After My Alpha Poisoned Me at Our Alliance Banquet

I planned every inch of the banquet hall. The white roses on the head table. The Blackridge crest stitched into the runner. The seating chart that took me three weeks of phone calls to balance. I even chose the wine.

No one mentioned my name in the welcome speech.

I stood at the edge of the room with a clipboard I didn't need, watching Jackson Sanders lounge at the Alpha's seat like the throne had grown around him. My fated mate. The man I had run this pack for since we were eighteen years old. Silverfang's Alpha on paper. Mine, by the Moon Goddess, in a way I had stopped saying out loud.

Josie Jensen was draped against his shoulder. She wore red. Of course she did.

"Olivia." My wolf's voice in my head was thin and tight. Her name was Nira. She had been quiet for years, tucked behind my ribs like a folded letter. Tonight she was awake and uneasy. "He smells like her."

I knew. Cedar smoke and rain, that scent that should have only been mine, was tangled with something sweeter. Vanilla. Cheap perfume sprayed directly onto his collar. Josie tilted her chin against his jacket and rubbed slow, like a cat. Scent-marking. In front of two packs. In front of me.

My wolf whimpered.

That was the part I hated most. Not the public ownership. Not the smirk Josie sent me over the rim of her glass. The way my body still leaned half a step toward him, like a plant toward light. Fifteen years of guilt and a mate bond will do that. Train you to call a leash a love story.

"Lady Hughes."

Derek Hale's voice. Jackson's Beta, his shadow, his hand when Jackson didn't want to dirty his own. He glided up with three of the inner circle behind him and a ceremonial goblet in his palm. Silver. Heavy. Steam curling at the rim like the drink had been warmed.

"A toast," Derek said. His smile was practiced. "For the woman who built this alliance. From the Alpha, with gratitude."

The wolves around him laughed in that low, knowing way that men laugh when the joke is a knife.

I took the goblet. Polite. Automatic. My fingers wrapped around the stem, and Nira slammed against the inside of my chest.

"WOLFSBANE."

The smell hit me a second behind her warning. Bitter, sharp, hidden under mulled spice and honey. The kind of dose you put in a drink for a wolf you don't want walking out of the room.

My throat closed. I lifted my eyes across the hall.

Jackson was already looking at me.

He didn't blink. He didn't frown. He lifted his own glass an inch and tipped his head, that small, lazy gesture I had watched him use a thousand times to tell warriors to fall in line.

"Drink up, Olivia."

The Alpha tone wasn't even loud. It didn't need to be. It rolled across the floor and settled in