My Alpha Rejected Me So His Mistress Could Be Luna

The bond went quiet at 7:42 on a Thursday evening, halfway across the great hall floor.

I felt it before Aiden opened his mouth. A single warm pulse against the scar on my neck—the mark he gave me three years ago, over the wound I took for him—and then nothing. Not cold. Not broken. Just a door easing shut inside a room I used to live in.

I kept walking toward my seat at the far end of the table. The pup pressed low in my belly, heavy and quiet. I had learned in the last month to move without letting anyone see how tired my body was.

Then I saw her.

Camilla Price sat in the Luna's chair.

She wore a pale grey dress, her hair braided the way I had once worn mine, and around her neck—resting exactly in the hollow of her throat where I used to feel it warm against my skin—hung my platinum locket. The chain was mine. The inscription inside was Aiden's handwriting. She had angled her chin so the candlelight caught it.

My hand went to the bond mark without my permission. Two fingers, right against the scar.

Aiden stood.

He did not look at me. He looked at the pack—at his Beta, Derek, at the ranked warriors along the long wall, at the Gammas and the seated Deltas—and he spoke in the flat, unhurried tone he used to assign patrol rotations.

"Effective tonight, Camilla Price is my chosen mate and the future Luna of Shadowmere. She will assume all Luna duties beginning at the ceremony next week."

A pause. Then, still not looking at me:

"Amelia will be reassigned to Omega quarters. Her duties will be reallocated by the Beta."

The words landed the way a stone lands in still water. No one moved. Derek's jaw worked once. Down the table, Maren—the pack healer, silver at her temples, hands folded flat against the wood—did not look up. She had gone very still in the way she went still before setting a broken bone.

I stood where I was. The pup shifted. My wolf tried to lift her head inside me and could not—she was too heavy, too slow, wading through something thick I had been swallowing at every meal for months without knowing.

I waited for Aiden's wolf to flinch through the bond. To recognize me. To recognize the woman whose blood he had once carried on his hands.

Nothing.

His wolf did not even turn its head.

Something inside me that had been holding on for three years let go of one finger.

"Amelia." Aiden's voice again. Clipped, Alpha-edged. "Serve Camilla for the remainder of the evening. Her plate. Her wine. Behind her chair when she is not eating."

I walked.

I walked around the length of the table with the whole pack watching, and I took the wine pitcher from the servant at Camilla's elbow, and I poured. My hands were shaking. Only a small shake, the kind you would miss unless you had watched a wolf's hands for a long time. From the far end, Maren's eyes tracked the tremor for one second and moved on.

Camilla lifted her glass without looking at me. "Thank you, dear." A soft, public smile. "The girl is being very helpful."

The locket swung forward when she leaned to speak to Aiden. I saw the inscription. Two lines, in his hand. I knew them by heart. I had helped him choose the font.

My wolf made a sound inside me. Not a howl. Something smaller and worse—the sound an animal makes when it has been struck and does not yet understand what struck it.

I set the pitcher down. I stepped behind Camilla's chair. I put my hands together at the small of my back where the pack could not see them, and I stood.

I stood through the toast Aiden gave in her honor. I stood through the polite applause. I stood through Camilla laughing at something a ranked wolf said two seats down, and through the moment she reached up and touched the locket at her throat, absent, comfortable, as if she had worn it every day of her life.

My fingers found the scar on my neck again. I did not notice until I felt Maren's eyes on my hand from the far end of the table. She looked away as soon as I saw her. But her chin dipped once, very slightly, in my direction.

Eat what I give you. Nothing else.

She had not said it yet. She would say it in an hour, in the corridor outside the Omega quarters, in the tight quiet of her examination room with the door closed behind us. But I already knew, standing behind Camilla's chair with the pup low in my belly and my wolf whimpering in a language I could barely hear, that something was being done to me that I had not yet learned the shape of.

Camilla lifted her wine.

"To the future of Shadowmere," she said, warm and clear, and the pack lifted their glasses back.

I did not lift anything. I stood behind her chair with my hands folded and my scar under my fingers, and I watched the candlelight catch on my locket at her throat, and I began, very quietly, to count.