After My Alpha Marked Another, I Planned His Ruin

I was measuring the training hall when Marcus found me.

Not measuring, exactly. I had the blueprints spread across the folding table, a pencil tucked behind my ear, and I was thinking about whether the east-facing windows needed to be wider. More light in the mornings. The warriors trained hard and they deserved good light. That was the kind of thing I thought about on a Tuesday.

Marcus appeared in the doorway at nine-fifteen. His face was the careful, neutral kind — the face he wore when he was delivering something he didn't want to deliver.

"The Alpha would like to see you," he said. "His office."

That was all. No reason. No context. Just the summons, delivered in the flat tone of a man doing his job.

I set down my pencil. "Now?"

"Yes, Luna."

I rolled up the blueprints and left them on the table. I told myself it was pack business. Budget review, maybe, or the alliance meeting we had coming up next month. Dominick called me to his office for those things all the time. This was normal. This was Tuesday.

I pressed my palm against the corridor wall as I walked.

I always did that. Thirteen years of it. The pack house had been a crumbling estate when we first moved in — drafty windows, water-stained ceilings, floors that groaned like they were tired. I had renovated it room by room, year by year, until it became something the whole alliance admired. I knew every wall. I knew which ones I'd replastered myself, which ones I'd chosen the paint for, which ones still held the ghost of the old stone underneath the drywall. When I pressed my palm flat against them, I could feel all of it.

I didn't know, walking down that corridor, that it was the last time I would do it without grief.

---

Dominic was standing behind his desk when I came in.

He didn't look up right away. That should have told me something. In thirteen years, he had always looked up when I walked into a room. It was one of those small things I had collected without realizing — the way his eyes found me automatically, the way his wolf recognized mine. I had taken it for granted the way you take breathing for granted.

The door clicked shut behind me.

Then I heard the lock.

It was a small sound. A single mechanical click. But it landed in my chest before my brain had time to process it, some animal part of me going very still, the way prey goes still when it hears something move in the dark.

Dominic looked up.

His eyes were flat. Not cold exactly — just empty of the thirteen years that should have been in them.

"Leanna."

He said my name the way you say a word you've been rehearsing. Careful. Placed.

And then, without preamble, without sitting down, without giving me anything to hold onto, he spoke.

"I, Dominick Wagner,