My Alpha Rejected Me for the Luna He Always Wanted

I started the surveillance on day three.

Lucas had sent me here to distract Sylas Armstrong. Keep him occupied. Make sure he wasn't thinking about Soleil. Fine. I would do exactly that, but on my terms.

I arrived at the briefing room twenty minutes early. Sylas held morning strategy sessions with his senior wolves—Declan Hurst, his Beta, and a rotating cast of Gammas and territory coordinators. The room had a long table, windows facing east, and a coffee station I'd identified as tactically useful. I set up the presentation materials, adjusted the blinds to cut the glare, and positioned myself near the far end of the table where I could watch without seeming to.

Sylas entered at exactly seven. He paused in the doorway—not obviously, just a beat longer than necessary—and his gaze tracked directly to me. Not a sweep of the room. A target acquisition.

"Good morning," he said.

I nodded. "Alpha."

He moved to the head of the table. I stayed where I was, organizing documents I'd already organized twice. When the other wolves filed in, Declan gestured me toward a chair near the back—staff seating, appropriate for my rank. I started to move.

"Closer," Sylas said.

I stopped.

He pulled out the chair two seats from his own. "You prepared the briefing materials. You should be able to reference them."

Declan's eyebrow twitched. I could read the thought as clearly as if he'd said it aloud: *That's not protocol.* But he said nothing. Neither did I. I took the seat.

The meeting ran ninety minutes. Sylas never looked directly at me, but halfway through, when I reached for my water glass, I found it already full. I hadn't refilled it. I glanced at him. He was reviewing a territory map, expression neutral, like he hadn't just crossed half the table to top off my glass before I'd consciously registered the thirst.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm. Once. Hard.

The pattern repeated. I started arriving earlier, positioning myself in places he would pass—filing rooms, the corridor outside his office, the pack library where senior wolves reviewed archives. I made eye contact a beat longer than deference required. Not aggressive. Just… present. Visible. The kind of boldness that should have earned me a dismissal or at least a cold correction.

Instead, Sylas ended a budget meeting forty minutes early because I developed a tension headache I had not mentioned aloud. He simply looked at me, said "We'll resume tomorrow," and dismissed the room. I stayed in my seat, frozen, while the other wolves filed out. He walked past me and paused.

"There's a healer on the second floor," he said quietly. "Dr. Wells. He's discreet."

Then he left.

I sat there, staring at the empty doorway, and tried to recalibrate. This was not the cold Lycan Prince Lucas's intelligence had described. This was something else. Something I hadn't accounted for.

I increased my surveillance.

The first time I saw Shadow, I was working late in the filing room. It was past midnight. The pack house had gone quiet except for the distant sounds of perimeter patrols changing shifts. I heard the soft pad of paws in the corridor and looked up.

An enormous black wolf filled the doorway. He was massive—easily seven feet at the shoulder, fur so dark it looked like he'd been cut from the night itself. His eyes were amber, steady, and fixed on me with an expression I could only describe as expectant.

I set down my pen. "Can I help you?"

Shadow—I knew it was Sylas's wolf from the briefing descriptions I'd catalogued—tilted his head. Then he walked into the room, turned in a slow circle, and curled up across the entire threshold. Blocking the exit.

I stared at him. He stared back.

"I need to leave eventually," I said.

His tail thumped once against the floor. He did not move.

I finished my filing. When I stood and approached the door, Shadow rose, stepped aside just enough to let me pass, and then followed me down the corridor. All the way to the staff quarters. He sat outside my door, that same composed expectancy in his posture, and was still there when I checked through the peephole at three in the morning.

The next day, I found Sylas in his office. I knocked once and entered without waiting for permission—a small test of how much latitude I actually had.

He looked up from his documents. "Kiara."

"Is your wolf a problem I should report to your Beta?"

Sylas set down his pen. For the first time since I'd arrived, I saw something that might have been amusement in his expression. It was subtle—a slight softening at the corner of his mouth, barely visible.

"He has excellent taste," Sylas said.

Then he returned to his documents.

I stood in the doorway for three full seconds. Something I was not expecting happened: I almost laughed. The sound caught in my throat before it could escape, and I turned and walked out before he could see my face.

Two days later, administration informed me I was scheduled for a routine health screening. "New policy," the coordinator said. "All recent hires. Dr. Brendan Wells, second floor, tomorrow at ten."

I attended with the composed disinterest of someone who had been told, for years, that she had no medical issues worth investigating. Dr. Wells was older, with kind eyes and the careful economy of movement that marked experienced healers. He ran standard bloodwork, took my vitals, asked perfunctory questions about my health history.

"Results in two days," he said.

When I returned, he was waiting with a printed report on the table between us. He sat across from me and placed it there with the deliberate care of someone handling something fragile.

"The wolfsbane metabolites in your bloodstream," he said, without softening, "are not residual. They are consistent with deliberate, sustained administration over a minimum of ten years."

I looked at the report. At the numbers. At the clinical language that named what I had known, in the abstract, for years. *Deliberate.* *Sustained.* *Ten years.*

My hands were steady when I picked up the paper.

"I need three copies," I said.

Brendan printed them without question. I gave one back to him for his records, folded one into my jacket pocket, and took the third to my room. I photographed it, uploaded the image to a secure server, and sent it to Maren Cole with a single instruction: *Archive.*

Then I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the copy in my hands. Proof. Not suspicion. Not inference. Proof.

Regina had been poisoning me for a decade.