After My Mate Replaced Me With His Perfect Mistress

I baked the pastries before sunrise.

That was always how I worked — early, quiet, alone in the kitchen while the rest of the Pack House was still sleeping. My hands knew the recipes better than my mind did. Flour, butter, the particular ratio of spiced honey that my father had written in the margin of page forty-three in his careful, slanted hand. I didn't need to measure anymore. I just knew.

I'd been kneading the dough for almost twenty minutes when I realized my shoulders had finally dropped. That was the thing about working with my hands — it was the only time the tightness in my chest loosened enough to breathe. Shepard had been distant for weeks. Distracted in a way that felt deliberate, like he was practicing it. I told myself it was the pressure of the upcoming launch. I told myself a lot of things.

By the time I wrapped the pastries in the linen cloth my mother had embroidered — pale thread, the Moonveil crest in the corner — I had almost convinced myself this was a good idea. A small gesture. A reminder. I was his Luna. I was still here.

The Pack House was busy when I arrived. Mid-morning, the hallways full of the low hum of pack business — Deltas moving between offices, a pair of Gammas talking in clipped tones near the east corridor. A few of them nodded at me. Most didn't. I noticed that. I'd been noticing it for a while.

Shepard's office was at the end of the main hall, behind a set of heavy oak doors that he'd had installed last year. Solid. Imposing. The kind of doors that said: what happens in here is not your concern.

I was maybe ten feet away when I heard his voice.

Not raised. That was the thing about Shepard's Alpha tone — it didn't need volume. It had weight. A low, resonant pressure that settled into your bones and made disagreement feel physically impossible. I'd felt it directed at me exactly twice in our years together, and both times I'd gone quiet before I even understood why.

He was using it now.

"— what this pack needs is a forward-facing identity. Not Lena's grandmother's pantry." A pause. The sound of something being set down on his desk. "She means well. She always means well. But there's a difference between honoring tradition and being trapped by it. What we're building with Whitney is something the whole region will recognize. Something modern."

I stopped walking.

The linen cloth was warm in my hands. I could smell the pastries through the fabric — cardamom, the faint sweetness of the honey glaze. My father's recipe. The one he'd made every year for the pack's founding anniversary, the one that elder Creed Weaver had once told me tasted like the pack's memory made edible.

Conservative and outdated pack nonsense.

I didn't move. I should have. I knew, in some distant, self-protective part of myself,