Entangled With My New Alpha Mate

Amber POV I found the letter Damian had written to my sister before I found them together, and I wish I had never seen either one. It was tucked under a stack of pack ledgers on his desk, the paper soft from being folded and unfolded too many times. My name was not on it. Ivy's was. I told myself it was nothing, that I was being foolish, and I put it back exactly where I found it because I did not want to know what I already knew. That should have been enough warning for me to stay away from the east wing that evening, but I went anyway. I told myself I wanted to bring him tea the way I did every night before the pack meeting, and that was true, but it was not the whole truth. Some part of me needed to see him. The door to his study was open just a crack, and the light spilling through it was warm and gold, the kind of light that makes a room look safe. I almost walked in without knocking, the way I always did, because he was my mate and there was no need for me to knock on the door. Then I heard Ivy laugh. It was not a laugh I recognized. It was soft and low, the laugh she used to give boys she liked in school, and my chest went tight before my mind caught up with my body. I stopped with my hand on the door and I looked through the gap instead of pushing it open. Damian had his hand in her hair, and she had her face tilted up to his, and when he kissed her she did not pull away. She leaned into it the way I used to lean into him, back when he still looked at me like his world revolved around mine. The tea tray slipped from my hands and hit the floor before I even knew I had let go of it. The porcelain broke into so many pieces that I would find slivers of it in the rug for weeks afterward, but in that moment I only heard the sound, and then I heard nothing at all because the bond in my chest went quiet. It did not hurt the way I thought it would. It felt like something being switched off, a light going dark in a room I had lived in my whole life, and I stood there in the doorway feeling the emptiness where warmth used to be. Damian turned first. His eyes found mine over Ivy's shoulder and for one heartbeat he looked like a man caught, ashamed, human. Then his jaw set and the shame folded itself away and he stood up straighter instead, the way an Alpha does when he has already decided something and does not intend to explain himself. "Amber." He said my name like an apology he did not mean to give. Ivy did not even have the decency to look afraid. She stepped back from him and smoothed her dress down and looked at me with an expression I could only call pity, and I hated her more for the pity than I did for the kiss. "You were not supposed to see this yet," Damian said, and I laughed, though nothing about it felt funny. "Yet," I repeated. "So there was a plan. There was a when." He did not deny it. He walked toward me instead, slow, the way he might approach a wounded animal, and he reached for my hand and I let him take it because some foolish part of me still hoped he would say it was a mistake, that none of it meant what it looked like. "I never chose this," he said, "but I cannot fight what I feel for her. Ivy is going to be my Luna." The word Luna hit harder than the kiss had. Luna was supposed to be me. I was his mate, chosen by fate itself, bound to him by a pull neither of us had asked for and neither of us could break, or so I had believed since the night the bond first snapped into place between us. I had built five years of my life around that word. "I am your mate," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "The bond chose me." "The bond does not decide who I love." His hand tightened around mine, not gently. "I have tried, Amber. I have tried for years to feel for you what I feel for her, and I cannot force it any more than you can force the sun to rise at midnight." I pulled my hand free of his and I felt the last thread of warmth leave with it. Whatever had connected us, whatever pull had kept me tethered to this man since the day we met, I felt it curl in on itself and go still, like a heart that had simply stopped beating. "Say it," I told him. "If you want to end this, dare to say the words instead of making me stand here and guess at them." Ivy made a small sound behind him, and Damian glanced at her before he looked back at me, and something in his face hardened into resolve. "I reject you, Amber Brighton, as my mate and as my Luna." The words moved through me like ice water, and I felt my knees try to buckle even as I forced myself to stay standing. A rejection was supposed to feel like dying. Instead, it felt like being erased, like the last five years of my life had never happened at all, and the man standing in front of me had never once loved me the way I had loved him. I did not cry in front of them. I would not give either of them that. "Congratulations," I said, and my voice barely shook. "I hope she makes you happier than I ever did." I turned and walked out of that study with the broken porcelain still scattered across the floor behind me, and I did not stop walking until I reached my room, and I did not stop packing until I had nothing left in that house that belonged to me. By midnight I was past the pack borders with a single bag over my shoulder and no plan beyond putting as many miles as I could between myself and the two people who had just hollowed me out. The forest past the border was not our territory, and I had never once ventured into it, but I did not care whose land I was crossing anymore. I only wanted to disappear. I did not know until I was deep among the trees, with my feet aching and the cold biting through my coat, that the land I had wandered into belonged to someone else entirely, and that someone had men patrolling it with orders to kill anything that trespassed. I heard the growl before I saw the wolf, and by the time I turned to run it was already too late, because three more had circled out of the dark behind me, teeth bared, closing in with no intention of letting me leave. "Stand down." The voice cut through the growling like a blade, the kind of voice that did not need to be raised to be obeyed. The wolves froze mid-step, and I turned toward the sound with my heart still slamming against my ribs, and that was when I saw him standing at the edge of the trees, watching me the way no one had ever watched me before. One of the wolves lunged before the others, his teeth sinking into my shoulder hard enough to tear a scream out of me, and I stumbled back against a tree with the pain white-hot and blinding, my vision swimming even as the rest of the pack closed in around me. "Stand down."