The scandal broke on a Tuesday morning while I was folding linens in the pack house laundry room—a task no Luna technically needed to do, but one I'd taken on because my hands needed something to hold that wasn't grief.
My phone buzzed once. Then again. Then it didn't stop.
The first message was from a distant cousin in the Blue Ridge Pack: *Is this real?* Attached was a link to something called MoonBite Weekly, a supernatural gossip site I'd never heard of but apparently half the eastern seaboard read religiously. The headline sat at the top in bold, unforgiving font: SILVERFANG ALPHA'S SECRET FAMILY: THREE PUPS, ONE MISTRESS, AND A LUNA LEFT IN THE DARK.
Below it were photos. Clinic photos—Paris in a hospital gown, Samson's hand on her shoulder. A birth certificate with his signature. A candid shot of him carrying a toddler I'd never seen before, the child's face blurred for privacy but the resemblance unmistakable. The article had quotes too, attributed to "anonymous pack sources," detailing dates, locations, and one particularly damning line: "The Alpha was unreachable the night his legitimate heir died because he was attending to his mistress's false labor."
I set the phone down on the dryer and stared at the white tile wall until the buzzing stopped feeling like it was inside my skull.
I hadn't leaked it. I hadn't told anyone. The only evidence I'd gathered was locked in my phone, unsent, because some part of me—foolish, stubborn—had still been deciding what to do with it. But it didn't matter what I had or hadn't done. The story was out now, spreading through pack networks like wildfire, and I knew exactly who Samson would blame.
I found him in the kitchen twenty minutes later, or rather, he found me. I'd gone there to make tea I had no intention of drinking, a routine my body remembered even when my mind didn't. He came through the side entrance, still in his coat, phone clenched in one hand, and the air in the room changed before he even spoke.
His Alpha aura hit me like a wall of pressure—thick, suffocating, designed to make wolves drop their eyes and bare their necks. It pressed against my ribs, made my knees want to buckle, but I'd been his Luna for long enough to know how to stand through it. I kept my hand steady on the kettle.
"You did this," he said. His voice was low, controlled in a way that was worse than shouting. "You leaked it."
I turned off the stove. Set the kettle down. Looked at him. "I didn't."
"Don't lie to me, Shay." He stepped closer, and the aura intensified. My wolf Sera whimpered somewhere deep inside me, a sound I felt more than heard. "You're the only one who knew. You went to that clinic. You saw the files. And now every Alpha from here to the Carolina border is calling me to ask if it's true, if I let my own pup die while I was—"
He stopped himself, but the sentence hung there anyway, complete in its cruelty.
I pressed my fist to my sternum, that old anchor, and kept my voice even. "I didn't leak anything. I haven't told anyone."
"Then how?" His hand slammed down on the counter, and I didn't flinch, which seemed to make him angrier. "How did they get clinic photos? How did they know about that night?"
I didn't have an answer for him. Paris could have told someone. A nurse could have sold the story. He could have been careless with his own paper trail. But none of that mattered, because Samson had already decided the narrative, and in that narrative, I was the villain.
"You've humiliated me," he said, and there was something almost bewildered in his tone, as if he genuinely could not comprehend how his own choices had led here. "Every pack leader on the eastern seaboard thinks I'm a fool. They're questioning my authority. My integrity. And you—" He gestured at me, sharp and dismissive. "You will fix this."
I stared at him. "Fix it."
"Yes." He straightened his cufflinks, a gesture I'd seen him do a hundred times before delivering something he knew would hurt. "You'll make a statement. Tell them you were unstable after Tru's death. That you misunderstood what you saw. That Paris is just an assistant and the whole thing was—"
"No."
The word came out quiet, but it landed like a stone in deep water.
Samson went very still. "What did you say?"
"I said no." I met his eyes and didn't look away. "I won't lie for you. Not about this."
For a long moment, he just looked at me, and I saw something shift behind his expression—calculation, cold and quick. Then he turned and walked out without another word, and somehow that was worse than if he'd shouted.
I stood there alone in the kitchen, my hand still pressed to my sternum, and I knew with absolute certainty that whatever he was about to do next, it would be worse than anything he'd done so far.
Because Samson didn't lose. He made other people lose for him.
And I had just refused to be the one who took the fall.
