After My Mate Slept With His Gamma

I set the last candle on the table and told myself this would be the year.

The Ironveil pack house dining room smelled of rosemary chicken and melted wax. I'd cooked it myself, the way Colin liked it, and I'd worn my mother's pendant against my collarbone — a small silver moon she'd left me before the fever took her. I only wore it on nights that mattered. Tonight mattered. Tomorrow I turned thirty. Ten years a mate. Nine birthdays spent hoping Colin would finally look at me and decide I was worth marking.

I smoothed the tablecloth and checked the clock for the fourth time. He was forty minutes late.

My name is Elena Mason, daughter of Richard Mason, Alpha of the Dawnridge Pack. I was raised to sit up straight at council dinners, to never raise my voice, to carry my bloodline like a crown even when no one else could see it. Nothing in that raising had prepared me for a decade of waiting on a man who couldn't be bothered to text me when he'd be late for his own anniversary dinner.

The door finally opened. Colin walked in still in his training clothes, hair damp, not even a glance at the candles.

"Smells good," he said, dropping into the chair across from me like he was doing me a favor.

"I made your favorite." I kept my voice light. Practiced. "Tomorrow's my birthday, Colin."

"I know." He didn't look up from his phone.

I waited. I always waited — for the word *Luna*, for the sentence that started with *I've been thinking, maybe it's time* — but his thumb kept moving across the screen, and something in my chest, some small stubborn ember, guttered a little lower.

Then his phone buzzed, and his whole face changed.

"Camila took a bad hit in training," he said, already rising. "I need to check on her."

"She's your Gamma, Colin. She's trained for worse than a bruise."

His eyes cut to mine, sharp, and his voice dropped into that low register I'd learned to dread — the Alpha tone, the one that pressed against my ribs like a hand shoving me back into my chair. "Don't make this into something it isn't, Elena."

Then he was gone, and I was alone with two plates of rosemary chicken going cold under candlelight.

I cleared the table myself. I always did. Somewhere behind my sternum, my wolf whimpered — a small, tired sound, like an animal that has stopped expecting the door to open.

---

My actual birthday came and went without so much as a text from him.

By noon I'd stopped checking my phone and driven myself to the Ironveil guest lodge instead, the little cabin at the edge of pack land where I'd booked us a private weekend weeks ago — candles, wine, the whole foolish hope of it. I told myself I was only going to cancel the reservation. Practical. Composed. The way I did everything.

I smelled it before I even reached the porch.

Cedar and smoke — Colin's scent — tangled with something else. Jasmine, thick and cloying, layered so deep into the sheets and skin-warmth drifting through the cracked window that there was no mistaking what it meant. My stomach dropped like a stone through water.

Then I heard him laugh. Low, easy, the kind of laugh I hadn't heard directed at me in years.

"Elena's too weak and boring to ever be a real Luna," Colin said, voice muffled through the door. "She should be grateful I haven't rejected her myself."

Camila's giggle answered him, bright and satisfied, and it went through me like claws dragged down bone.

Something inside my chest howled — one raw, anguished sound, my wolf's grief tearing loose all at once — and then she went silent. Not resting. Silent, the way a room goes silent after something inside it has died.

I don't remember deciding to speak. The words simply rose out of me, steady and terrible.

"I, Elena Mason of the Dawnridge Pack, reject you, Alpha Colin of the Ironveil Pack, as my mate."

The bond didn't break so much as it *burned*, a white line of fire ripping through my chest from throat to sternum. I staggered against the porch rail, gasping, one hand pressed hard over my mother's pendant as if I could hold myself together through it.

Through the door, I heard Colin cry out — a strangled, doubled-over sound, furniture scraping as he hit the floor.

I didn't go in. I didn't look back.

I walked to my car on legs that didn't feel like mine, shaking, hollowed out, and I drove away from Ironveil territory standing upright, which was more than I thought I'd manage.

---

Colin, I would later learn, recovered his composure within the hour.

"She's bluffing," he told Camila, pouring himself two fingers of scotch, already certain of his own version of the story. "No she-wolf in her right mind rejects an Alpha and means it. She'll come crawling back inside a moon cycle."

He settled into his chair to wait for the groveling he was sure was coming.

He is still waiting.