After My Alpha Betrayed Me, I Married His Rival

I wore the blue dress.

Not because it was the most expensive one I owned, or because it matched the Ironcliff Pack's colors. I wore it because I had picked it out three weeks ago on a Tuesday afternoon, standing alone in a boutique in town, thinking about how Tristan's eyes always went to blue. Six years of small calculations like that. Six years of choosing things for someone else's reaction.

The Ironcliff pack house was full by the time I arrived. Every major family in the region had sent someone — Silverpine, Greywood, the Ashford delegation from the coast. A Come of Age Ceremony for an Alpha heir was political theater as much as celebration, and everyone knew their role. Mine was to stand near the front, look like the future Luna, and remind every wolf in the room that the Silverpine-Ironcliff alliance was solid.

I was good at my role. I had been practicing it for six years.

Tristan found me near the bar before the ceremony started. He smelled like whiskey already, his tie loosened, that easy grin on his face that I used to think meant he was happy to see me. Now I recognized it as the expression he wore when he had already decided something and hadn't told me yet.

"You look good," he said.

"You're drunk," I said.

He laughed. "It's my night."

I didn't argue. I never argued with Tristan when he was like this — I had learned early that it only made things worse, and I had spent six years being the one who made things better. I smoothed things over. I absorbed the damage. I told myself that was what loyalty looked like.

I found my seat near the front and watched the room fill up around me.

The ceremony started at nine. Alpha Gerald Mills gave a speech about legacy and bloodline and the future of Ironcliff. He was a precise, cold-eyed man who had always treated me like a line item in a budget — useful, accounted for, not particularly interesting. I sat with my hands folded in my lap and listened and waited for the part where Tristan took the stage and made it official.

He took the stage at nine-forty.

He was still grinning.

"I want to thank everyone for being here tonight," he said into the microphone, his voice carrying that particular loose warmth that whiskey gave him. "This is a big night. A night about the future."

I watched him. Something in my chest had gone very quiet.

"And I want to announce —" He paused, looked out at the crowd, and his eyes found mine for exactly one second before sliding away. "I want to announce that I've chosen my Luna."

The room shifted. A murmur, low and uncertain.

He said her name. I didn't know her — a she-wolf from one of the smaller Ironcliff families, standing near the side of the stage with wide eyes and pink cheeks. She looked