His True Mate Killed Our Baby

The pendant hit my palm at 8:47 p.m., still warm from the inside of Maxwell's jacket pocket, and for three seconds I let myself believe it was mine.

The great hall of Ironveil had gone quiet for the moment—two hundred pack members holding their breath while their Alpha presented his mate with a gift on their fifth anniversary. Candlelight caught the moonstone, a teardrop the size of my thumbnail, set in white gold. I turned it over out of habit, the way I checked every hem and seam of every dress he'd ever bought me, because nothing in this house was ever quite finished unless I finished it.

The engraving on the back wasn't my name.

Simone. Six letters, cursive, deep enough that a fingernail could catch in the grooves.

Something low and unfamiliar rolled through my chest—a growl, not mine, not entirely, rising from a place I hadn't heard from in years. My wolf. Awake. Furious. My hands went ice-cold around the chain.

"Maxwell." I kept my voice even, the way I'd trained it to be for five years. "Why does this say Simone?"

He took it from me so fast the chain burned a thin red line across my palm. "Jeweler's mistake," he said, not looking at me, already handing it to Elena as if she could make the word disappear by holding it. "I'll have it fixed."

Elena Voss, his Beta, a sharp, careful woman who had never once met my eyes for longer than a greeting required, took the pendant and studied it with the kind of stillness that told me she believed him even less than I did. She said nothing. She never did.

"A mistake," I repeated.

"You heard me." His tone dropped half an octave, the edge of command bleeding into it, the way it did when he wanted a conversation to end. I felt it press against my sternum like a flat hand. Five years ago that pressure alone would have made me apologize for asking.

Tonight my wolf snarled back, and I didn't apologize.

"Of course," I said instead, and smiled, and let him think the smile meant surrender.

It didn't. It meant I was going to find out.

I didn't sleep. Around one in the morning, when the last of the guests had staggered home and Maxwell was asleep in the room down the hall he'd shared with me for exactly zero nights this month, I slipped down to the pack's administrative office in my bare feet. The terminal there connected—through a chain of encrypted logins I'd learned only because I managed his correspondence, his schedules, his entire life—to the Lycan Council's central bond registry.

I typed his name. Maxwell, Alpha, Ironveil Pack.

One result populated the screen.

Registered Mate Bond: Simone [REDACTED SURNAME] — Status: Active — Filed sixteen years prior.

Sixteen years. Before I even knew what a mate bond was. Before he'd ever shattered his spine, before I'd ever pressed my hands to his back and coaxed his wolf back into his body one nerve at a time.

I searched my own name next. Julianna. Nothing. No filing, no record, no ceremony logged anywhere in five years of candlelit vows I had believed with my whole chest.

Something in me that had lived quietly for five years—a thread I had always assumed connected us, thin but real, humming faintly whenever he walked into a room—went cold. Then hollow. Like a door swinging shut on an empty house, the click of the latch louder than it had any right to be.

My wolf howled. One long, anguished sound that tore through the inside of my skull and left silence behind it—not peace, just silence, cold and total, like she'd retreated somewhere I couldn't follow.

My hands were steady even though nothing else in me was. I pulled my phone from my robe pocket and photographed the screen. Twice, to be sure. Then I forwarded both images to an email account Maxwell didn't know existed, one I'd built years ago out of some instinct I'd never examined too closely, and deleted them from my phone's gallery.

Proof. I had proof now, hidden somewhere he couldn't reach.

I was halfway back down the hall, the tile cold under my bare feet, when I heard his voice through the cracked door of his study—low, warm, alive in a way it hadn't been for me in longer than I wanted to count.

"...her flight lands Thursday," he was saying, and there was no mistaking the tenderness in it. "I'll have the west wing ready before she gets here, Simone. I promise."