My Twin Stole My Mate, So I Stole The Alpha

ARIANA'S POV The bedroom door was half-open. I stopped just outside it, one hand still clutching the small paper bag I'd brought for Damian, a stupid, sentimental thing, his favorite pastries from the bakery on Fifth, because I'd wanted to surprise him after his late shift at the pack house. I'd practiced what I was going to say the whole drive over. Something easy. Something that would make him laugh, the way he always did when I tried too hard to be romantic and ended up rambling instead. "I know you're here," I whispered through the gap in the door, smiling despite myself. No answer. Only silence, thick, wrong, the kind that presses against your eardrums like it's hiding something. Then I noticed it. The hallway smelled like Damian. Familiar, warm, the scent I'd know blindfolded in a crowded room. But underneath it, tangled through it, was another scent, one I knew just as well, because I'd grown up beside it my entire life. Alina. My twin sister. My stomach dropped straight through the floor. I pushed the door open before I could stop myself, before some small, self-preserving part of me could scream that I didn't actually want to know. The first thing I saw was Damian. He sat on the edge of the bed, dark hair disheveled, shirt hanging loose off one shoulder, breathing still uneven. His expression froze solid the second his eyes landed on me, like a man watching a car crash he had no ability to stop. Behind him, Alina sat against the pillows, hurriedly dragging a sheet up over herself. The room told the whole story before either of them said a word. Discarded clothes in a trail across the floor. Tangled sheets. That specific, heavy silence that only exists in the aftermath of something already finished. I hadn't caught them in the act. I was too late for that. They'd already done it. My fingers went numb. The paper bag slipped out of my hand and hit the floor with a soft, pathetic thud that somehow felt louder than anything else in the room. Damian stood up too fast, nearly stumbling. "Ariana—" "No." The word came out of me before I'd decided to say it. My wolf stirred violently under my skin, clawing at the inside of my chest. Mate. The word echoed through my mind like a struck bell. Damian was my mate. The one person the universe had supposedly handed me, the person I was bonded to on a level deeper than choice, deeper than logic. The man standing in front of me, guilty, half-dressed, unable to meet my eyes, was supposed to be the one person I trusted above every other living soul. And my sister was sitting in his bed, wrapped in his sheets, looking at me like I was the one interrupting something, halfly naked. "Did you—" I couldn't finish the sentence. My throat closed around the words like it physically refused to let them out. Damian squeezed his eyes shut. "Ariana, please." That wasn't a denial. My heart understood that before my brain caught up. "Did you sleep with my sister?" I forced the full sentence out this time, every syllable costing me something. Silence stretched long enough that I nearly screamed just to fill it. Then, barely above a whisper: "Yes." My world went completely, perfectly quiet. I could hear my own heartbeat, loud and slow and cruelly steady, like my body hadn't gotten the memo that everything had just ended. One. Two. Three. Alina laughed. Actually laughed, soft, almost fond, like this was a mildly awkward situation rather than the total annihilation of everything I'd built my life around. I stared at her. "What's funny?" She shrugged, tucking a strand of dark hair, identical to mine, down to the exact shade, behind her ear. "Why are you looking at me like that?" "You knew he was my mate." "I know, is that supposed to mean anything?" "You knew I loved him." "I know that too." Her voice stayed maddeningly calm, like we were discussing the weather. "You're my sister, Alina. How could you do this to me after everything?" "And?" That single word cut deeper than anything else she could have said. I actually took a step back, like she'd physically struck me. "I… seriously don't understand you," I said, voice cracking. Alina leaned back against the headboard, entirely unbothered, entirely comfortable in a bed that had no business being hers. "There's nothing to understand." She glanced at Damian, something possessive flickering behind her eyes. "He wanted me, precious Damien wanted the one with the action more, rather than a 90s old hag who refuse to follow the trend." Damian looked away, jaw tight, saying nothing, which was somehow worse than if he'd argued. "And I wanted him," Alina finished, like that settled every possible objection I could raise. My chest tightened until it physically hurt to breathe. She smiled — slow, satisfied, cruel in a way I'd never once seen from her before tonight. "So what's the problem?" "The problem," I said, my voice shaking with the effort of keeping it level, "is that he is my mate. That bond means something. It's not a… a scheduling conflict you can just work around." She rolled her eyes, unbothered. "You're acting like mates are prisoners. Like fate gets a say in who actually deserves someone." Then she turned to Damian with a teasing, intimate smile that made my skin crawl. "Besides — if you ask me—" she paused, deliberate, twisting the knife slowly— "I don't think tonight was enough." Damian's head snapped toward her. "Alina." "What?" She blinked at him, all false innocence. "I was just saying." My vision blurred with tears I refused to let fall in front of either of them. She wasn't sorry. She wasn't even pretending to be ashamed. She was satisfied, smug, glowing, victorious, like she'd won something instead of destroyed it. She had taken the one person I thought belonged to me. And she wanted more. I looked at Damian one last time, searching his face for something — anything — that might make this survivable. "Was I not enough?" The question came out smaller than I meant it to, more broken. His face twisted, guilt written across every line of it. "Ariana…" "Answer me." He couldn't. He opened his mouth and nothing came out, and that silence answered the question more completely than any words could have. I stepped backward, and the mate bond in my chest, the thing that had tethered me to him since the day we met, warm and constant as a second heartbeat — suddenly burned like it had caught fire. I gasped and grabbed the doorframe to keep from collapsing. My wolf howled somewhere deep inside me, a sound of pure animal grief that had nowhere to go. Something was happening to the bond. Something was tearing. Damian moved toward me instinctively, hand outstretched. "Ariana, let me—" I raised my hand, and the motion alone stopped him cold. "Don't." He froze mid-step. "Don't touch me," I said, and my voice broke completely on the last word. Then I turned around and walked away. I didn't scream. I didn't slap Alina across her smug, satisfied face, though every muscle in my body ached to. I didn't fall to my knees and beg Damian to choose me, to take it back, to tell me this was some horrible mistake I could still wake up from. I simply left. Because there are moments when the heart breaks so completely that even crying feels like more effort than you have left to give. DAMIAN'S POV I stood frozen in the doorway long after her footsteps faded down the hall, Alina's satisfied silence pressing in behind me like a weight I couldn't shake off. I told myself I hadn't meant for this to happen. That the moon-fever, the pull of proximity, the wine, that any of it excused what I'd done. None of it did. I knew that even as I reached for the excuses. Ariana's face — the exact moment the bond had visibly torn something loose in her chest — would stay with me longer than I deserved for it to. "You're going to go after her," Alina said behind me. It wasn't a question. I didn't answer because I didn't need to.