stood near the edge of the crowd, her arms folded tight across her chest. Her mouth was a thin, pressed line. For a single second her eyes found mine, and I saw something there—shame, maybe, or the ghost of it. Something that could have been a warning if she had let it be.

Then she looked at the ground.

I noted it. The way you note a stone you might trip over later. I filed it away and kept walking.

The warriors shoved me into the center of the circle. My knees hit the packed dirt. I caught myself on my hands and pushed up slow, not letting them see me stumble twice.

The bond-wound in my chest was still bleeding heat. Every heartbeat sent a fresh sting through the empty place where the mark used to be. My right wrist throbbed under the iron cuff, hot in a way it had never been. I flexed my fingers and felt the metal bite back.

I could not shift. Every wolf in that ring knew it.

That was the point.

The crowd tightened around the perimeter, three deep now. On the low platform at the north edge of the circle, Greyson stood with Sutton at his shoulder. He didn't sit. He didn't have to. His arms hung loose at his sides, and his face wore the same expression he used to wear when he watched me scrub the pack house floors. Mild. Uninterested. A man watching his lawn get mowed.

Sutton stepped forward. She had already stripped down to the shift-shirt she'd worn under her banquet dress. The moonstone pendant swung at her collarbone, catching torchlight.

"Last chance, Omega," she called, loud enough for the back rows. "Kneel. Bare your throat. Crawl to the pack border and I let you keep your skin."

I stood up straight. I did not answer.

She smiled like I had given her a gift.

Her bones cracked. She dropped forward, and the shift rolled through her like water—sleek gray fur, long muscle, Gamma build. Her wolf hit the ground already moving. She was beautiful. I will give her that. Beautiful the way a knife is beautiful right before it slides between your ribs.

She circled me once. Slow. Head low, ears flat, yellow eyes locked on mine. Her breath fogged in the cold air. My legs shook. I couldn't stop them. The bond-shock had not finished with me, and every part of my body wanted to fold.

I did not fold.

She lunged.

I did not even see it start. One second she was ten feet away, and the next her weight slammed into my chest and drove me flat on my back. The air punched out of me. My skull cracked against the dirt. One massive paw pressed down on my sternum, and I felt something in my ribs pop—not break, but bend hard enough to warn me.

I could not breathe. I could not move. I stared up at her open jaws and the hot stink of her breath and I thought, absurdly, *this is what he chose.*

Her yellow eyes shifted. Down. To my wrist.

The cuff.

Sutton's wolf lowered her head and closed her teeth around the iron band. She dragged my arm across the dirt. I felt the welded edge tear my skin, hot blood running warm into my palm. She shook her head once, hard, and the ancient weld cracked.

She dropped my arm. Her form shimmered—not a full shift back, just enough. A woman's face on a wolf's shoulders, mouth still wet with my blood, hand pressing the cuff into the dirt under her paw.

"Omegas," Sutton hissed down at me, "don't get to keep heirlooms."

She leaned her weight into it.

The iron cuff shattered.

I felt it before I heard it. A sound like a struck bell rang under my skin, low and long, traveling up my arm and into my spine and down into every bone I owned. The wolfsbane fumes hissed out of the broken metal in a thin gray curl.

Something moved inside my chest.

Something that had been there my whole life, folded up small, holding its breath.

It opened one eye.

And then—slowly, like a mountain deciding to stand up—it began to rise.