My Mate Ordered Me to Poison Our Unborn Pup

At 8:14 on the eve of our third anniversary, my mate bond turned into a live wire.

I was standing in the hallway outside the clinic, one hand pressed flat against my lower stomach where our pup had just been confirmed. Then Dillon’s voice slammed straight into my head through the open, uncompleted bond thread.

"Your scent is the only thing I've ever truly craved, Giuliana," he whispered. "Breathing you in feels like the first real breath I've ever taken."

A heavy jolt of raw lust—his lust, sharp and thick for another woman—ripped through my chest. My skin turned ice-cold. The unmarked skin on the right side of my neck burned with phantom frost, like a heavy iron door slamming shut in an empty room. Inside me, my wolf didn't curl up to whimper. She snarled. Her claws dug hard into my ribs, pacing with sudden, vicious fury.

Within the hour, Dillon summoned the senior wolves to the common room.

Giuliana stood beside him. She had arrived from Shadowpine just two days ago, wrapped in an oversized white knit sweater, her eyes soft, wide, and deliberately helpless.

Dillon looked over the heads of his warriors, avoiding my eyes where I stood near the doorway.

"Giuliana will occupy the Luna quarters in the Alpha wing effective immediately," Dillon announced, his tone flat and unyielding. "Everly will relocate her things to the lower east wing."

A dead silence fell over the room. Beta Callum shifted uncomfortably, his eyes darting toward me, but nobody spoke against the Alpha.

I didn't say a word. I turned, walked straight up to Dillon’s bedroom, and dragged two leather duffel bags out from beneath the bed. They were still zipped shut, dusty and untouched from the day I moved in three years ago. I had never fully unpacked. My wolf had always known what my heart had refused to admit.

That night, I stepped into Dillon’s private study.

"I need two minutes," I said. My voice was completely steady, the same tone I used when triaging torn throats in the clinic.

Dillon rubbed his temples and leaned back against his desk. He reeked of Giuliana’s scent—a cloying, sugary lily that made my stomach turn. "Make it quick, Everly. Giuliana isn't sleeping well."

"I went to the clinic today," I said calmly. "I'm pregnant. Six weeks. It's yours."

I watched his face. Not a muscle softened. His eyes went narrow, his mouth setting into a hard line.

"Now?" he said, his voice dropping. "That's a complication."

"A complication?"

"Giuliana is in a fragile state," Dillon snapped, stepping closer. "The pack needs stability. She cannot be stressed by this right now. You'll begin wolfsbane suppressants tonight. Mask the pregnancy scent completely until she is settled as Luna."

A cold rage bloomed behind my eyes. My fingers tightened into fists. "You're telling a healer to poison her own unborn pup? Do you have any idea what wolfsbane does to a developing heart?"

"You're the best healer in the territory. Figure out the dosage," he said coldly. He turned his back on me and picked up a stack of border patrol files. "And you will not attend the pack banquet tomorrow night. I won't have your sour face ruining her presentation."

He didn't look at me again. He didn't care if the pup lived or died.

At dawn, I went straight to the pack dispensary and locked the deadbolt behind me.

I was done keeping his warriors whole.

I didn't touch the wolfsbane. Instead, I pulled jars of peppermint, dried silver-leaf, and crushed wild ginger from the high shelves.

"Mentha piperita, twenty grams," I muttered, my hands moving with surgical precision. "Pinus sylvestris, ten drops." Naming the compounds kept the terror from reaching my hands. I compounded a harmless herbal paste—one that would temporarily numb my scent glands to ordinary wolf noses without a microgram of poison touching my blood.

Then I walked over to the clinic's master ledger.

For three years, I had kept the Ironvale warriors alive. I had developed custom clotting agents for silver burns and secret antitoxin blends for rogue bites. Every single proprietary formula was written in my own hand across these pages. Without them, Dillon's fighters were just reckless men with bleeding wounds.

I ripped the entire recipe block from the leather binding, tossed it into the brass incinerator, and dropped a lit match onto the parchment.

The blue flames flared, turning three years of my unappreciated devotion to ash.

Next, I opened Dillon’s iron emergency safe behind the desk—a lock I had possessed the combination to since his second year as Alpha. I reached past the pack papers and pulled out five heavy bullion bars of pure Lycan trade gold. I shoved them deep into the inner pockets of my coat, the cold metal settling heavy and solid against my ribs.

A sharp, ringing laugh echoed from the courtyard below.

I walked to the window and parted the blinds. Down in the morning mist, Dillon was draping his heavy Alpha coat over Giuliana’s shoulders, laughing as he handed her into the passenger seat of his running truck.

In my pocket, my phone vibrated with a text from an unlisted number:

*The black SUV has crossed the outer tree line. Ten minutes to the eastern border.*