My Mate Chose His Mistress

The venison had been in the oven for three hours.

I knew because I'd been watching the clock above the kitchen door the way you watch something you don't actually care about — just to have somewhere to put your eyes. The pack house smelled like rosemary and rendered fat and the kind of warmth that makes a place feel like home, which was funny, because this place had never been home. Not once in three years.

I pulled the roasting pan out and set it on the iron trivet. The meat was perfect. Honey-glazed, herb-crusted, the skin crackling at the edges exactly the way Eleanor had taught me the first Thanksgiving I spent here, back when she still believed her son was going to come around.

From the great hall, I heard Emmett laugh.

It was a real laugh — loose and easy, the kind he never used around me. Daisy said something I couldn't make out, and he laughed again. I picked up a spoon and basted the potatoes.

I am Avery Larson. I have been the Luna of Ironvale Pack for three years. I have cooked this feast every November, alone, in this kitchen, while my fated mate entertained the woman he actually wanted in the next room. I have never once burned the venison.

I consider that a personal achievement.

The kitchen door swung open and Eleanor slipped inside, closing it behind her with the careful quiet of someone who thinks she's being subtle. She was dressed for the feast — deep burgundy, silver at her throat, the former Luna's posture she never fully put down. Her eyes went to the roasting pan, then to me, and she smiled the way she always smiled at me: like I was something precious that her son kept leaving out in the rain.

"It smells wonderful, sweetheart," she said.

"It always does." I set the spoon down and reached for the bread. "You didn't come in here to compliment the venison, Eleanor."

She had the grace to look slightly caught. Then she crossed to the counter beside me, lowered her voice, and told me her plan.

She'd prepared a drink. A special one. A wolf-heat stimulant, she said — carefully sourced, carefully dosed, slipped into Emmett's glass before the toast. Just enough to override his stubbornness. Just enough to remind his wolf what it was supposed to want. She'd done her research. She was very thorough about it.

"One night," she said, squeezing my hand. Her grip was warm and certain. "That's all it takes. His wolf will remember. And then everything goes back to the way it should be."

She looked at me like we were co-conspirators. Like I was going to cry with gratitude.

I looked at her and thought: you sweet, catastrophically misguided woman.

"You've thought of everything," I said.

Her whole face lit up. "I have the glass ready. I just need you to make sure he drinks it before the toast. You're the Luna — no one questions you handing him a drink."

"Of course," I said. "Leave it to me."

She squeezed my hand again, harder this time, and I squeezed back, and she left the kitchen looking like a woman who had just solved a very complicated problem.

I stood there for a moment, listening to the sounds from the great hall. Emmett's voice. Daisy's laugh. The low murmur of pack members who had long since stopped pretending they didn't know exactly what was happening in this house.

Then I picked up the bread knife and went back to slicing.

---

I got the glass twenty minutes later.

Eleanor had left it on the sideboard near the hall entrance, marked with a small piece of tape on the stem — her version of a covert operation. I palmed it on my way past, smooth and unhurried, the way you pick up something that was always meant to be yours.

I didn't drink it. I'm not an idiot.

I tucked it into the inside pocket of my apron, where it sat warm against my ribs like a small, useful secret. Evidence, if I ever needed it. I probably wouldn't. But I've learned to keep things.

Then I went looking for Daisy.

She was near the back corridor, right where I expected her — hovering at the edge of the pack's social gravity, close enough to Emmett's orbit to feel important, far enough to maintain the fiction that she was just his Beta-assistant. She was wearing a green dress that she'd clearly bought for tonight specifically. She looked up when she saw me coming, and something flickered across her face. Wariness, maybe. Or calculation. With Daisy, it was hard to tell the difference.

I held out the Alpha suite keys.

She stared at them.

"He wants to see you," I said quietly. "Upstairs. Now, before the toast." I let a small, tired crack into my voice — just enough. "I think he wants to tell you something."

Daisy looked at the keys. Then at me. Then at the keys again.

She took them.

I walked back to the kitchen.

---

Outside, the November air was sharp enough to sting. I stood on the back steps with my encrypted phone and dialed a number I had memorized three months ago.

The Silverfang Pack had a gossip operative named Petra who could get a story across six allied territories before midnight if the material was good enough. I had made sure the material was very good.

I kept it simple. The Alpha's mistress in the Luna's bed, on Thanksgiving night, with the Luna's own keys. The suite number. The timing. A few details that could only have come from someone inside the house.

Petra asked if I wanted attribution.

"Anonymous," I said. "Obviously."

She laughed. I hung up.

I stood there for another minute, looking out at the dark tree line at the edge of Ironvale's territory. Somewhere out there, my real pack was waiting. Nighthollow. My name. My blood. Everything I'd been building while Emmett spent three years looking through me.

Not much longer now.

I went back inside and finished slicing the bread.

---

The scandal broke fast, the way good ones always do.

Someone found Daisy in the Alpha suite. I didn't see it happen — I was in the kitchen, right where I'd been all evening, dish towel over my shoulder, the picture of a Luna who had no idea what was going on. But I heard it. The sharp voices, the sudden silence in the great hall, the specific quality of collective shock that a pack makes when something confirms what everyone already suspected.

Then Emmett's voice, loud and cracking at the edges.

Then Eleanor's, high and white.

I leaned against the kitchen doorframe and watched the great hall come apart. Pack members frozen mid-conversation. Daisy somewhere in the middle of it, her green dress very bright under the chandelier. Emmett's face a color I'd never seen on him before.

Eleanor stood near the sideboard, her hand pressed flat against her chest, looking at her son like she was seeing him clearly for the first time and finding the view unbearable.

I felt something then. Not satisfaction, exactly. Something quieter. The particular stillness of a woman who has been waiting a very long time for a door to open, and has just heard the latch click.

I folded the dish towel over the oven handle.

The venison was getting cold. But then, it always did.