My Alpha Mate Fed Me Wolfsbane for Years

The bond broke open at 12:14 a.m., and I felt his hands on someone else.

Not metaphorically. Not as suspicion or fear. I felt warmth spreading across skin that wasn't mine, pressure at a throat I wasn't touching, the slide of fingers through hair I had never grown. The mate bond transmitted it with the fidelity of a live wire: every sensation, every angle, every breath. My wolf howled inside my skull, but the sound came out muffled and weak, like she was drowning.

I pressed my thumb against the Luna mark on my neck. The scar tissue Hudson's canines had left six years ago throbbed in rhythm with whatever he was doing three floors below me. My empty bed smelled like lavender and loneliness. His side of the sheets had been cold for weeks.

Then the scent hit.

Magnolia. Cheap vanilla. A she-wolf's arousal, transmitted through the bond like someone had shoved it directly into my sinuses. My stomach turned. I knew that scent. I had smelled it in the corridors, lingering near the kitchens, always just faint enough to dismiss.

Fiona Berry. Twenty-four. Unmated. From the Crescent Ridge Pack, here on some diplomatic visit that had stretched from two weeks into two months.

I was out of bed before I decided to move.

The pack house hallways were dark. My bare feet made no sound on the stone floors. I followed the bond like a leash pulling me toward my own destruction. Down the main stairs. Past the great hall where I had stood beside Hudson at a hundred pack meetings, silent and smiling while he took credit for border strategies I had designed on sleepless nights in my study.

The Luna suite. My suite.

The door was cracked open. Soft light spilled into the hallway. I heard a low, breathy moan, and my wolf surged forward with sudden vicious clarity, trying to push through the fog that had wrapped around her for as long as I could remember.

I shoved the door open.

Fiona was on the bed. My bed. She wore my ceremonial Luna shawl draped across her bare shoulders, the silver-and-midnight fabric I had been gifted at my Luna coronation three years ago. Her belly was round and obvious beneath the silk. Six months, maybe more.

She looked at me without surprise. Without shame.

"Scarlet." Hudson's voice came from behind me, and I spun. He stood in the doorway, shirtless, utterly calm. His eyes were flat. "You shouldn't be here."

"I shouldn't—" My voice cracked. I steadied it. "This is my suite."

"Not anymore." He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The sound of the latch clicking was very loud. "Fiona needs the space. She's carrying a pup."

I stared at him. At the man I had marked. The man I had spent six years building into something magnificent while I made myself smaller and smaller to fit into the margins of his reputation.

"You're sleeping with her," I said. It wasn't a question. The bond had already answered.

"I'm providing for a she-wolf in need." His tone was smooth, practiced. Alpha diplomacy. "You're being hysterical."

"I felt you." My voice dropped. "Through the bond. I felt your hands on her."

Something flickered behind his eyes. Not guilt. Irritation.

"Then you know," he said simply.

I waited for him to explain. To lie. To give me anything I could argue against.

He gave me nothing.

"I want a dissolution," he said. "Quiet. Mutual. You'll leave Ironclad by the end of the week."

My wolf snarled, but the sound was distant, weak. "You're exiling me?"

"I'm offering you a choice." He stepped closer. His aura pressed against mine, and I felt my wolf flatten instinctively under the weight of it. "Accept the dissolution, or I'll have you declared unfit and removed as a rogue."

"On what grounds?"

"On the grounds that you've been unstable for months." He tilted his chin up slightly, a gesture I had seen a thousand times in pack meetings when he issued commands. "On the grounds that your wolf is weak and your judgment is compromised. No one will question it."

I opened my mouth. He moved faster.

His hand closed around my throat. Claws extended, pricking skin. He slammed me back against the stone wall beside the door, and I felt the Luna mark crack under the pressure—a hot, tearing sensation that made my vision white out.

"You will accept this," he said, and his voice dropped into Alpha tone—that resonant, unshakable command that every wolf in a pack is biologically wired to obey. My wolf whimpered and curled inward, submission flooding my limbs like paralysis. "You will leave quietly. You will not make a scene."

I couldn't move. Couldn't speak. The Alpha tone held me pinned as thoroughly as his hand.

"And Scarlet?" He leaned close enough that I could smell Fiona's magnolia scent still clinging to his skin. "Those border-defense strategies you're so proud of? They're already filed under my name in the Silverfang alliance documents. Every rotation formula. Every wolfsbane barrier grid. All mine."

He released my throat and stepped back.

I slid down the wall, gasping. Blood trickled warm down my neck from where his claws had broken skin.

Hudson walked past me without looking back. "You have until morning to decide."

The door closed.

I sat on the cold stone floor, one hand pressed to my bleeding neck, and felt my wolf push against the fog with more force than she had managed in years.

She wasn't howling anymore.

She was growling.

I pulled myself to my feet. My legs shook, but they held. I looked at the Luna suite door—at the room where Fiona Berry lay draped in my shawl, carrying a pup in my bed—and I turned away.

I didn't go back to my quarters.

I went to the Healer's clinic.

It was after midnight, but the lights were on. The Healer looked up when I walked in, and her expression shifted from surprise to something colder and more focused when she saw my neck.

"I need documentation," I said. My voice was steady. "And I need bloodwork."

She didn't ask questions.

She took photos of the claw marks. She swabbed the blood. She drew three vials and labeled them with clinical precision.

Then she pulled up my file on her terminal and went very still.

"How long have you suspected?" she asked quietly.

"Suspected what?"

She turned the screen toward me.

Twenty-eight months of bloodwork results. Every test flagged with the same anomaly: trace wolfsbane. Consistent. Chronic. Concentrations that matched long-term ingestion through food.

I stared at the screen. At the dates. At the levels.

"Since you became Luna," the Healer said. "He's been poisoning you since you became Luna."

My wolf surged. Not muffled this time. Not weak.

Furious.

"I need copies," I said. "Everything. And I need you to keep the originals locked."

The Healer printed the files without a word.

I took them and walked out into the night. My neck was still bleeding. My hands were shaking. But my mind was clear for the first time in three years.

Hudson had built his entire reputation on my work. He had poisoned me to keep my wolf small. He had marked me before I could awaken fully, before I could ever know what I was capable of.

He had made one mistake.

He thought I would leave quietly.

I went to my study—not the Luna suite, but the small room I had kept since before the mating, the one he never entered because he didn't care what I did there as long as the strategies kept coming.

I opened the hidden drawer beneath my desk.

Inside were my original strategy binders. Every border rotation. Every wolfsbane formula. Every contingency protocol. Physical documents bearing my scent-mark, the one form of proof no wolf could forge or sanitize.

I pulled them out and set them on the desk beside the Healer's files.

Then I opened the oldest pack-law archive and began to read.

Somewhere in these laws, there had to be a stage he couldn't control. A tribunal he couldn't silence.

I had until morning.

I intended to use it.