My Alpha Betrayed Me for the Lycan King’s Daughter

Seven days.

Seven days since Alpha Asher Scott walked out of our pack house with nothing but his coat and his keys, telling me he was going to the shrine. Seven days since I stood at the window and watched his truck disappear into the tree line, telling myself he was fine. He always came back from the shrine.

He always came back to me.

By day three, I'd stopped sleeping. By day five, I'd stopped pretending I wasn't scared. On day seven, I walked into Gamma Damien's office, sat down across from him, and said four words.

"Find my husband. Now."

Damien didn't argue. That's one thing I've always respected about him—he reads a room. He took one look at the hollows under my eyes and the white-knuckled grip I had on the edge of his desk, and he started making calls before I'd even finished speaking.

We tracked Asher's scent northeast, toward the mountain. Toward the shrine.

The shrine where we used to go together, every year, to light a candle for the pup we lost.

I don't talk about that much. The miscarriage. I was seven months along when the rogues hit our eastern border—the same rogues that Lycan King Winston Brown had quietly pointed in our direction, though I didn't know that yet. I fought them off. I saved Asher from their ambush. And I paid for it in blood and silence and a grief so deep it still lives in my chest like a stone I can't cough up.

Asher had given me a locket after. Custom-engraved. A tiny crescent moon on the front and our pup's would-have-been name etched on the inside. I wore it every day.

I was wearing it now, my fingers finding it automatically as our convoy climbed the mountain road, headlights cutting through the dark pines.

Damien's hand on my arm stopped me when we reached the cabin.

"Luna. Let us go first."

"No."

I stepped past him.

The cabin sat back from the shrine path, half-hidden by old spruce trees. A light burned in the window. Asher's truck was parked outside, and there was another vehicle beside it—sleek, expensive, with plates I didn't recognize.

My wolf went still inside me. Not the stillness of calm. The stillness of something bracing for impact.

I kicked the door open.

The smell hit me like a physical blow.

It was thick and warm and intimate in a way that made my stomach lurch—the unmistakable, heavy scent of mating. Of two wolves who had been together. Recently. More than once.

I stood in the doorway and I took in the room in pieces, the way your brain does when it's refusing to assemble the full picture all at once.

The overturned wine glass on the floor.

The tangle of sheets.

Asher, scrambling upright, his bare chest catching the lamplight, his expression doing something I had never seen it do before.

Panic.

Alpha Asher Scott—the man who had stood before the Lycan King at eighteen and bled without flinching—was looking at me with naked, animal panic.

And beside him, pulling a sheet up over herself with wide dark eyes, was a young she-wolf I had never seen before.

Pretty. Young. Smug, even now, even caught.

"Scarlet." Asher's voice came out rough. He stood, reached for his shirt. "This isn't—I need you to listen to me. This is political. There are things happening with the Lycan territories that I couldn't tell you about yet, and Nadia is—"

"Nadia."

The name came out of my mouth flat and quiet. The she-wolf—Nadia—held my gaze. She didn't look afraid. She looked like she was watching something she'd been waiting to see.

I heard my warriors behind me. Damien. Three others. All of them witnesses.

Good.

I reached to my hip and drew my sidearm.

Asher took a step forward. "Scarlet—"

I didn't point it at him. I pointed it at the votive candle burning on the shelf across the room. The one he lit every year. The one we lit together for our child.

I pulled the trigger.

The candle exploded. Wax and glass and flame scattered across the wooden shelf, and the light in the room shifted, dimmer now, colder.

The silence afterward was absolute.

I lowered the gun. My hand was steady. I was almost surprised by that.

"I, Scarlet Adams, Luna of Midnight Shadow Pack"—my voice came out clear, carrying the full weight of my title, every syllable deliberate—"reject you, Asher Scott, Alpha of Midnight Shadow Pack, as my fated mate."

The pain hit immediately. It always does, they say. Like something tearing loose from the center of your chest.

I didn't let it show on my face.

Asher's expression broke open. For one second, he looked exactly like the ten-year-old boy who had pressed a blood-stained piece of bread into my hands and told me it would be okay.

I looked away from him.

"Finish it," I said. "Say the words, Asher. In front of everyone."

He didn't move.

I waited.