Rejected at the Banquet: My Mate Chose the Servant Over Me

I watched the footage three times.

Not because I needed to. The first time was enough to understand everything. The second time was to make sure I hadn't misheard a single word. The third time, I watched with the sound off, just studying their faces—the way Brody leaned back against my headboard like he owned it, the way Adrianna traced a finger along the edge of my grandmother's silver hairpin while she talked about destroying me.

Then I closed the laptop.

I sat at my kitchen table for a long moment, hands flat on the wood, and I let myself feel it. Not the grief—that was already done, already processed in the dark on the walk home from the banquet. What I felt now was something simpler and much colder. It was the specific sensation of the last warm thing inside me going out, like a candle someone had been cupping their hands around finally guttering in the wind.

His voice. That was what did it.

Not the words—the tone. Smooth, unhurried, the same calibrated warmth he used when he told me I was the only one. The same voice that once said my name like it meant something was now mapping out exactly how many milligrams of wolfsbane it would take to knock my wolf flat for an hour. Clinical. Practical. Like it was a logistics problem and I was the variable he needed to neutralize.

I rolled the small moonstone from my pocket between my fingers—a habit I'd never broken, a private thing I did when I needed to think—and I thought.

They had a plan. That was fine. I had their plan now, which meant their plan was already mine.

The Pack Banquet was being hosted by Maverick Harrison at Nighthollow. Three weeks out. Brody would approach me with a champagne flute. Wolfsbane, concentrated enough to strip my wolf for several hours. Adrianna would have a photographer ready. By the end of the night, they'd have pictures—Bella, disoriented and compliant and on her knees—and those pictures would be their insurance policy forever. Every time I thought about speaking the truth about where Adrianna came from, or what Brody really was before I built him into something, they'd remind me what the whole pack thought they saw.

I put the moonstone down on the table.

It was a good plan, honestly. If I were the girl they thought I was—a heartbroken, discarded she-wolf with no resources and no recourse—it would have worked perfectly.

I was not that girl.

I opened a new document and started writing.

The first thing I wrote was: supply line.

Adriana's scent was the foundation of everything. My custom cedar blossom and white sage oil, batch three, decanted into her skin until she smelled like something she wasn't. That scent was what had convinced Brody. That scent was what had convinced the pack. Take it away and you had an Omega's daughter standing in stolen jewelry, and the jewelry alone wouldn't hold up to scrutiny the way the scent did.

The supply line ran through Silverpeak. Through her parents—her Omega parents, both stationed at the estate as household servants, both in a position to pocket vials and small items and pass them along whenever Adrianna needed a refresh. Quiet. Patient. Years of it.

I needed them gone before the banquet. Not confronted. Not warned. Just gone, cleanly and completely, before they could send her anything else.

I thought about it for a while. Then I picked up my phone and called the estate manager at Silverpeak—a woman named Dorothea who had served my family for twenty years and who would carry any instruction I gave her to her grave without asking why.

'I want to arrange something for the Snyders,' I said when she answered. 'A recognition trip. Honorary. Frame it as a reward for years of loyal service—send them somewhere nice, somewhere far, somewhere they'll feel genuinely honored.' I paused. 'Book it for next week. Make sure it's a long one.'

Dorothea was quiet for exactly two seconds. 'Of course, Miss Crescent. Shall I arrange for their quarters to be cleared while they're away?'

'Yes,' I said. 'And Dorothea—have legal draw up the formal dismissal papers. Effective upon their return. I'll need the debt documentation attached. All of it.'

Another pause. Shorter this time. 'I'll have it ready.'

I hung up and sat back.

The Snyders would leave thinking they'd been honored. They'd come home to find themselves dismissed, burdened with their daughter's accumulated debts, and permanently removed from the one place that had been feeding her fraud for three years. Adrianna wouldn't know until she needed a fresh vial and found the line dead.

By then, it would be too late to restock before the banquet.

Her scent would still be there—you couldn't strip custom oil from skin in three weeks—but it would be fading. Thin at the edges. Not enough for anyone to notice yet, but enough that I would know. Enough that when the time came, I'd have one more thread to pull.

I looked down at my list. Added a line at the bottom.

Banquet: champagne flute. Watch which glass he carries.

I underlined it once.

Three weeks. I had three weeks to make sure that when Brody Weaver handed me a drink meant to take everything from me, I was ready to give it back.