I Married My Cheating Fiancé’s Exiled Brother

“IF YOU LOVE MY FIANCÉ SO MUCH, WHY DON’T YOU MARRY HIM INSTEAD?” The words tore out of my throat before I could stop them, and something low and animal rode underneath them. Silence. Then my best friend of ten years burst into tears. My fiancé, standing beside her with his shirt half-buttoned, didn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. “Baby, please.” He reached for me. “This isn’t what it looks like.” I stared at his hand. The same hand that had slipped a diamond ring onto my finger eight months ago. The same hand that had held mine this morning while he promised to love me until death. The same hand that had apparently been on my best friend while I stood downstairs, smiling for our wedding guests. “Don’t you dare touch me.” My voice was so quiet that he actually stopped. Under my skin, my wolf had come awake for the first time in months, and she was pacing. Behind him, Chloe clutched a bedsheet to her chest. My wedding dress was hanging in the bridal suite downstairs. The flowers were arranged, the guests were seated, and two hundred wolves from three packs were drinking to a union that would bind the Hart family to the Cross pack for a generation. My father had been bragging all morning about the heir I was marrying. And upstairs, in the room I’d personally booked for my bridesmaids, that heir was sleeping with the one woman I trusted more than anyone in the world. “Chloe?” She covered her mouth. “Please, don’t hate me.” Something inside me went very still. I’d held her through her first heartbreak. I’d lent her rent money without being asked. When her mother died, I’d slept on a hospital floor beside her because she couldn’t bear to be alone. I’d made her my maid of honor and given her a front-row seat to the happiest day of my life. Apparently, she’d decided to use it to take my husband. “How long?” Neither of them answered. “How long have you been sleeping with my fiancé?” “Emma,” Daniel said softly, the way you’d speak to someone standing too close to an edge. “Let me explain.” “How. Long?” Chloe lowered her eyes. “Eight months.” I waited for the room to make sense again. It didn’t. Instead, my mind slid back to a night in April, when Daniel had cancelled our dinner for the third time in a month and I’d sat on my bathroom floor, convinced I was being paranoid. Chloe had come over with wine and sat down beside me in her work clothes. She’d rubbed my back and told me, “He adores you, Em. He’d be insane to look at anyone else.” She’d smelled like his cologne, and I hadn’t thought anything of it. That was what made my stomach turn now. I was a wolf. I could smell a lie on a stranger across a crowded room. Yet for eight months, I’d smelled nothing on either of them but the tea Daniel kept making me, the calming blend he swore would help with my nerves. My senses had gone dull and foggy, and I’d blamed the stress of the wedding. And a year before that, when my aunt had remarked that Chloe watched my life like she was shopping for it, I’d stopped speaking to my aunt for two weeks. “Did you ever feel guilty?” I asked. Chloe cried harder. “I never meant for this to happen.” “That’s not what I asked you.” She looked at Daniel. Even now, even after I’d found them together on my wedding day, she was checking with him before she answered me. And he was looking back at her. Not at me. “Do you love her?” I asked him. His jaw tightened. “Don’t turn this into something it isn’t.” “Answer the question.” He dragged a hand down his face and then, in a moment, rearranged it into something patient and reasonable. “Emma, listen to me. I love you. That has never changed. Things with Chloe were a mistake, and we can talk about it properly, but not like this. Your father is downstairs. The Alpha is downstairs. The alliance took three years to negotiate, and you’re upset, and you have every right to be, but you’re not thinking clearly.” “Did you take her to that hotel in June?” My voice cracked. “When you said you were working late?” “Everything I’ve done for the last four years, I did for us.” He took a careful step toward me. “Don’t throw it away over one terrible morning. If you walk out, the packs will talk about nothing else for generations. You’ll be the Hart who broke a treaty because she couldn’t control her temper. Is that what you want?” It was almost impressive. He’d cheated on me with my best friend and was now explaining how I should handle the consequences, and he honestly believed he could talk me out of the building. Behind him, Chloe had stopped sobbing. She wiped her cheeks, and her gaze drifted past me to the bedside table, to the empty place where I’d set down my ring, and I realized I hadn’t remembered doing it. “We were going to tell you eventually,” she said quietly. Eventually. After the ceremony. After the bond. After I’d knelt beneath the moon and promised to stand beside him in front of every wolf I knew. I looked at the man I’d loved for four years and understood that he wasn’t going to apologize, because he truly didn’t believe he’d done anything that needed one. So I stopped asking him to. “Get dressed,” I said. “Both of you.” Daniel’s shoulders loosened. It was the smallest movement, but I saw it. He thought he’d won. “Nobody downstairs hears a word about this. You will both walk out of here and act like nothing happened.” I picked up my phone from the dresser and held it for a second longer than I needed to. My nails had begun to sharpen against the screen. I made them stop. “You have two hours. Then you can tell me which one of us you’re marrying.” “Emma—” Daniel started. “Two hours.” I walked out and closed the door behind me, softly, so he wouldn’t hear my hands shaking. In the elevator, I pulled up the wedding schedule I’d spent six months perfecting and found the line I was looking for. At 2:30, once the vows were done and the champagne was poured, the venue’s AV technician would dim the lights and play the slideshow. Ten years of photographs, hand-picked by me, with Chloe in nearly every one. A tribute to the happy couple, set to a song Daniel had chosen. The technician took files from only one person. When the doors opened on the lobby, the scent hit me like a slap. Cedar and woodsmoke, faint and a little bit old, and impossible. The kind of scent I hadn’t smelled in six years, not since the night the Cross pack had cast out its second son and Daniel told everyone the name was never to be spoken again. My wolf lifted her head and, for the first time in eight months, she wasn’t confused.