When My Alpha Betrayed Me, the Lycan Prince Came for Me

I woke up alone.

That was the first wrong thing.

The guest room ceiling stared back at me, unfamiliar in the pale morning light. My neck throbbed where Brandon had marked me the night before, the bite still raw, the skin around it hot to the touch. I pressed two fingers to it and winced. A mated she-wolf was supposed to wake in her Alpha's arms on the morning after the Marking Ceremony. That was the way it had always been done. That was the whole point.

Instead, I was in the smallest bedroom on the second floor of the Silverfang pack house, and the sheets on the other side of the bed were cold.

I sat up slowly. My wolf, Nara, stirred inside me, uneasy. *Something's off,* she murmured. *Find him.*

I didn't bother with shoes. I padded down the hallway in the oversized t-shirt Brandon had given me weeks ago — the one that used to smell like him, cedar and gun oil and the faint sweetness of pack territory. I inhaled as I walked, tracking his scent trail toward the master bedroom at the end of the corridor.

And then I stopped.

Because his scent wasn't alone.

It was braided with another one. A she-wolf's scent. Sweet and floral and wrong — so wrong my stomach turned before my brain caught up. I knew that scent. I had lived with that scent for eight years.

Skyler.

*No,* Nara said. Just that. *No.*

My hand found the doorknob before I decided to move. I turned it.

The door swung open on silent hinges, and the smell hit me like a slap — thick, oily, coating the back of my throat. Brandon was asleep on his stomach across the master bed, one arm thrown over a smaller body. Skyler. Her dark hair spilled across his pillow. Her bare shoulder rose and fell with sleep. The sheets were a mess. Her clothes were on the floor.

Something inside me went very, very quiet.

Skyler stirred first. Her lashes fluttered. She saw me standing in the doorway, and for one long second her face was blank — the face underneath the face. Then she gasped, and the tears started, right on cue, perfect and glittering.

"Quinn — oh Goddess, Quinn, it's not what — I had a nightmare, I was so scared, I just came to Brandon because he's my *brother*, I didn't — please don't look at me like that —"

She clutched the sheet to her chest. Her lower lip trembled. She had been practicing that lip since she was twelve.

Brandon groaned and rolled over. He blinked at me. He blinked at Skyler. He blinked at the doorway.

And then — this is the part I will remember when I am ninety years old — he did not flinch. He did not scramble. He did not drop to his knees.

He sat up, dragged a hand through his hair, and said in his Alpha tone: "She's my sister, Quinn. You're overreacting."

The mate bond lit up inside my chest like someone had poured kerosene into a vein and struck a match. I felt every inch of the bite on my neck. I felt eight years of my life move through me in a single breath — the wages I'd handed over, the nights I'd pressed cloth to his wounds in a safe house so cold I couldn't feel my fingers, the warriors I'd trained because no one else would come, the ceremonies he'd postponed one crisis at a time.

I went still.

Nara went still with me. Amber eyes open behind my ribs. Watching.

"Quinn," Brandon said, softer now, sensing the temperature shift the way an Alpha does. "Baby. Come here. You're tired. Last night was a lot."

I looked at him.

I looked at Skyler, whose tears had already stopped tracking down her cheeks because she was too busy watching my face.

I opened my mouth.

"I, Quinn Mason, reject you, Brandon Cole, Alpha of the Silverfang Pack, as my mate and my Alpha."

My voice did not shake.

The bond snapped.

It was not a break. It was a tearing — something being ripped out of the meat of me by the root, dragging nerves with it. My vision whited out at the edges. I locked my knees. I did not fall.

Brandon did.

He went down off the side of the bed hard, one hand splayed against the floorboards, and the sound that came out of his throat was not human — it was his wolf, howling from inside him, a raw animal grief-cry that filled the whole house. Skyler screamed. I didn't hear it. I heard it the way you hear things underwater.

I turned around.

I walked.

Down the hallway, down the stairs, past Derek — his Beta, my friend, standing frozen in the kitchen doorway with a coffee mug halfway to his mouth. His eyes found mine. Whatever he saw in my face made him set the mug down very carefully on the counter.

He did not try to stop me.

Buster was asleep on his bed by the back door. Golden fur, one paw twitching in a dream. My mother's dog. My last piece of her.

I did not stop. I could not stop. If I stopped I would not start again, and if I picked him up I would be too slow, and Brandon would come down those stairs, and I did not trust what I would do or what I would let him do.

I whispered, "I'll come back for you," and I opened the door, and I walked out into the cold morning with the bite on my neck still bleeding through the collar of Brandon's t-shirt.

I walked into the treeline before I let myself run.

I ran until the pack house was gone, until the Silverfang scent markers thinned and vanished, until my lungs burned and my legs shook and I was somewhere in the unclaimed forest with no trail behind me and no plan in front of me. I did not shift. I did not cry. Nara paced inside my skull, quiet, watchful, waiting for me to tell her what came next.

I walked for hours.

I walked north, because north was away, and away was the only direction that mattered.

The sun was climbing when I saw the border marker. Iron post driven deep into the ground, the Blackmoor crest carved into the top. The old wolf's-head sigil of a bloodline older than the Lycan Court itself.

Felix's territory.

My childhood rival. The Lycan Prince I had argued with across a negotiation table when I was nineteen and he was twenty-one, both of us too proud to yield an inch. The most powerful unmated royal in the Northeast.

I stared at the marker. I thought about what it meant to cross it uninvited, alone, wearing another Alpha's fresh mate mark and reeking of a bond that had been ripped out of me not four hours ago. Trespass. Political incident. An act of war, if the wrong person interpreted it.

I stepped over the line anyway.

I made it maybe fifty yards before I heard them — soft, coordinated, professional. Blackmoor warriors, moving through the underbrush in a loose crescent. Four of them. They did not draw weapons. They did not need to.

The lead warrior — a tall woman with a scar across her jaw — stopped ten feet from me and looked me over. Her nostrils flared. Her eyes went to the bloody collar of my shirt and then to my face.

"Name," she said.

"Quinn Mason."

A pause. Something flickered across her face — recognition, maybe. Or something else.

"You'll come with us," she said. "The Prince will want to see this himself."

I nodded once.

Nara lifted her head inside me and, for the first time since the door had opened on that bedroom, made a sound that was not grief.

She was listening for something.

I did not yet know what.