His Mistress Bound Me While He Rejected Our Bond

The mark on my neck had been humming for ninety-eight nights, and on the ninety-ninth, at some hour past midnight, it finally screamed.

I woke to it before I woke to anything else — a hot wire dragged under my skin, pulling toward the door. That was how the bond worked when it was starving. It didn't ache where he touched me. It ached where he didn't.

His footsteps came down the hall a moment later. Unhurried. Familiar enough that I didn't need to open my eyes to know the weight of his stride, or the door he'd pass without slowing — mine.

But I knew something else now, something my body had learned before my mind caught up: his scent had changed. Cedar and rain-soaked earth, that used to be only his, now carried something underneath it, threaded so deep it had stopped being separate. Vanilla and crushed jasmine. Cataleya's wolf, worn on his skin like a second coat.

I got up.

The corridor was cold under my bare feet. I stepped into his path before he reached the stairs, and he stopped short, jaw tightening, eyes sliding somewhere over my shoulder instead of at my face.

"Come inside," I said. Not a question. Not a plea. Just a door, held open.

"Paige." My name, said like a warning.

"You've walked past that door ninety-nine times, Franco."

His eyes finally found mine — and I watched something in them harden, right before his voice dropped into the register that wasn't a voice anymore. It was pressure. Alpha tone, aimed at his own mate.

"Enough."

The word landed on my chest like a hand shoving me back. My knees buckled half an inch before I caught the wall. Somewhere under my ribs, my wolf — thin, starved, quiet for months — flinched like something struck.

"It's a fractured bond," he said, fast, rehearsed, the way a man recites something he's said so many times it no longer costs him anything. "A condition. Rare. My wolf needs hers to stay stable, Paige, you know this—"

"I don't know this." My voice came out steady even as my mark burned white-hot. "You've never shown me proof. You've only ever told me."

"A true Luna would understand sacrifice." He said it like a gift he was handing me, wrapped in scripture. Then he turned and walked, and the sound of his footsteps down the stairs was the loudest thing in the house.

I pressed two fingers to the mark and felt it — not fading, not settling, but pulsing with a low, furious growl that wasn't mine. My wolf, awake for the first time in months. Not submitting. Snarling. *He is lying.*

The bond was supposed to be a bridge. I understood, standing there in the dark hallway with my fingers on my own throat, that it had become a leash instead — and I was the only one wearing it.

The next morning I went to the archive room. Ledgers, alliance records, nothing anyone would question a Luna touching. Behind the border correspondence, sealed in wax I'd never had the courage to break, was the letter my mother sent me the year before she died. I had told myself I wasn't ready. I was ready now.

One page. Her handwriting, careful and slanted. *Your blood is Lycan, Paige. Royal line, buried three generations back on my side. If you ever need proof, ever need protection no pack Alpha can override — find Prince Onyx of the Lycan court. He will know you by scent. He cannot be lied to about this.*

I folded it into the ledger and told no one.

That evening I found the old mind-link thread my mother had shown me once, half-forgotten, rooted in a pack that no longer existed. I reached, and I did not ask to be saved. *I am Paige Evans. My mother was Elena Evans. I need to know how a wolf with suppressed Alpha-blood survives prolonged wolfsbane exposure and a bond being used against her.*

Onyx answered within the hour. Calm, precise, a stranger's voice that felt steadier than my mate's had in months. I burned the scent suppressant I'd stolen from the infirmary before the residue could settle, and I went back to my ledger like nothing had moved.

Three days later, Cataleya appeared in my doorway.

She didn't speak. She didn't need to. The dress she wore was Luna ceremonial silk, pulled straight from the storehouse reserved for me, and she let me look long enough to understand exactly what she was wearing before she turned and walked away, unhurried, humming.

My wolf surged up my spine with a snarl so violent it nearly cracked my face open.

I pressed my fingers to the mark, steadied my breath, and opened the ledger to a clean page.

I wrote the date. Then: *Ceremonial gown. Storehouse. Cataleya Ramirez.*

I kept writing.