My Alpha Used Wolfsbane to Steal My Wolf

The kitchen was empty when Hallie found me.

I was organizing platters for tomorrow's pre-ceremony banquet—silver trays that needed polishing, linen napkins that needed pressing. Routine work. The kind that kept my hands busy and my mind quiet. I heard her heels on the tile before I saw her, the sharp click-click that always announced her presence like a warning.

She stopped in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me with that expression I'd learned to recognize over three years. Not quite a smile. Something sharper.

"Adeline," she said pleasantly. "Working hard, I see."

I didn't look up. "The banquet needs—"

"The banquet will be fine." She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The click of the latch was very soft. Very deliberate.

I set down the tray and turned to face her. We were alone. No pack members in the hallway. No witnesses.

Hallie's sweetness dropped like a mask she'd grown tired of holding.

"I wanted to talk to you," she said, examining her nails. "About logistics. After the ceremony, your room will be reassigned."

I said nothing. My thumb found my wrist.

"The Omega quarters in the basement," she continued, as though discussing furniture arrangements. "Remington wants you close enough to be useful but not close enough to embarrass him in front of the new Luna." She paused, tilting her head. "Makes sense, don't you think?"

The burn from the silver chain throbbed against my collarbone. I kept my face still.

Hallie stepped closer. Her voice dropped, losing the performative edge entirely. What remained was genuine curiosity. "Does it hurt?" she asked. "Knowing he never wanted you? Not even once?"

I looked at her directly. I didn't blink. I didn't speak.

She waited—three seconds, four—then smiled again, satisfied. "That's what I thought." She turned toward the door, her hand on the handle. "See you at the ceremony, Adeline. Wear something nice."

The door closed behind her.

I stood there in the empty kitchen, my thumb pressed hard against my wrist, and added every word she'd just said to the ledger in my mind. Verbatim. Timestamped. Witnessed by no one but me and the wolf pressing insistently behind my ribs.

Hallie had mistaken my silence for defeat.

She had no idea what she'd just given me.

That night, alone in my room, I felt it shift.

I'd stopped eating the pack's prepared meals three days ago—the morning I found the collar. I'd been subsisting on food I fetched myself from the communal stores, plain and untouched. Bread. Fruit. Water I boiled myself. The nausea had faded. The fog in my head had started to lift.

And my wolf—the presence I'd felt stirring for days—was getting stronger.

I sat cross-legged on my cot, the silver chain burning faintly against my throat, and closed my eyes. The heat in my chest surged, sharper than before. Then I heard it.

Not a feeling. Not an impression.

Words.

*They poisoned us.*

My eyes snapped open. My breath caught.

*They have always known what we are.*

I pressed both hands flat against the mattress, grounding myself. "What are we?" I whispered aloud, feeling ridiculous and desperate and certain all at once.

The answer wasn't words. It was something bigger—an impression that flooded my senses like light breaking through water. Vast. White. Sovereign. Something that had been caged for three years and was finally, finally waking up.

My hands shook. Not with fear. With something that had no name yet.

I pressed my palm flat against the floor and breathed until the trembling stopped. Then I ate the bread I'd brought myself, every bite deliberate, and felt my wolf settle—still there, still waiting, but no longer screaming.

*Soon,* I thought.

She didn't answer. She didn't need to.

The evening before the ceremony eve, I slipped out.

The pack house was chaos—delegations arriving, rooms being prepared, voices echoing through the halls. No one noticed when I grabbed a supply basket and headed toward the eastern border under the pretense of fetching herbs from the forest edge. No one stopped me.

The tree line was dark and cold. I walked the familiar path, my breath misting in the air, and reached the dead-drop point.

But this time, I wasn't alone.

A man stood beside the old oak tree, waiting with the kind of stillness that suggested he'd been there awhile. His scent reached me first—winter pine and steel, sharp and clean and utterly unfamiliar.

Something inside me lurched.

I stopped walking for half a second, my body recognizing something my mind hadn't caught up to yet. Then I forced myself forward.

Pierce Coleman didn't move as I approached. He was tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in dark tactical gear that marked him as Lycan enforcement. His eyes tracked me with professional precision—calm, assessing, patient.

"Adeline Shaw," he said quietly. Not a question.

I nodded.

"The King will attend the ceremony," he said, his voice low and unhurried. "The evidence you provided is sufficient for tribunal proceedings. You need only to survive what happens at the altar. What occurs there will be witnessed by royal authority."

I exhaled slowly. "And after?"

"After, the Council convenes." His gaze dropped briefly to my throat—to the burn line visible above the silver chain—and his jaw set in a way that wasn't professional at all. "You won't face him alone."

I noticed the shift in his expression. I filed it away.

I turned to leave, but his voice stopped me.

"You kept a journal for three years."

I looked back at him.

"Most people in your position stop writing after the first six months," he said.

I met his eyes directly. "I am not most people."

Something in Pierce's posture shifted—barely, but I saw it. His hands stilled at his sides, his wolf surging forward so hard I could almost feel the pressure of it in the air between us.

He didn't move. He didn't speak.

I turned and walked back toward the pack house, the weight of his gaze following me until the trees swallowed the path.

Behind me, Pierce Coleman stood at the tree line for a long time, his wolf pressing a single word forward that he had been refusing to hear for weeks.

*Mate.*

He told himself it was the severity of the case.

His wolf knew better.