My Mate Registered His Mistress as Luna Before Me

Coming back was easier than going out.

The silver fur slid away under my skin like water off glass. Bone found bone. My hands were hands again, bare and shaking, and I stood in the middle of that corridor in a torn shirt with my hair loose down my back, and the heat still pouring off me like an open oven door.

Nobody got up.

Twelve people on their knees on white marble, and three drops of my sister's blood drying between them.

"Elise." Beckett's voice had gone strange — high, thin, hunting for the bottom of itself. "Elise, listen to me—"

"No." I didn't raise my voice. I didn't need to. Every wolf in that hallway heard me like I'd spoken directly into their ear, and I watched three of them flinch. "You had five years of me listening. I'm done with that part."

I turned to face the witnesses instead. Not him. Them.

Mara Whitfield, the pack healer, on both knees with one hand over her mouth. Corbin Reyes, our Gamma, head down, shoulders locked with the effort of trying to stand and failing. Two seamstresses. Four warriors. Laurel, still half-crouched over my sister like she'd forgotten how to let go. Bethany against the wall with her collar open and her glowing mark gone dull as an old coin.

"You're all witnesses," I said. "Under pack law, twelve is more than enough. Remember what you see. You'll be asked."

Someone made a small sound. I kept going.

"The Luna Accord. Fourth Codex, ratified under the second Lycan King, never repealed, never amended." The words came out of me smooth as a prayer I'd said every night for months, because that's exactly what they were. I'd read them in the west study at two in the morning with the door locked, not knowing what I was looking for, only knowing that something in my chest had been wrong for five years and I wanted to be ready when I finally found the name for it. "Any Luna whose mate mark was obtained by fraud, coercion, or simulation may reclaim, in full and without compensation, all territory, alliance, and asset she personally secured during the term of the false bond."

I let that sit.

"So let's count."

"Elise—" Beckett tried.

"The Hollowmere alliance." My voice stayed level. Flat. A ledger being read aloud. "Negotiated by me over eleven months. Four trips. Their Alpha signed because I healed his daughter's spinal break, and he sworn the terms to me by name. Fourteen hundred acres of ridge land came with it."

"You will be silent—"

"The Kestrel Run trade pact. Mine. Two hundred acres of river frontage and the fishing rights that pay this pack's winter grain bill." I took a step forward. Just one. Beckett took two back. "The eastern ward line — every sigil, every anchor stone, drawn in my handwriting and powered with my gift, which means it answers to my blood and nothing else. Nine hundred acres inside it."

I could hear Isla breathing behind me, ragged and fast.

"The Silverfang treasury tripled in five years. Every dollar of that growth traces to contracts with my signature. The healing house. The border kennels. The relocation of the pups' school off the flood line." I stopped. "Do you want me to keep going, Beckett? Because I can. I wrote it all down. Every acre. Every name. Every date. I've been writing it down since I was nineteen because you told me I was too useless to be trusted with anything I couldn't prove."

His face went white in patches, like something spilled on paper.

Then he snapped. "SEIZE HER."

The Alpha tone cracked out of him with everything he had. I felt it hit the room — and then I felt it break apart against whatever was standing in front of it now, like a wave coming apart on rock.

Not one warrior moved.

Corbin's arm jerked once, then locked. His wolf simply would not carry the order. I watched him realize it. I watched his mouth open, close, and his head bow lower, and it wasn't fear on his face. It was something closer to recognition.

"SEIZE HER!" Beckett's voice tore. "That is an ALPHA COMMAND—"

Silence. Twelve wolves. Not one of them so much as shifted their weight.

And for the first time in five years, I heard exactly what his authority had always been: noise in an empty room.

So I turned my back on him.

I felt the whole corridor register it — that small collective inhale. In pack culture there is no filthier insult. You do not show your spine to an Alpha unless you have decided he cannot reach you.

I knelt beside my sister.

"Hey," I said, and my voice finally cracked, just there, just for her. "Hey, Isla. Let me see."

Her arm was a mess. Four deep lines, edges already going hot and puffy. She was staring up at me with her mouth open and tears cutting clean tracks through the powder on her cheeks.

"Your eyes were silver," she whispered.

"I know." I laid my palm over the wounds. "Hold still."

The light came easier than it ever had. Gold, warm, spilling out from under my hand in a slow pulse, and I felt the torn muscle knit, the skin draw closed, the heat sink out of her blood. When I lifted my hand, there were four pale pink lines and nothing else.

Isla let out a sob and grabbed my wrist with both hands.

"Stand up," I said gently, pulling her to her feet. "Now listen to me. Take the car. Don't pack. Drive to Mom's and don't stop at the border station."

"Elise, no — I'm not leaving you here—"

"Isla." I held her face in my hands. Behind me I could hear Beckett breathing, ragged and wet, and somewhere further off, Bethany starting to cry. "You're getting mated in six weeks. You are going to walk down that aisle with two good arms and nothing on your conscience."

"But—"

"What happens in this house tonight isn't for you to see." I kissed her forehead. "Go."