When My Mate Chose His Mistress Over Our Bond

I had been waiting for this night my entire life.

The grand hall of the Silverfang pack house was lit with hundreds of candles, their warm glow catching the silver threads woven through the ceremonial banners overhead. Every ranked wolf in the pack was here. Allied representatives from three neighboring packs sat in the outer rows. The elders stood at the altar in their formal robes, Elder Rowan at the center, his weathered face composed and solemn.

And I stood beside Connor Stephens, my fated mate, Alpha of Silverfang.

His scent wrapped around me the way it always did — cedar and rain, clean and deep, the smell that my wolf had recognized the first time I'd walked into a room with him and never stopped reaching for. My wolf hummed low in my chest, warm and content, the way she only ever felt when he was close. After twenty-three years of being the adopted daughter, the girl whose place in the pack was always slightly conditional, always slightly provisional — tonight was supposed to change all of that.

Tonight, I would be Luna.

Elder Rowan's voice filled the hall, steady and ceremonial, reciting the bonding rites that had been spoken at every Mate Ceremony in Silverfang's history. I kept my eyes forward, my hands loose at my sides, my breathing even. I had practiced this. I had imagined this. I had a list somewhere in my apartment of every small detail I'd wanted to remember about this night.

Then I felt it.

It was subtle enough that I almost missed it — a shift in Connor's scent, so slight it could have been nothing. The cedar was still there, but underneath it, something had gone cold. Like rain turning to ice. I didn't move. I didn't look at him. But my thumbnail found my palm, pressing in just below the knuckle, the small private anchor I'd developed years ago for moments when I needed to stay inside my own head.

I told myself it was nerves. His nerves. Even Alphas got nervous at their own Mate Ceremonies.

But then his eyes moved.

Just once. A single flicker toward the back of the hall, quick and controlled, the kind of glance a man makes when he's checking that something is in position. It lasted less than a second. When his gaze came back to my face, his expression was exactly what it had been before — warm, certain, the face of a man about to claim his fated mate.

I pressed my thumbnail harder into my palm.

The doors exploded open.

The sound hit the hall like a physical thing — the heavy ceremonial doors slamming back against the stone walls, the gasp that rippled through three hundred wolves simultaneously. I turned with everyone else.

Hanna Mills stood in the doorway.

Her dress was shredded at the shoulder, the fabric hanging in deliberate strips. Her hair was loose and wild. Tears streaked her face in perfect lines, and her eyes