My Mate Swapped Our Baby With His Mistress's Son

Cody's hand found the small of my back at exactly seven fifty-two, the way it always did before he addressed the pack — and that's when I smelled her.

We were standing on the dais for Hugh Evans's memorial, three hundred Ironmaw wolves bowed in silence for the father Cody buried two years ago, and I leaned into my mate's shoulder the way a Luna is supposed to. His cologne. His sweat. His musk, the one I'd known for five years, warm and familiar as my own skin.

And underneath it, woven so deep it had to have been there for years — floral, cloying, wrong. Not a trace. Not a brush of contact. Integrated. Bone-deep. Like it had been painted into his pores one careful layer at a time.

Something low in my sternum turned over, a vibration I had no name for, a thing I hadn't felt in five years. My wolf. Awake, for one second, and furious.

I didn't say a word until the crowd dispersed. Then I followed Cody into the Alpha study and shut the door myself.

"Whose scent is on you?" I asked. Quiet. I didn't need volume. "It's not surface. It's not a servant brushing past you in a hallway. Someone put that on your skin on purpose, for years, Cody. Tell me it's not Alyssa."

He didn't deny it. He rolled his right shoulder, slow, the gesture his warriors cleared rooms for, and then his hand closed around the mating mark on my neck.

The Alpha tone hit my bond like a fist through a door. My spine locked. My jaw locked. My knees went first, folding under me while my mind screamed inside a body that no longer answered to me.

"No Luna leaves Ironmaw alive," he said, low, almost gentle, which was worse than shouting. "Alyssa moves into the suite by morning. This isn't a conversation, Gracelynn."

He let go. He turned to leave. My body was still half-frozen, my voice a dead weight in my throat — but I pressed my palm flat against the stone wall, the anchor I'd built out of five years of exactly this, and I forced one sentence past the paralysis.

"I know about Kaison."

I had no proof. Only scent-truth, raw and unshaped. But Cody's shoulder stiffened, one fraction, before he walked out — and my wolf pulsed once, hard, against my ribs. Not dormant. Listening.

By morning, Marcus Webb was in my doorway with two Omegas and empty boxes, pulling my ceremonial whites off their hangers, my Luna pendant box, the little wolf Kaison carved for me last winter — piling all of it in the corridor like garbage set out for collection.

Alyssa came down the main stairs in my whites with Kaison on her hip, timed perfectly for the pack members gathering below.

She stopped in front of me. "Kneel," she said, pleasant as a hostess.

The Alpha-tone residue still threading my nerves buckled my knees before I could stop it. But my eyes came up to her face, and I made sure only she heard me.

"I can smell the lie on your skin."

Her composure didn't crack. Her scent did — one sharp thread of fear cutting through the floral wrongness, and I filed it away like a blade going into a sheath.

Cody made it official an hour later, in front of everyone: Omega rank, Omega quarters, a work roster nailed to the kitchen door with my name at the top — floors, laundry, the healer's clinic drains.

I carried my first bucket of water down the east corridor with my wrists raw from the mop handle and my mind very clear. Five years as Luna. Five years memorizing patrol gaps, supply routes, the healer's clinic hours, the exact week the Southern Pack's Alpha was due to arrive for the alliance banquet — a visit Cody could not cancel without questions he couldn't afford.

They had taken my whites. My rank. My rooms.

They had not thought, even once, to take what was in my head.

Down the hall, through the half-open door of Derek Holt's office, I heard him reading the banquet schedule aloud to Marcus — dates, guest list, seating — and I stood very still with the bucket handle cutting into my palm, listening to every word.