My Alpha Husband Let His Mistress Burn Me Alive

The grey uniform itched at my collar.

I'd worn it for three days now—the standard Omega servant's kit issued by the Silvercrest Pack for the regional Alpha summit. Grey cotton, no embellishment, a small silver pine embroidered on the breast pocket that marked me as temporary staff. Borrowed identity. I'd had worse.

I kept my hair down. Long enough to cover the scar on the left side of my neck, where a mark that should have meant everything had become something I hid from strangers. Not out of shame—I'd burned through shame somewhere around year four. Out of economy. Other people's reactions to it cost me energy I didn't have.

The summit hall was everything I wasn't. Crystal chandeliers, long tables draped in white linen, the air thick with the competing scents of a dozen pack hierarchies dressed in their best. Alphas moved through the room like weather systems—each one trailing their particular gravity, their Betas orbiting close, their Gammas stationed at the edges of the room with the careful stillness of men paid to look relaxed. I'd grown up knowing what a room full of Alphas felt like. I'd once walked into rooms like this as a Luna.

Now I carried trays through the service corridor and kept my eyes at chest height and counted the hours.

Fifteen months. That was how long Greta Voss had given Ella's wolf before the window closed permanently. Fifteen months, and that had been three months ago. I did the math every morning when I woke up. I did it again now, moving through the back hallway with a tray of crystal glasses balanced on my forearm, the numbers running quiet and relentless behind everything else.

I came around the corner and stopped.

Three people. A Beta I didn't recognize. A woman in a green silk dress with dark hair and a smile that had never once reached her eyes in all the years I'd known her.

And Enzo.

He was bigger than I remembered. Or maybe I'd just spent ten years making him smaller in my memory as a survival mechanism. Alpha Enzo Morrison, head of the Shadowpine Alliance—three packs now, I'd heard, which meant he'd spent the last decade doing exactly what Alphas do when they're not busy destroying their fated mates. Ascending. The grey at his temples was new. Everything else was the same: the jaw, the set of his shoulders, the way he occupied space like he'd been told the room was built for him and had never had reason to doubt it.

The faded remnant of what used to be our bond did what it always did when he was close. A spike of pain, dull and deep, somewhere behind my sternum. Not grief. Just damage. The difference between a wound and a scar is that scars don't hurt unless you press on them.

He was pressing on it simply by existing in the same hallway.

His eyes found me. Something moved through them—too fast to name, and I didn't try.

"Get the summit coordinators." His voice was the same. The alpha tone, that particular frequency that pressed on the back of your skull and made lesser wolves step back without deciding to. He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was looking at his Beta. "I want this—" a pause, just long enough to be deliberate, "—reassigned. No Omega with visible defects in any service rotation where attending Alphas can see them. It reflects on the hosting pack."

Damaged goods. He didn't say it. He didn't need to.

I lowered my gaze to the middle distance—a point on the wall just past his shoulder—and waited. The Beta moved off. Enzo moved past me without another word, close enough that the scent of pine and cold stone hit me like a physical thing, and I stood very still and breathed through my nose until my hands stopped wanting to shake.

Kendall didn't move past me.

She stopped. Tilted her head. The smile she gave me was the kind that looks, from a distance, like warmth.

"Sofia." My name in her mouth, the way it had always been. Like something she was setting down carefully before she stepped on it. "You look well."

I said nothing.

Her eyes moved over my face, my covered arms, the grey uniform. Taking inventory. Satisfied with what she found.

"Good luck with the rest of your shift," she said pleasantly, and followed Enzo down the corridor.

I stood there for another three seconds. Then I turned back the way I'd come, adjusted the tray, and kept walking.

The glasses didn't rattle. I made sure of that.

---

The formal dinner was worse.

I don't know how she arranged it—I never knew how Kendall arranged things, only that she always did. One of the summit coordinators found me in the service kitchen an hour before the meal and told me I'd been specifically requested for the Alpha table. A visiting Luna had asked for me by description. The coordinator said it like it was a compliment.

I thought about Ella. I thought about the number twelve. Twelve months left. I picked up the platter and went.

The Alpha table seated fourteen. I moved around it with the careful precision of someone who has learned to exist in hostile spaces—efficient, quiet, taking up as little room as possible. I set down the first course without incident. Refilled glasses. Retreated to the service position along the wall.

I saw Kendall's foot move. I saw it—and I was half a second too slow, and my ankle caught, and the tray went.

The sound of crystal hitting marble is very specific. It fills a room completely. Fourteen Alphas looked up.

I was already crouching, reaching for the largest pieces, when I heard Kendall's voice above me—that practiced, regretful tone she used when she wanted witnesses to believe she was being reasonable.

"Oh, how unfortunate. Someone get the Gamma to help her—she's bleeding on the good linen."

Two hands caught my arm. Not to help me up. The Gamma guard yanked my sleeve back to the elbow in one motion, and the room saw what was underneath: the rogue-claw scars that ran from my wrist to the inside of my elbow, white and deep and undeniable.

Kendall looked at them with something that almost resembled sorrow.

"A wolf who can't shift," she said, to no one in particular and everyone present, "is just meat walking around pretending it deserves a place at the table."

Some of the Alphas looked away. Some didn't.

I pressed my fingertips against the largest scar—a habit, a grounding—and gathered the remaining glass with my bare hands. A piece caught my palm. I didn't stop. I placed everything I could reach onto the tray, straightened, and walked out of the dining room without looking at Enzo.

I didn't need to look. I already knew what I'd find.

Nothing. Just a man watching someone else's problem solve itself.

---

The head housekeeper found me the next morning before I'd eaten.

"A complaint was filed," she said. She had the decency to look uncomfortable. "From a visiting Luna. You're being reassigned—kennel maintenance, back grounds. Half wages for the remainder of the summit."

I did the math. I always did the math.

"Understood," I said.

She left. I sat on the edge of the narrow cot in the Omega quarters and looked at my bandaged palm and ran the numbers one more time. Half wages for four days. What that left me. What that meant for Greta's payment. What that meant for the twelve months.

That night I opened the mind-link to Ella—thin and fragile as it was, the best I could manage without a wolf to anchor it—and felt her there, warm and steady and waiting.

*Mom. How's it going?*

"Fine," I said. "The work is fine. Everything's fine."

A pause. Ella had always been too perceptive for her own good. For my good.

*Okay,* she said finally. *I believe you.*

She didn't. We both knew it. But she let me have it, the way she always did—quietly, without making me pay for needing it.

I closed the link and sat in the dark for a long time, pressing my fingers against the scar on my arm, counting what I had left and what I still needed and how many more rooms like that one I could walk through before I ran out of ways to keep walking.