My Alpha Rejected Me for His Fake Mate

Preparations for the summit began the next morning, but something inside me was shifting.

It started as small, strange flickers.

For five years, my wolf had been a silent, bruised weight curled in the back of my skull. She had barely made a sound since the night Aiden ripped the bond away. But two days before our departure date, I took Aspyn down to the compound market to pick up dried lavender and fresh honey for the trip.

Aspyn was skipping ahead of me, her little hand trailing along the wooden stalls. A delivery driver from the lower valley stepped out from behind a parked truck, carrying a heavy crate of tools. Aspyn didn’t look where she was going and reached out to steady herself on his dusty sleeve.

Before I could even open my mouth, a sound tore through my head.

It wasn't my voice. It was a low, vibrating, bone-deep growl that practically shook my teeth.

The air around me seemed to freeze. My instincts spiked with pure, savage heat, screaming at me to pull my daughter back, to tear open the throat of anything that moved too close to her.

My vision flared white for half a second.

"Aspyn, stop," I said, my voice dropping so low and sharp that the driver flinched.

Aspyn blinked, pulling her hand back instantly. "Sorry, Mama."

The driver looked around, confused, his eyes darting toward the trees as if searching for an unleashed beast. He couldn’t hear the growl, but he had felt the sudden drop in temperature. I pressed my hand to my chest, my heart hammering against my ribs.

My wolf had never growled like that. Even when Aiden had thrown me to the stone floor five years ago, she had only whined and bled.

An hour later, the strangeness got worse.

I stood on the eastern balcony overlooking the compound’s main sparring yard, leaning against the iron railing. Below, a dozen Lycan warriors were drilling with short blades. Usually, I had to watch closely to track their footwork and check their defensive rotations.

Then a sudden wave of heat washed behind my eyes.

A sharp, electric burst flooded my senses. My nostrils flared involuntarily, and all at once, the whole yard resolved into a crisp, overwhelming map of pure scent.

I didn't even need to look. I could smell the zinc and fresh sweat of the warrior four paces to the left of the armory door. I smelled the dried pine resin on the boots of the archer ten yards behind the fence. I could trace the exact breathing rhythm of every single guard along the stone parapet. It was terrifyingly sharp, like someone had peeled a thick cloth off my senses.

That afternoon, I walked into the compound clinic.

Isolde Marsh clamped a blood pressure cuff around my arm and shone a penlight into my eyes. She didn't say much at first. She was a woman of few words, older and sharper than most healers in the territory. She swiped a sterile swab along the inside of my cheek, ran it through an automated blood-analyzer, and stared at the digital readout on her tablet for two long minutes.

Her brow furrowed deeply.

"Isolde?" I asked quietly, rubbing my thumb against the scar on my collarbone. "Is something wrong with my vitals?"

"Your vitals are exceptionally strong, Saoirse," Isolde murmured. She tapped a series of keys, saving the file. "Too strong."

"What does that mean?"

"The dormancy around your wolf's biological markers is thinning," she said, looking over the rim of her reading glasses. She turned the tablet toward me. A jagged red wave flickered across the screen. "A wolf damaged by bond-severance does not regenerate sensory acuity on this scale. It shrinks. It goes dark."

She pressed a button, flagging the file for review.

On the header of the chart, in clean digital type, she typed: *Suppressed high-bloodline signature. Origin unknown.*

"Keep an eye on it," Isolde said softly, touching my hand. "And tell Magnus if the sensory spikes make you dizzy."

I nodded, but an uneasy prickle lingered at the back of my neck.

***

The uneasiness only deepened three days before we were scheduled to leave for Silverfang territory.

It was late afternoon, and the sun was slipping behind the western ridges, casting long, bruised shadows across the lawn. Aspyn was tossing an old tennis ball across the grass near the eastern tree line. Buster, the massive grey wolfhound the Lycan King’s Beta had given me, was trotting happily by her side.

Suddenly, Buster stopped dead.

His ears flattened against his skull. The coarse fur along his spine rose into a thick ridge. He didn't whine. He let out a vicious, guttural snarl that cracked through the quiet yard like a gunshot.

"Buster?" Aspyn called out, startled.

The hound didn't look back. He exploded into a sprint, bolting straight toward the dense pines at the edge of the perimeter fence.

"Aspyn, get behind me!" I yelled, dropping my book and sprinting down the porch steps.

By the time my boots hit the grass, Buster was already tearing into the brush. A sharp, human grunt echoed from the trees, followed by the violent sound of fabric ripping. I reached the fence line just in time to catch the heavy thud of jaws snapping shut, a muffled curse, and the sound of someone frantically crashing through the dry underbrush on the other side of the boundary.

Buster stood at the fence, foam flecking his lips, his teeth slick with black thread and mud from a stranger's combat boot.

Within ten minutes, Magnus's border patrol was swarming the woods.

I stood on the gravel path, holding Aspyn tight against my hip, while the patrol commander knelt by the boundary markers. Magnus stood five feet away, listening in cold, terrifying silence.

"A single set of human-gait tracks, Prince Magnus," the commander reported, shining a tactical light over the crushed fern leaves. "He was pacing the boundary line just out of camera range for at least two hours before the hound caught his scent."

"Two hours," Magnus said. His voice was very quiet, but it made the hairs on my arms stand up.

"Yes, sir. He waited for the patrol swap," the commander added, his jaw set grimly. "Whoever it was, they knew our rotation schedule. They knew the four-minute gap between the third and fourth sweep."

I felt the blood drain from my face.

I had designed those patrol rotations. But before I lived here, I had designed the ones for Nightshade, too. The defensive logic, the spacing of the blind spots—anyone who had studied my tactical habits could figure out where I would leave room for a shift change.

"Double the watch on the eastern line," Magnus ordered flatly. "Set motion sensors every twenty feet from the river to the gate."

"Understood, Alpha."

That evening, the private quarters were dead silent.

Magnus didn't say a single word about the tracks. He sat at the dining table, cutting Aspyn's roast chicken into neat little bites, smiling softly whenever she told him a ridiculous story about Buster chasing a squirrel up an oak tree. He seemed entirely relaxed, the picture of quiet domestic calm.

But when Aspyn finally fell asleep in her bedroom down the hall, I looked out the living room window.

Two massive Lycan Guards, armed with tactical sidearms and clad in full royal armor, were already posted outside her bedroom door.

Magnus hadn't mentioned it. He didn't have to.

The summit was three days away, and the shadows were already closing in.