I Rejected My Alpha Mate

I knew something was wrong before he even closed the door.

It was past midnight. I'd been sitting at the kitchen table with a cold cup of tea, waiting. Ryatt had texted around nine — running late, extended training session, don't wait up. I waited anyway. I always waited.

He came in quietly, the way he always did when he thought I was asleep. I heard his boots on the hardwood, the soft click of the door. I stood up from the table and walked into the hallway to meet him.

That's when I caught it.

Sweet. Floral. Warm in a way that had nothing to do with the night air.

It wasn't perfume. Perfume fades. This was a scent — a she-wolf's scent — pressed into the fabric of his shirt, sitting in the curve of his neck like she'd rested her head there. My wolf went completely still inside me. Not growling. Not panicking. Just still, the way an animal goes still when it recognizes a threat it already knew was coming.

"Hey." Ryatt gave me a tired smile. "You're up late."

"Yeah," I said.

I looked at him for a moment. He looked back. Neither of us said anything else.

I went to bed. I didn't sleep.

---

I waited until his breathing evened out. Until the room settled into that particular quiet that means a person is deeply, genuinely asleep.

Then I got up.

I moved through the pack house the way I'd moved through it for five years — knowing every creak in the floor, every light switch, every drawer that stuck. I went to his jacket first, the one he'd draped over the chair by the door. I checked the pockets.

The leather wrist cuff was in the left one.

I held it under the hallway light. Dark brown leather, hand-stitched, with a small silver clasp. Simple. Expensive. I'd seen its match on Delaney Fox's wrist three weeks ago during a pack training session. I'd noticed it then and told myself it meant nothing. Lots of people wore leather cuffs.

I set it on the table.

Then I sat down at his desk and opened his mind-link log.

Ryatt had always kept his mind-link accessible to me. It was one of those small, unspoken things between mates — a gesture of openness, of nothing to hide. Except tonight, when I pulled up the recent activity, I found a thread I'd never seen before. Shielded. A separate channel, locked with a privacy setting I hadn't known he'd enabled.

I'm the one who manages the pack's communication systems. I know every override code.

I used one.

The timestamps went back six weeks. Late nights, mostly. After eleven, sometimes past one in the morning. The content was nothing explicit — that almost made it worse. It was the kind of conversation you have with someone you're comfortable with. Easy. Familiar. Inside jokes I didn't understand. References to things I hadn't been part of. And woven through all