My Alpha Chose Another Luna

I spent an hour getting ready.

That's the part I keep coming back to. An hour. I curled the ends of my hair the way Daniel once said he liked, the loose waves that fall just past my shoulders. I lit the three white candles on the windowsill — the ones I'd been saving since last year, the ones that smelled like cedar and something faintly sweet. I wore the cream-colored dress, the simple one, because I didn't want to look like I was trying too hard. I wanted to look like myself. Like the woman he chose.

Three years. Three years since the morning I walked into the Silverfang pack house and caught his scent for the first time — warm cedar and rain-soaked earth — and my wolf went absolutely still inside me, the way she only goes still when something is exactly right. Three years since he looked across the room and I watched his eyes change. We both knew. That's how it works for us. You know.

The Marking was supposed to happen tonight.

I stood in the center of my quarters with the candles burning and my hair down and my hands steady at my sides, and when Daniel came through the door I tilted my head and bared the left side of my neck. The unmarked side. The side that had been waiting.

His hands came up. I felt them hover near my shoulders — warm, familiar, the hands I had memorized — and then they dropped.

"The pack isn't stable enough yet."

I didn't move. The candle nearest the window guttered in a draft.

"The timing isn't right, Mila. I just need a little more patience from you. You understand that, right? You've always understood."

I pressed my thumb against the unmarked side of my neck. A habit I'd developed somewhere in the second year of waiting, when the delays started to stack up and I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't asking questions.

"Okay," I said.

Just that. Okay. Because I trusted him. Because the Moon Goddess doesn't make mistakes, and Daniel was mine, and I had three years of evidence that he was worth the wait.

I blew out the candles on my way out.

---

The corridor outside my quarters is long and poorly lit at night, just the low amber glow of the wall sconces that Daniel never got around to replacing with something brighter. I was walking slowly, my thumb still pressed to my neck, when I heard his voice.

Not out loud. Inside.

Our mind-link has never been fully sealed — that's what happens when a mate bond goes unmarked for too long, the connection stays incomplete, the edges blurry. I'd felt it before: a stray emotion bleeding through, a flash of his mood when something went wrong with the pack. I'd always looked away from those moments. Felt like reading someone's private mail.

I didn't look away fast enough this time.

*"I built