After My Mate Sold Our Child To A Rogue

I woke up on New Year's Day the way I had for the past ten years: five minutes before my alarm, already mentally sorting through the pack's annual run logistics. The winter sun wasn't up yet, and the pack house was still quiet in that particular way that meant everyone else was sleeping off last night's celebration. I hadn't attended. Someone needed to make sure the kitchens were prepped for the post-run breakfast, and that someone was always me.

I was halfway through my morning routine—hair braided back, running clothes laid out, mental checklist cycling through supply counts and route confirmations—when the static hit.

It wasn't painful, exactly. More like a sudden absence, the way your ears feel when a pressure shifts. I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist, steadying myself against the bathroom counter, and reached for the pack's elite mind-link chat. The one reserved for the Alpha, Luna, Beta, and Gamma. The one I'd been part of since the day Wesley marked me.

Nothing.

I tried again, pushing past the strange blankness. Still nothing. Not silence—silence had texture, had presence. This was erasure. I had been removed.

My wolf stirred uneasily in the back of my mind, a low whine I felt more than heard. I ignored her and finished getting dressed, moving through the motions with the same deliberate calm I'd cultivated over a decade of managing pack crises. There would be an explanation. A technical glitch. Wesley had probably been adjusting permissions and accidentally clicked the wrong setting. It happened.

I told myself this as I walked through the pack house halls, my steps echoing against the polished wood floors Wesley had insisted on installing last spring. The ones I'd coordinated with the contractors while he was off at that leadership conference. Or what he'd told me was a leadership conference.

The first sign that something was deeply, fundamentally wrong came from two Delta warriors stationed near the administrative wing. They didn't see me—I'd gotten very good at moving through spaces without drawing attention—but I heard them clearly.

"Can you believe it? The whole eastern lakeside tract, just handed over."

"Alpha's got a soft heart, I guess. Helping out a wolfless Omega like that."

"Raelynn Simpson. Heard she's got some kind of tragic backstory. No pack, no wolf, nowhere to go."

"Lucky her. That land's worth a fortune. Prime territory."

I stopped walking.

The eastern lakeside tract was the crown jewel of our new acquisitions—months of negotiation, a significant financial investment, and land that could house three new pack families or generate serious revenue if we developed it correctly. I had drawn up five different proposals for its use. Wesley and I were supposed to review them together this week.

And he'd deeded it to someone named Raelynn Simpson.

Without telling me.

Without even a courtesy mind-link.

My wolf snarled, a sound that reverberated through my chest. I pressed my thumb harder against my wrist and kept walking, my trajectory shifting automatically toward