My Alpha Wanted His Mistress as Luna

At 6:15 on a Thursday evening, my fingers brushed against a stiff slip of paper tucked inside Jared’s leather travel bag.

I pulled it out. It was a tuition receipt for an elite private academy in the southern valley. Stamped across the top was the name *Anakin*. Beneath the boy’s name, layered heavily over Jared’s familiar cedar scent, was the thick, cloying smell of an unfamiliar she-wolf—sweet like crushed honeysuckle, unmistakable and female.

My stomach dropped like a stone, the mate mark on the right side of my neck going cold. For four years, that mark had been my anchor, linking me to Jared, the Alpha of Shadowridge.

At dinner, I laid the receipt flat on the dark mahogany table between his steak and his glass of wine.

"Whose child is Anakin?" I asked. My tone was light, conversational.

Jared cut into his meat without breaking rhythm. He didn't blink. "Misfiled expense from the visiting Beta at the alliance summit. Handed it to me by accident. Don't worry about it."

He lied without a hitch. But right behind his ribs, through the open channel of our mate bond, something violently snagged. A sharp, electric flare of pure panic ripped through our link, so intense my teeth ached. He slammed his mental walls shut half a second later, smoothing the surface, but the lie was already burned into my skull. The bond did not lie, even when the mouth did.

"I'll shred it for you," I said calmly.

"Do that," he murmured, taking a sip of wine.

At two in the morning, while Jared’s breathing settled into a deep, rhythmic sleep beside me, I slipped out from under the duvet.

I took a stack of alliance trade manifests and walked silently down the hall into his private study. Shadowridge wolves knew me as the quiet, capable Luna who balanced the pack’s accounts and never demanded the spotlight. They thought wolfless meant harmless.

I knelt by the heavy oak desk and reached for the bottom drawer. It was locked. I took an iron hair pin from my braid, worked it into the brass cylinder, and clicked it open.

Inside lay a cheap, black burner phone.

The moment my fingers touched the plastic, the screen lit up with a buzz that sounded like thunder in the quiet room. A message popped up on the lock screen.

*Malia: Anakin fell asleep asking for you. Only two more months, Alpha. When does the wolfless one and her ridiculous mutt leave?*

My throat tightened. Blood pounded against my temples. The mate mark flared with a dull, sickening chill, like ice pressed directly against bare flesh. I didn't cry. Tears were a luxury for someone who had a protector. I had none.

I took out my own phone, angled the camera, and snapped sharp, high-resolution photos of the screen, the notification, and the phone's serial number. Then I slid the burner back into place, locked the drawer, and walked back to the master bedroom.

I lay down beside him. Jared’s back was turned, his skin warm, his wolf resting quietly in his chest. I stared at his broad shoulders in the dark and pressed my thumb against the mark on my neck.

Then, something shifted.

Deep inside my chest, right behind my sternum, a low, furious vibration shuddered through my ribcage. It wasn't my heart. It felt heavy, hot, and ancient—like a great beast shifting its weight after a twenty-year sleep. The heat surged into my throat, an ember burning so hot it took my breath away.

I pressed both hands flat against my chest, squeezing my eyes shut until the vibration slowly sank back down into the bone. I had never felt that before. I filed it away into the cold, quiet vault of my mind, alongside the receipt and the messages.

By eight the next morning, I was three miles outside the pack border, sitting in a diner booth across from Corvin.

Corvin was a rogue-tracker from the neutral borderlands. He had no pack, no loyalties, and no fear of Jared’s Alpha tone.

"Twenty thousand," I said, sliding a thick manila envelope across the laminate table along with a folded non-disclosure agreement. "Paid from my personal inheritance account. Not pack funds. Track Jared’s scent the next time he leaves the border for a 'summit.' I want the exact coordinates of where he sleeps."

Corvin flicked the envelope open, checked the cash, and looked up at me with pale, sharp eyes. "He’s an Alpha, Luna. If he catches me, he tears my throat out."

"He won't catch you," I replied, my voice level. "And if you break the contract, I will find you before he does. Sign."

He signed.

The machinery was moving. I had paid external eyes and created an outside paper trail under my maiden name. When I walked back through the Shadowridge packhouse double doors an hour later, Jared’s Beta, Thomas, was crossing the foyer.

"Morning, Luna," Thomas greeted respectfully.

"Morning, Thomas," I said, offering an easy, practiced smile. "Make sure the third-shift training schedule is on my desk by noon."

Three days later, the coordinates arrived on my phone.

It was a secluded stone den hidden in the pine ridges of the southern neutral valley. I didn't wait for a written report. At dusk, I parked my car half a mile out on an overgrown logging road and walked the rest of the way on foot, keeping downwind.

Yellow light spilled through the den's front window onto the damp needles of the forest floor.

I stood in the shadows of the tree line and looked inside.

Jared was there. His heavy Alpha coat was thrown over a wooden chair. He had a slender, dark-haired woman—Malia—pulled against his chest, her head tilted back as he buried his face in her neck, breathing her in with an open, hungry tenderness he had never once shown me.

A little boy, barely four years old, ran into the room with wooden toy blocks clutched in his hands.

"Daddy!" the boy squealed.

Jared let go of Malia, bent down, and swung the child high into the air. The boy shrieked with laughter, kicking his legs, before Jared pulled him into his arms, kissing his forehead.

Through the cracked glass of the window, Jared's voice carried clearly into the cold evening air.

"Just hold on a little longer, sweetheart," he murmured to Malia, resting his hand against her lower back. "The annual banquet is in three weeks. You’ll be Luna before the first snow."

I stood frozen in the dark until the violent tremor in my hands went dead still.

I turned around, walked back to my car, and drove home with every window rolled all the way down, letting the freezing mountain wind scour the smell of honeysuckle from my skin.

When I stepped into the Shadowridge foyer, Jared was already home, sitting on the sofa with a glass of scotch.

He looked up at me, his eyes narrowing slightly as he caught my gaze. "Where were you?"

I hung my coat on the brass hook and looked straight into his eyes. "Checking the guest list for the banquet."