My Mate Drugged Me to Mark Another Woman

The needle mark in my hip still throbbed when I climbed into bed that night.

Three years of weekly injections, and the bruising never really faded. Dr. Hollis, our pack healer, said my wolf was too fragile to take the bond. She said the medicine would prepare me. She said to be patient.

I had been patient for thirty-six months.

I tried to mind-link Dante again. My fated mate. The Alpha of Ironvale Pack. The man who took a rogue's claws to the chest three years ago shielding me, the man who said his wolf had broken in the fight and couldn't complete the marking yet.

The link went nowhere. Just static, like calling into an empty hallway.

I picked up my phone. No texts. No missed calls. He'd told me he was working late in his study on the alliance paperwork. Three weeks until the Pack Alliance Ceremony, and the sixty million dollar resource deal still needed my signature.

My wolf shifted under my skin. A weak, drugged shift, the kind I'd grown used to. She felt like a candle in a jar.

Something made me reach for the tablet on the nightstand. The pack house had cameras in every common space. Dante had insisted, security reasons. Only the Alpha and Luna had access. I told myself I just wanted to see if he'd fallen asleep at his desk.

I opened the live feed for his study.

The screen filled, and my hand stopped working.

Fiona was on his lap.

Fiona Bell. The Omega I pulled out of a rogue camp ten years ago when she was a starving teenager. The girl I'd named, fed, sent to college on the Foster Foundation. The young woman who hugged me last week and called me her sister.

She was straddling Dante in the leather chair behind his desk. Her hair was loose down her back. Her shirt was open. And his teeth, Goddess, his teeth, were buried in the curve of her neck. Right where a mark goes. Right where mine should have been three years ago.

He wasn't damaged. He was marking her.

The mind-link channel he'd left open for late-night work crackled in my head. Not to me. To her.

"Easy, baby. The injections have her out cold by now. She couldn't smell us if we mated on her bedroom floor."

Fiona laughed. A small, satisfied sound.

"That healer's worth every coin I pay her," he said. "Eloise's wolf is so dulled she can't tell I'm unmarked. Three more weeks. She signs the alliance papers, the Foster territory transfers clean, and then we can stop pretending."

I watched my own hand on the tablet. Steady. I didn't know it could be steady.

I tapped the record button.

I went very still in the dark.

By two in the morning I was at my desk in the small office off my bedroom, the door locked.

My father had been Alpha Gerald Foster. He was dead now four years, but he