After My Mate Crippled Me, He Crowned His Mistress

I should have known something was wrong when he made the tea.

Not because Jameson never made tea — he did, sometimes, on quiet evenings when the ridge was cold and the cabin smelled like woodsmoke and my herb bundles drying above the kitchen window. But there was something different about the way he moved that night. Too easy. Too deliberate. Like a man walking through a room he had already memorized in the dark.

I didn't notice. I was bent over my healing notes at the kitchen table, cross-referencing my feverfew ratios for the third time, too absorbed to look up when I heard him fill the kettle. My Come of Age ceremony had been fifteen years ago — fifteen years since I'd caught his scent across the ceremonial grounds and felt the whole world tilt sideways. Pine and smoked leather. Even now, it made something in my chest go quiet and warm.

That was the problem, I suppose. After fifteen years, the warmth had become something I breathed rather than noticed.

"You're going to ruin your eyes," he said, setting the mug down beside my notes. Chamomile. Our ritual. The scent of it rose in a small curl of steam, floral and familiar, and I didn't think twice.

"Alpha Calloway's announcement is tomorrow," I said. "I want the lavender extraction notes in order."

"They'll be in order." He set a hand on my shoulder — warm, steady, the hand I'd held through fifteen winters — and squeezed once. "Drink your tea, Belle."

I did.

I don't know exactly when it started. Four sips in, maybe five. There was no dramatic moment, no sudden alarm. Just a sensation like the floor dropping an inch beneath me, a subtle wrong-ness that I catalogued the way a Healer catalogues everything — dispassionately, looking for a cause. My wolf, Sable, stirred. She didn't like something. I set the mug down.

And then Sable screamed.

Not a sound. A tearing — a raw, shredding thing that ripped through the center of my mind with a violence I had no frame of reference for, because nothing had ever hurt her before, nothing had ever reached her before. I felt my senses collapse inward like walls folding. The room got far away. The notes blurred. I could feel the wolfsbane moving through my bloodstream with a horrible, clinical efficiency — I knew what it was, I knew exactly what it was, I had used it in controlled doses in trauma procedures — and that knowledge was the most terrifying thing, because it meant someone had done this on purpose.

Jameson was still standing behind me.

I tried to say his name. My mouth formed the shape of it. Nothing came out.

"There she is," he said quietly. Not to me. To himself, almost. The voice of a man checking something off a list.

I grabbed the table edge. My fingers wouldn't grip. I was already tilting, already leaden from the shoulders down, and when I