When My Alpha Chose His Mistress Over Our Unborn Child

The mark went cold at 6:47 in the evening, two days before Sienna was supposed to come home.

She felt it on the gravel drive, halfway between her car and the pack house steps—a small icy stone pressed flat against her collarbone, where Pierce's bite had lived warm under her skin for eight years. She stopped walking. Waited for the warmth to come back. It didn't. It spread instead, a thin cold wire crawling up into her jaw, and for one long second it felt like a door closing inside an empty room.

She pushed open the main hall doors anyway.

The scent hit her first—Pierce's cedar and iron, familiar as her own hands, but laced now with something floral and foreign, a musk that didn't belong to her. It clung to the air like it had been rubbed into the walls. Sovereign, drugged and dull for months, snapped upright somewhere behind Sienna's ribs and let out a low growl that vibrated through her teeth.

*Something's wrong,* Sovereign said. *Move.*

Sienna followed the scent down the hall to the Luna's sitting room—her sitting room—and found Pierce with his arm around Lylah Burke, who was curled into the chair Sienna had claimed the day she'd become Luna. Lylah's hand rested on Pierce's knee like she'd done it a hundred times.

"Sienna." Pierce stood, shoulders squaring, voice dropping into that low commanding register she'd learned, over eight years, to read as a warning. "You weren't due back until—"

"I left early." She didn't move from the doorway. "Whose scent is that on you."

He stepped in front of Lylah instead of answering. "The Goddess made a mistake eight years ago." He said it flatly, like a diagnosis. "Lylah is my true mate. I've never felt with you what I feel with her."

Sienna pressed two fingers to the cold spot on her collarbone. She said nothing. The silence stretched long enough that Pierce's jaw tightened, uncertain what to do with a wife who wasn't crying.

"Say something," he said, alpha tone bleeding into it now, low and pressing against her chest like a hand.

She felt the pressure of it and did not sit down. Did not soften. She turned and walked out on her own two feet, and left him standing there with his mouth still open.

*Good,* Sovereign snarled. *Don't give him your voice. Save it.*

The next three days passed in a kind of clinical fog. Lylah moved through the pack house rearranging Sienna's herb stores without asking, calling herself Luna in the hallway to anyone who'd listen. Pierce never corrected her. Wolves who used to bow their heads when Sienna passed now found reasons to look elsewhere. Sovereign kept sending up low furious tremors Sienna mistook for stress, until the third morning, when she found two of her apothecary ledgers missing from her office and later, moved, in Lylah's quarters.

She retrieved them without a word to anyone. That night she sat at her desk and cross-referenced fourteen months of requisition logs against her nightly tea blends. The numbers didn't match. Someone had been adjusting her orders, month after month, in small enough amounts that she'd never noticed. She didn't know yet what it meant. She copied the discrepancies into her own hand and locked the ledgers in her cedar box before the Banquet.

The great hall was full by sundown—two hundred wolves, ceremonial torches throwing long shadows up the stone walls. Pierce climbed the dais in full Alpha regalia, and Sienna felt the cold at her collarbone flare like it already knew.

"I, Pierce Morrison, Alpha of Shadowridge," he said, his voice carrying to every corner of the hall, "reject you, Sienna Cole, as my mate and Luna."

The mark split. Silver blood ran hot down her throat and pooled in her collarbone, and the severed bond hit her like a fist through the chest. Her knees buckled. She went down on the stone floor, palm pressed flat over the wound, and the entire hall went silent enough to hear the torches crackling.

She did not scream.

One second. Two. Three. Then she pressed harder against the bleeding mark, planted one foot, then the other, and stood.

She walked the length of the hall without looking at him, silver blood drying along her collarbone, two hundred wolves parting in front of her like water. Behind her, she heard Pierce say her name once—not a command this time. Something closer to panic.