My Beta Cheated, So His Alpha King Took Me

I smelled her before I saw the evidence.

Tara's scent clung to Grant's collar like a brand — airport bourbon, her particular cedar-musk, and underneath it all, something unmistakable. Something that turned my stomach to ice.

Satisfaction. Post-mating satisfaction.

The world didn't tilt. It didn't shatter dramatically. For exactly three seconds, I stood in the entryway of the home we'd shared for thirty years, my keys still in my hand, and I simply breathed.

Then my claws came out.

I didn't realize it until I heard the sound — five clean lines raking across the hardwood floor, deep enough to show pale wood beneath the stain. Sable, my wolf, made a noise in my chest I'd never heard from her before. Not a growl. Not a howl.

A death rattle.

I walked to the kitchen.

The silver mating bowl sat on the shelf where it always sat, where it had sat for thirty years. Pack tradition, Mating Moon ceremony, the night Grant and I had pressed our bleeding palms together and made promises in front of the whole pack. The bowl was engraved with both our names. It had survived three moves, two renovations, and what I'd told myself was a solid marriage.

I picked it up with both hands and drove it into the granite countertop as hard as I could.

The crack of it was louder than any sound I'd made in years. Louder than I'd let myself be in years.

Grant came running. Of course he did — he'd been in the next room, probably rehearsing whatever explanation he'd constructed on the flight home. He appeared in the kitchen doorway, six feet of Beta wolf with guilt written in the tight set of his jaw, and he found me crouched on the kitchen floor, picking up pieces of silver with my bare hands.

I needed something to do with my fingers. I needed something real.

I pressed a shard into my palm until I felt the sting, the small bright pain of it, and Sable whimpered in my chest like a wounded animal. Her coat, in that spiritual space behind my ribs where wolves live, had gone the color of ash.

"Sloane." Grant's voice. Careful. The voice he used when he thought I was being unreasonable. "What did you — that was our mating bowl."

"I know what it was."

I stood up. My palm was bleeding, a thin red line across the lifeline. Appropriate.

"You need to calm down," he said.

"I am calm." And the terrible thing was, I almost was. The rage had burned so hot so fast that it had passed through me and left something colder behind. "I can smell her on you, Grant. I can smell exactly what you did."

His jaw tightened. There it was — his right hand dropped to his left forearm, fingers wrapping around his wrist, thumb pressing against the inside of his pulse point. Rotating. A small, unconscious movement. I'd seen it a hundred times over