My Fated Alpha's Wedding Night Vengeance

"Did you honestly believe this was a blessing from the Moon Goddess?" Nikolai asked.

The stack of papers struck my shoulder and scattered across the bridal-suite carpet. One page landed faceup beside the bed, dark rust-colored drops staining the corner.

My father's blood.

A minute earlier, my new mate mark had still burned with the intoxicating heat of Nikolai's bite. Now the skin at my neck throbbed like a brand.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Your father's treason." Nikolai stood between me and the locked door, still dressed in the black formal shirt he had worn beneath his wedding coat. "Ten million dollars routed through shell accounts to the rogue band that attacked us three years ago."

I stared at the transfer records. "My father doesn't control the pack's offshore accounts."

"He controlled enough."

"He has served your family for twenty-six years."

"And my father died in a fire your father paid for."

The words hit harder than the papers had.

Three years ago, the old packhouse had burned before dawn. I had dragged two pups through a kitchen window while smoke blackened the sky. Nikolai's father never made it out of the west wing. My father, Beta Adrian Vale, had spent the months afterward rebuilding patrol routes and hunting the surviving rogues.

"He would never do that," I said.

Nikolai crossed the room and shoved a photograph toward me. Charred beams. A collapsed roof. The blackened shell of the packhouse.

"We caught one of the mercenaries at the northern border this morning," he said. "He identified Adrian Vale as the man who financed the attack."

"Under what conditions?"

His eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?"

"Was he questioned in front of the council? Was there a healer present? Did anyone record his statement?"

"I questioned him."

"That isn't a trial."

"I am the Alpha."

"And my father is your Beta. Even you do not get to execute him because one rogue says a name you want to hear."

Nikolai's jaw tightened.

I bent and gathered the nearest pages. The transfers were real enough to look frightening: dates, account numbers, routing details, authorization codes. But the deeper I looked, the stranger they became.

"The Beta estate could never move this kind of money," I said. "You know that."

"Power has a way of finding money."

"Power? My father supported your succession."

"Until he realized he could take it for himself."

I straightened. "Then let me speak to him."

"No."

"Nikolai."

"The council ordered him held below the east barracks. His hearing is at the end of the month."

"You told me he was already guilty."

"He is. The hearing determines the sentence."

My stomach turned.

I touched the fresh mark at my neck. "You knew this before the ceremony."

His silence answered me.

The room seemed to tilt.

"You stood before the pack and took me as your mate while you believed my father murdered yours."

"I married you because leaving the Beta bloodline outside my control would have been stupid."

For a second, I forgot how to breathe.

"So the vows were a trap."

"Call them containment."

The bond inside me surged in protest, a brutal instinct insisting that the man in front of me was mine, that I should move toward him, trust him, soothe him. I hated my own body for wanting what my mind finally understood.

"You marked me," I whispered.

"The Goddess made that mistake. I did not."

The door opened before I could answer.

Bianca Thorne stepped into the bridal suite wearing my white silk nightgown.

Not one like it. Mine. My initials, E.V., were embroidered in pale thread near the hem.

She leaned against the frame as if the walk from the guest wing had exhausted her. A silver wolf-crest cufflink rolled between her fingers. I recognized that too. I had given the pair to Nikolai that morning.

"Nikolai?" she said softly. "Are you still coming to change my dressings? The scars are hurting again."

The rage in his posture vanished at once.

"You should be in bed," he said.

"I tried." Bianca's gaze slid to me for half a second. "I got lonely."

I looked at Nikolai. "She is wearing my wedding-night clothes."

"They are clothes."

"And she has your cufflink."

"I dropped it in her room earlier."

Bianca lowered her eyes, the perfect picture of fragile innocence. "I can leave if I'm causing trouble."

"You are not," Nikolai said.

Of course she wasn't.

He crossed to her and put an arm around her waist. She immediately leaned into him.

"Take a good look at Bianca," he told me. "She ran into the fire trying to reach my father. She carries those burns because she chose this pack over herself."

I remembered the night of the fire. I remembered Bianca appearing outside after the roof collapsed, soot on her face and a shallow burn along her shoulder. I also remembered never seeing her enter the building.

"My father pulled three warriors out of that fire," I said. "Where is his gratitude?"

"Buried with mine."

He guided Bianca toward the door.

"You're leaving me locked in here?"

"Until I decide what to do with you."

Bianca turned her face into his shoulder, but not before I saw the small smile she tried to hide.

The lock clicked behind them.

I waited until their footsteps faded, then dropped to my knees and sorted every page by date.

If my father had been beaten for this evidence, there had to be a weakness in it.

I found one on the seventh sheet.

A two-million-dollar transfer dated October fourteenth, three years ago. The sender field listed my father's emergency authorization code. The recipient line carried a handwritten acknowledgment.

Darius Thorne.

Bianca's older brother.

I checked the date again, and a memory snapped into place: my father in the infirmary, unconscious beneath an oxygen mask after a severe lung infection. He had spent that entire week sedated.

He could not have authorized the transfer.

Someone had used his code while he could not even speak.

I folded the page into the lining of my dress just as footsteps returned outside the door.

For the first time that night, fear gave way to something sharper.

The evidence did not prove my father was a traitor.

It proved someone inside Nikolai's circle had built the lie.