When My Alpha Punished Me for His Mistress’s Lies

Three days felt like three years.

The Come of Age Ceremony preparations turned the packhouse into something I barely recognized — streamers and folding tables, the smell of fresh-cut flowers and catered food, younger pack members running errands with that particular nervous energy that came with formal events. It should have felt festive. It felt like a countdown.

Stella moved through it all like she'd already been crowned.

I watched her from the hallway that first morning, arms crossed over my chest, my bandaged hand tucked against my ribs. She stood in the center of the main foyer with a clipboard she didn't need, directing traffic with the easy authority of someone who had decided the title was already hers. Her voice carried — it always carried — and the younger Deltas scrambled to keep up with her instructions without question.

Then she saw me.

The pause was barely a second. Then she smiled and turned to the nearest pack member, a girl who couldn't have been more than seventeen.

"Mackenzie will handle the floor prep," Stella said, loud enough for the hallway to hear. "All of it. The east wing, the ballroom, the back corridor. She needs something to keep her occupied."

The girl glanced at me, uncertain. I kept my face still.

"The wax applicator's in the supply closet," Stella added, already turning away. "On your knees is probably easiest."

Someone laughed. Quietly. The kind of laugh that stops the moment it starts, because even the person doing it knows it's wrong.

I got the wax applicator. I did the floors. All of them, on my knees, my burned hand wrapped and aching, while the younger pack members moved around me like I was furniture. I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself three days.

I told myself a lot of things.

---

By the time the ceremony night arrived, I had run out of things to tell myself.

The ballroom was full and warm and loud with the kind of celebration that Black Moon Pack did well — music from the far corner, the low roar of conversation, the clink of glasses, the particular electricity that came with watching the pack's youngest members step into their wolves for the first time. Under different circumstances, I would have loved this night. I had loved it, once. I remembered standing in a room just like this one, years ago, feeling my wolf stir for the first time and thinking the whole world had just gotten bigger.

Now I stayed near the edges. Near the exits. I kept my bandaged hand at my side and my eyes moving and I told myself I just had to get through the night.

I almost made it.

I was crossing the far end of the ballroom, angling toward the side corridor, when the crowd shifted and she stepped directly into my path.

Stella.

She was in a deep green gown, her hair pinned up, every inch of her composed and deliberate. She looked beautiful. She looked like she owned the room.

And around her neck, resting against the green silk like it had always belonged there, was my father's bullet shell necklace.

I stopped breathing.

She didn't stop walking. She came straight toward me, unhurried, and when she was close enough that I could see the chain clearly — my chain, the one I had worn through every shift, every fight, every night I had pressed my thumb to the scar on my palm and held on — she let her eyes drop to it briefly, then come back up to my face.

She smiled.

That real smile. The one with nothing warm in it.

Something in me went white.

Not the white of pain. The white of something breaking open — something that had been holding its shape through weeks of floors and kitchens and Alpha tones and corridors, and had just reached the end of what it could hold.

My father wore that shell around his neck the day he died protecting this pack. I wore it every day after. It was the only piece of him I had left, and she was wearing it over a formal gown at a party, like a decoration. Like a joke. Like a message.

I moved before I decided to.

My good hand closed around the necklace and I pulled — hard — and then my shoulder hit hers and we were both going down, the green silk twisting under my knees, the music screeching to a stop somewhere behind me as the crowd lurched back and someone screamed and the necklace chain bit into my palm and I didn't let go.

I didn't let go.

The ballroom erupted around us. Voices, movement, the crash of something overturned. Stella's composure finally, finally broke — she was clawing at my wrist, her face stripped of every careful layer, and I was pulling the chain free and I didn't care about any of it.

Not the crowd. Not the noise. Not what came next.

Just the necklace in my hand. Just my father's. Just mine.