My Alpha Rejected Me Before the Tribunal

The sixty-eighth morning smells the same as the sixty-seventh.

Floral. Heavy. Hers.

I press the cloth against the baseboard and drag it slow, working the scent out of the grout the way I've learned to — not fast, not angry, just steady. Colette Patterson wears jasmine oil, the cheap kind that clings to fabric and skin and stone. It layers over Killian's musk like a second coat of paint, and after three years of this, I know exactly how long it takes to scrub down to wood.

Forty minutes. Give or take.

I'm on my knees in my own mate's suite at six in the morning, and my hands don't shake. That's the thing no one understands about me. They never have.

"You've missed a spot."

I don't look up. I already heard her bare feet on the floor — she walks heel-first, deliberate, the way women do when they want to be heard. Colette is standing in the doorway wearing Killian's shirt, the collar hanging loose off one shoulder, a coffee mug cradled in both hands like she owns the morning.

She crouches down to my eye level. Her smile is the patient kind, the kind that means she has time.

"Does it bother you?" she asks, almost soft. "The smell. Has the wolfless Luna learned to enjoy it yet?"

I keep scrubbing.

She waits three seconds for an answer she already knows she won't get, then straightens, and her laughter trails down the hallway like smoke.

I finish the baseboard. I wring the cloth out over the bucket. I do not allow myself the small luxury of imagining what her face will look like in thirty days.

Not yet.

---

The morning assembly gathers in the main hall at eight — three hundred wolves arranged in loose rank, the air thick with pack-scent and the particular charged quiet that means Killian is already in the room.

He descends the stairs with Colette on his arm. She's changed into her own clothes now, something fitted and cream-colored, her dark hair loose. She knows how to make an entrance. I'll give her that.

I stand at my place to the left of the dais, hands folded, eyes forward. The Luna's position. The one I've held for seven years.

Killian doesn't look at me until he wants to.

When he does, his voice drops into the Alpha tone — that low, resonant command that bypasses thought and goes straight to bone — and my body answers before my mind can argue.

*Down.*

My knees hit the stone floor. My palms flatten. My spine bows, throat bared, the posture of total submission forced out of my own muscles while I watch from somewhere behind my eyes, perfectly calm, perfectly furious.

The hall goes silent.

His hand catches me across the face — open-palmed, not a fist, which somehow makes it worse. The crack of it echoes. My lip splits at the corner and I taste copper.

"The state of my suite," he says to the room, not to me, "is an embarrassment."

I keep my eyes on the floor. The stone is cold through my knees. Ansel, standing two rows back, has gone very still — I can see his boots from here, and they haven't moved.

"Colette Patterson," Killian continues, his voice carrying easily now, smooth and certain, "will be marked as co-Luna within the month. The Concubine Rite will be observed in full."

The murmur that moves through the pack is low, careful. Nobody cheers. Nobody objects.

I stay bowed until he dismisses me with a flick of his hand, and I rise the way I always do — quietly, without drama, blood drying at the corner of my mouth — and I walk out.

---

The healer's cellar is mine between midnight and dawn. No one else comes here.

I light a single candle and take the last bottle from the shelf behind the loose stone — pale green glass, the moonflower tonic I've brewed in secret for three years, the only thing standing between Killian Scott and the silverblight rotting through his blood. The same rot that killed his sixty-seventh mistress. The same rot he earned.

I hold it over the drain.

One breath.

Not mercy. Never mercy. Just the weight of knowing that once I pour it, the clock starts, and clocks don't negotiate.

I pour.

The pale liquid spirals down and disappears, and the smell of moonflower — clean, faintly sweet — rises once and then it's gone.

I pick up the nail I keep on the shelf beside the candle and scratch a single mark into the cellar wall.

Day One.

Then I go upstairs to the attic, pull Selah Cox's journal from behind the water cistern, and carry it back down to the cellar table. I lay it open beside my own coded log — three years of blood test results, tonic batch records, the dates I first noticed the tremor in Killian's left hand. I work through the cross-references methodically, the way I do everything: the rogue trade link, the silverblight chain, every woman he marked and discarded before Colette came along thinking she was something different.

It all holds. Every line of it.

I wrap both documents in oilcloth and press them under the cellar floor, between the third and fourth stones from the east wall.

I allow myself one full minute of stillness in the dark.

Then I blow out the candle and go upstairs to begin the day — because somewhere in the pack house above me, Killian Scott is already brewing my morning tea.