After My Mate Poisoned Me for Another Woman

The rain started just as they lowered the former Alpha into the ground.

I stood beside my husband, Alpha Trenton Stone, my head bowed in what everyone assumed was grief. The black veil over my face hid more than tears—it hid the careful blankness I'd perfected over three years of this marriage. Around us, the Greystone Pack mourned their fallen leader with howls that cut through the October wind.

I didn't howl. I couldn't. The wolfless Luna never could.

That's what they whispered, anyway. I caught the words drifting from the cluster of she-wolves near the oak tree: "Such a waste of space." "Poor Alpha Trenton, stuck with a dud." "At least she's pretty to look at."

I'd heard worse. I'd learned to let it slide off me like water off glass.

But Trenton—Trenton wasn't grieving either.

I could feel it in the way his body hummed with energy beside me, a manic vibration that had nothing to do with sorrow. His fingers drummed against his thigh in a rapid, irregular pattern. Every few minutes, he pulled out his pocket watch, checked it, then snapped it shut with a sharp click that made my teeth ache.

His gaze kept drifting toward the guest wing of the pack house, visible through the trees.

Where Kehlani was staying.

Kehlani Thomas. His "fated mate." The fragile she-wolf with her wild orchid and rain scent, the one who was supposedly dying from some rare Fading Wolf Syndrome. The one he visited every night while I slept alone in the Luna's quarters.

The one he loved.

I wasn't supposed to know about her. But I had a gift—one I'd hidden my entire life. My nose could deconstruct any scent down to its molecular components, could track a wolf through a rainstorm three days old, could smell a lie in someone's sweat.

And right now, Trenton reeked of anticipation.

The ceremony ended. Pack members filed past us, offering condolences that Trenton accepted with distracted nods. The moment the last wolf disappeared toward the pack house, he turned to me.

"Go inside, Natasha. I have business to attend to."

His voice carried that edge of dismissal I knew so well. Not quite an Alpha command, but close enough to make most wolves obey without question.

I lowered my eyes. "Of course, Alpha."

He was already walking away before I finished speaking.

I waited until he entered the pack house through the side entrance, then I followed.

The rain had picked up, turning the ground to mud. I moved quietly through the servant's entrance, the one Omega Larson had shown me years ago when I'd first arrived as the new Luna. The old housekeeper had been kind to me in ways no one else had bothered to be.

I climbed the back stairs to the second floor, my wet shoes silent on the carpet. Trenton's private study was at the end of the hall, the door slightly ajar.

I heard his voice before I reached it.

"—increase the