Reclaiming the Alpha’s Broken Mate

The anniversary dinner had gone cold an hour ago.

I'd made it myself — roasted lamb with rosemary, the recipe Rowan's mother used to make before she passed. I'd set the table with the good china, the ivory-and-gold plates we'd registered for together at Bergdorf's, the ones we'd never actually used. Candles. A single white peony in a crystal vase because Rowan once told me he thought roses were cliché.

I sat alone at that table for forty minutes before I heard the front door.

Rowan came in without apology. He didn't look at the candles, or the lamb, or the wine I'd already poured for him. He walked straight to the bar cart by the window, poured himself two fingers of Scotch, and loosened his tie like the evening had already exhausted him.

I watched him from my chair. I didn't say anything.

He finally looked at me. Something shifted in his expression — not guilt, just a flicker of mild inconvenience, the way a man looks when he's about to deliver news he considers entirely reasonable.

"Happy anniversary, Sloane." He took a slow sip. "I've decided to let Molly move into the west wing. She needs proper space, and that room's just sitting there." A pause. "The piano room."

For a second, I couldn't hear anything. Not the hum of the refrigerator, not the cars outside, not even my own breathing.

The piano room.

I'd lived in that room. Not slept there — lived. Twelve years of early mornings before the rest of the house woke up, fingers running over ivory keys, learning how to feel something privately, in a house where privacy had been slowly stripped away from me piece by piece. That room was the last place that was entirely, unconditionally mine.

And he wanted to give it to her.

I looked down at my hand.

The engagement ring caught the candlelight — three carats, cushion cut, brilliant and cold. Rowan had proposed on a rooftop in Monaco. I'd been twenty-six. I'd thought I was the luckiest woman alive.

I laughed. Just a small sound, quiet and dry, not quite real.

Rowan blinked. He'd been expecting tears. Maybe a thrown plate. The Sloane from two years ago might have given him both.

Instead, I pressed my thumbnail hard against the band of the ring. Harder. Working it into the thin crease of skin below the metal until I felt a sharp sting and something warm and wet.

A thin line of blood beaded along my finger.

I kept smiling.

"Sloane—"

The sound of bare feet on the stairs stopped him.

Molly appeared at the bottom of the staircase.

Molly Voss — twenty-four years old, blond, and trained from birth to look helpless in a way that made men feel like heroes. She was wearing a silk slip, the kind of thing you'd call a nightgown if you were being generous. Pale gold, nearly sheer. She clutched the hem of it with both hands like she'd wandered