After My Miscarriage, I Sent the Fetal Specimen to His Mistress's Baby Shower

I was four months into carrying my pup when my mate, Theron Ironmaw, brought another woman into our den. She was seven months along.

"Sera, Corvina Thornveil was Fenris Greyfang's mate. He just passed during the rogue attack and left her and the pup with nothing. I couldn't turn my back on them. Don't worry, it's only temporary. Once she finds a pack willing to take her in, she'll move on."

I was too soft-hearted to say no. I never imagined "temporary" would stretch into two months.

At first, I didn't think much of it. Not until the night I rose from bed, restless with the ache in my lower back that came with carrying, and stumbled onto a scene that stopped me cold.

My mate. And his dead blood-brother's woman. Together by the window, where moonlight pooled across the floor like spilled silver.

Every drop of blood in my body turned to ice.

My wolf went utterly still inside me. Not a sound. Not a whimper. Just a silence so absolute it felt like something had died in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

I stood outside that door for three full hours. In that time, they went at it three times. His scent, that scorched iron and dry cedar bark, was tangled so thoroughly with her cloying honeysuckle-and-vanilla that I couldn't separate them. Couldn't find him in it anymore. The smell hit me in waves, each one worse than the last, and my wolf still made no sound. She had gone somewhere deep and dark and unreachable, curled in on herself like an animal that already knows the wound is fatal.

Watching Theron's face twist with pleasure, over and over, I felt my heart being carved open with a blade, one slow cut after another.

He hadn't touched me since I'd gotten pregnant. Said he was afraid of hurting the pup, that his wolf ran too close to the surface during intimacy and he couldn't risk it with me carrying.

But Corvina was nine months along now, and that hadn't stopped them. Not once. Not twice. Three times.

When Theron finally finished, it was five in the morning. A thin gray light was creeping through the curtains, and somewhere beyond the estate walls, a lone wolf howled at the fading moon. The sound threaded through me like a needle pulling grief behind it.

Corvina wouldn't let him leave. She stretched across the sheets, her swollen belly barely covered, and purred, "Theron, you're incredible. So much better than my late mate ever was. Thank you for giving me such an amazing experience."

"You're not bad yourself. Way more uninhibited than Sera."

A laugh scraped out of my throat before I could stop it. Bitter. Broken.

My wolf flinched at the sound of it. Or maybe I flinched. I couldn't tell where she ended and I began anymore.

Theron's head snapped toward the doorway. His nostrils flared, catching my scent, and I watched the color drain from his face in the space of a single breath. Corvina gasped and yanked the sheets over herself, her sweet-sick scent spiking with something sharp. Fear, maybe. Or performance.

"Oh my, it's Seraphina Silvercrest! She must have gotten the wrong idea. Theron, hurry, go explain things to her."

Theron pulled on a robe and stepped out. When he saw the tears streaked down my face, his brows drew together in a hard line. Not guilt. Not shame. Irritation. Like I was the problem. Like my grief was an inconvenience that had wandered into his hallway uninvited.

"It's the middle of the night. Why aren't you in bed? What are you doing out here?"

I stared up at him, unable to believe the words coming out of his mouth. My voice shook. "That's my question to ask, not yours. Theron, I'm carrying your pup. And while I was sleeping, you were in there with another woman. Have you no shame at all?"

The mating mark on my neck throbbed. It had been warm once, in the early years, a constant low pulse of connection that reminded me I belonged to someone and someone belonged to me. Now it burned. A dull, sick heat, like an infection spreading beneath the skin.

"Sera, don't overthink this. Corvina's mate is dead. She hasn't had any intimacy in a long time. I was just helping her out. It's perfectly normal, isn't it? Relax. There's nothing between us beyond this. You're my mate. You always will be." He softened his tone like he was coaxing a pup. "Be good. Don't get upset. It's bad for the little one."

His Alpha aura pressed against me as he spoke. Subtle. Practiced. That low-frequency hum of dominance he used when he wanted compliance without argument. I had bent under it a thousand times before. Tonight, something in me resisted. Not my wolf. She was still silent, still curled in that dark place. Something older than her. Something that lived in my blood before I ever had a wolf at all.

"He's right, Seraphina." Corvina drifted out in her nightgown, her voice dripping with sweetness. Her scent preceded her, that honeysuckle and warm vanilla so thick it coated the back of my throat, and beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the chemical undertone of heat-amplifying herbs. She had been using them. I could smell it now, under the sex and the sweat. She had manufactured this. "Theron and I are just taking care of a physical need, that's all. I swear it won't affect your mating bond. As long as he's willing to look after me and my pup going forward, I'll be perfectly content."

She tilted her chin up and smiled. A deliberate baring of her throat that was meant to look submissive but landed as mockery. She knew exactly what she was doing.

"Really. I would never try to steal him from you. I know the one he truly loves is you."

The hickeys on her neck and chest burned into my vision like needles, the pain driving straight from my eyes down into the pit of my stomach. Bite marks. Not just hickeys. He had bitten her. Not deep enough to bond, but deep enough to claim. Deep enough that every wolf who saw her would smell him on her for days.

I looked at the two of them standing there, and I couldn't form a single word.

My throat had closed over. My hands hung at my sides, and I realized distantly that they were trembling, a fine vibration that started in my fingers and traveled up through my wrists, my forearms, settling somewhere in the hollow of my chest where the mating bond pulsed its sick, infected warmth. I didn't know people like this existed. People whose sense of right and wrong was so thoroughly, spectacularly shattered.

And somehow, they were the ones I'd ended up with.

In that moment, the thought of severing the bond erupted in my mind like a flare.

Five years of mating, and I had never once considered it. I had suppressed my bloodline, muted my scent with wolfsbane tinctures until even my own wolf could barely recognize me, poured the Silvercrest fortune and every alliance my family name carried into building the Ironmaw Pack from nothing. Five years of disappearing into the role of quiet, submissive mate. Five years of watching him grow powerful on resources he never once questioned the origin of. But the first time the thought came, it came with a force that nearly knocked me sideways.

And my wolf. My wolf, who had been silent through all of it, who had curled into that dark unreachable place and refused to surface, finally stirred. Not with grief. Not with rage. With something quieter and far more dangerous. A cold, clear recognition. The kind of stillness that comes right before a predator decides it is finished being prey.

"Theron, I don't know who you are anymore." My voice was quiet, almost calm. "I really don't. Not even a little. You feel like a complete stranger to me."

I smiled, cold and hollow, and took one step back. Then another.

Something flickered across Theron's face. His wolf surfaced behind his eyes for half a second, a flash of amber that was gone before it fully formed. He reached for my arm. "Sera, don't be so petty. I was just helping her out. My love belongs only to you."

I wrenched my arm free.

"Don't touch me. You're filthy."

The words left my mouth and the mating mark on my neck went cold. Not warm, not burning. Cold. Like the bond itself had heard me and flinched.

I turned my back on him and walked down the hallway toward the room that had once been ours. My footsteps were steady. My spine was straight. My wolf walked with me, step for step, rising slowly from wherever she had hidden, pressing against the inside of my ribs like she was reminding me she was still there. Still mine. Still breathing.

Behind me, the mingled scent of scorched iron and cloying honeysuckle hung in the air like something rotting.

I did not look back.