My Alpha Framed Me to Protect His Pregnant Lover

The phone rang while I was cutting silver paper for Lyla's gifts.

I knew it was him before I looked. Seven years of marriage teaches you the rhythm of a man's calls, even the ones that lie. I picked up and tucked the phone against my shoulder.

"Amelie." Cullen's voice was tired in that careful way of his. "There's a problem at the northern border. Rogues. I can't make it back for the Solstice."

I kept cutting. The scissors made a clean, even sound.

"How many?" I asked.

"Six, maybe seven. We're tracking them now."

"Be safe."

"I always am."

I ended the call and set the phone down. Then I stood very still in the middle of the den, surrounded by half-wrapped gifts for our daughter, and waited for the disappointment to arrive the way it always did.

It didn't come.

Something else came instead. A small, cold thing that sat down in my chest and did not move.

I turned to finish the wrapping and my eyes caught on the jacket draped over the armchair. The one Cullen had left behind on his last visit. I picked it up to hang it in the closet, the way I always did, and the smell hit me before I had taken two steps.

Pine. Cedar. His scent, the one I had loved for seven years.

And under it, something sweet. Floral. A perfume I did not own.

My mating mark flared on my neck. Not the sharp pull of his nearness. Something duller. A slow, sourceless burn that had been with me on and off for years, and that I had told myself was nothing.

I lowered the jacket onto the chair. I did not pick it up again.

I told myself I was being a paranoid wife. I told myself there were a hundred reasons a man could come home smelling like a woman's perfume. A pack visit. A diplomatic dinner. A handshake with someone's sister.

I told myself a lot of things on the way to his study.

The Winter Solstice guest list was supposed to be in his desk. That was what I told myself I was looking for. I sat down in his chair and opened the top drawer, and even as I did it I knew I was lying.

I was not looking for a guest list. I was looking for the truth.

I found it under a folder of border permits, tucked inside a generic envelope. A bank confirmation. A property purchase. A luxury den registered in a quiet, expensive corner of Seattle territory, the kind of place a wolf goes to be invisible.

The name on the deed was Cullen's.

I sat very still for a long moment. Long enough that the heat clicked on. Long enough that my fingers went cold around the paper.

Then I opened his laptop. I had his pack codes. I was the Luna. I had every code he had.

The pack travel logs went back seven years. I started counting and lost count at thirty. I started over, slower, and reached fifty-six. Fifty-six cross-country trips. Border negotiations. Alliance meetings. Each one routed through the same Seattle corridor. Each one spaced just far enough apart that I had nodded and kissed his cheek and welcomed him home.

I took the pack house camera off the shelf. My hand was steady. I photographed every page. The deed. The wire transfers. The travel logs. Page after page after page.

When I was finished I put the camera back. I closed the laptop. I closed the drawer. I left the study exactly the way I had found it.

Then I went down the hall to find my daughter.

Lyla was in the kitchen with Elder Marta, helping her press cookies into shapes that were mostly stars and a little bit chaos. Marta had been with the Silverfang Pack since before I was born. She had rocked Lyla to sleep more nights than I cared to count, on all the nights when Cullen was somewhere else.

"Marta," I said, and kept my voice light. "I need to handle something tonight. Pack business. Can you keep her until morning?"

Marta looked at me. She did not ask what was wrong. She had eyes that had seen too much to need to ask.

"Of course." She wiped her hands on her apron. "Drive careful, Luna."

I knelt down in front of Lyla. She had flour on her cheek. Five years old, all dark hair and grey eyes, my eyes, the only part of her that was unmistakably mine.

"Mama has to go fix something," I said. "I'll be back before you wake up."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

She pressed something small and metal into my hand. Her little hair clip, the silver one shaped like a leaf. "So you have a piece of me," she said, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

I tucked it into the lining of my coat where the seam had come loose, against my heart, and I kissed her forehead and I left.

I drove through the night.

Three states. Highway after highway. The mating mark on my neck burned steadily the whole way, a low, even fire, like something inside me already knew what I was driving toward and had stopped pretending. The photographs were folded flat in my coat pocket. The hair clip was a small weight against my ribs.

I did not cry. I did not turn the music on. I drove.

It was past ten when I crossed into Seattle territory. The address from the deed pulled me through a quiet, manicured neighborhood of tall trees and wrought-iron gates. The kind of street where nothing bad was supposed to happen. The kind of street I had never lived on.

I parked one house down and walked.

The pack house at the end of the drive was lit up like a postcard. Warm yellow windows. Smoke rising from the chimney. A wreath on the door. Snow had begun to fall, soft and slow, and it caught in my eyelashes as I stepped off the path and into the dark of the trees.

I made myself look.

Through the frosted glass of the front window I could see the great room. A fire. A tall green tree, half-trimmed. And Cullen.

My mate. My fated mate.

He was laughing. He had a toddler on his shoulders, a little boy with curls, and he was lifting the child higher so small hands could press a gold star onto the top branch. The boy crowed with delight. Cullen tipped his head back and laughed up at him, the sound muffled by the glass, and I had not seen that laugh in seven years.

A woman stood in the doorway behind them.

Blonde. Tall. Wrapped in a soft cream sweater, one hand resting on the frame, watching them with a soft, possessive smile. The firelight caught the side of her neck.

A mating mark. Fresh. Still pink at the edges.

My knees did not buckle. I had thought they would.

Cullen turned, the toddler still on his shoulders, and looked at the blonde woman. He smiled at her. The unguarded smile. The one that used to be mine. The one I had not seen on his face in so long I had begun to think I had imagined it.

The burn in my mark was no longer dull or sourceless. I felt it now for what it had always been. An echo. A leak. The bond bleeding around a wound I had refused to see.

Seven years of loyalty cracked open in my chest, quiet as ice.

I walked up the front steps.

I pushed the door.

It opened.

Warmth and light and the smell of cinnamon hit me like a hand to the face. Cullen turned. The toddler giggled on his shoulders. The blonde woman in the doorway saw me, and her face did something I will remember for the rest of my life. Shock first, just a flash, the way an animal startles. Then, in less than a second, something else moved in behind her eyes. Calculation. Cold and quick and ready.

She opened her mouth.

The sound that came out of her was not a scream. It was a howl. High, broken, terrified, the precise frequency of a she-wolf under rogue attack. It cut through the warm air of that house and rolled out into the snow, and I knew, with a clarity that arrived too late, that she had been ready for this. That she had practiced.

In the distance, somewhere on the cold edge of the night, an answering howl rose. Then another. Local pack warriors. Closing in.

Cullen lifted the toddler off his shoulders and set him on the floor with careful, ordinary hands. He did not look at the woman. He did not look at the door. He looked at me.

And I watched my mate's face go flat and assessing, the way a man's face goes when he has decided to manage a problem. He squared his shoulders. He took one slow breath in.

I felt the air in the room begin to change before he had said a single word.

He was reaching for his Alpha tone.