Betrayed by Her Alpha, Chased by Three

Evelina's POV "Luna Evelina, I will have the revised supply reports on your desk first thing tomorrow morning." I laughed and waved him off as I gathered my folders from the table. "Administrator Cael, I have told you at least a dozen times to drop the formality when it is just us. Go home. It is past ten." He smiled, still a little flustered by it, same as every time. I said goodnight to Freda and the others. Freda had served on the elder council since before I was Luna; she knew this pack better than most of its Alphas ever had. Then I stepped out into the cool night air, pulling my jacket tighter as I took the lower path back toward the pack house. It was a good night. The kind that made the long hours and early mornings feel worth it. Malik and I had built a life here I would have sworn was real. I loved him with all my heart. I had stayed with him through the hardest stages of his life, through grief and the weight of becoming who he needed to be, and I had never once questioned whether it was worth it. Seven years of work I was proud of. A pack that was stronger than it had been when we started. I had chosen this life, this future, with both hands, and not once had I regretted it. I was passing the old storage building near the tree line when I heard it. Low sounds drifting through the gap in the old wood. I shook my head and kept walking. Wolves would always be wolves. I had lost count of how many times I had reminded the younger ones that the storage building was for actual storage and not for this, and they never listened. I was almost past it when a voice stopped my feet dead. "You have no idea what you do to me." I told myself I was tired. It was late. I kept walking. I had taken maybe four steps when I heard her laugh. That scratchy high pitch that had always set my teeth on edge. My wolf lunged toward the sound, and I turned around before I could stop myself. The gap in the wood was just wide enough. The moonlight through the small window was just enough. Alpha Malik had her pressed against the far wall with her legs around him and his hands in her hair. I stood there with my eye against that gap and I could not look away and I could not breathe. "Seven years, and she still thinks she's the one holding this pack together," Isadora, my husband's brother's widow said, laughing low between breaths. "Pathetic, honestly. She's been raising our child, thinking he belonged to your brother... and smiling about it." "She did well," Malik said. His voice was low and easy, the voice I'd known through seven years of mornings, negotiations, arguments, and quiet evenings. Hearing it in that room made my stomach drop like a missed stair. "She raised our son believing he was her brother-in-law's," Isadora said. "Yours and mine, Malik. She tucked him into bed every night, kissed him goodnight, and called it love." She laughed again. "How much longer are you going to let her play happy family with a child who was never hers?" "For as long as it's useful," he said. "As long as she keeps raising our son, he'll become the next Alpha." My wolf went silent. My hand balled into a fist and I was already at the door before I caught myself. I stood there in the dark with my fist raised and thought about Alpha Malik's face if I walked in. Smooth. Composed. That negotiator's calm, the one he never dropped even for me. His voice telling me I had misunderstood, that I needed to rest. Isadora straightening her clothes and looking at me with those flat eyes. I lowered my fist and stayed there for a long moment because my legs had stopped working and I did not trust them yet. Our son. Yours and mine. The words kept turning over and I could not make them stop. I breathed out and walked away. The memories came as I walked. The first year, the old Alpha dying and Malik's brother stepping up while Malik was still finding his footing, me running beside both of them because that was what I did. The third year, sitting with the brother through the illness that eventually took him. Holding his hand the last night because Malik could not bring himself to stay in the room and someone had to be there. I had stayed. Then the brother was gone, and Malik became Alpha. Isadora could not look at the newborn without falling apart, or so we were told. Malik came to me, just the two of us, and said the boy needed someone steady. I had not hesitated. Ren placed in my arms as a newborn, his whole body fitting against my forearm, his face scrunched and furious at the world. Four years of bedtimes and small warm hands reaching for mine in the dark. Four years of loving him like he had always been mine to love. All of it a lie they had been laughing about behind my back. I went to my desk and started writing everything down. Three weeks passed. I smiled at Alpha Malik over breakfast every morning like nothing had changed. I refilled his coffee, laughed at the right moments, sat beside him at pack dinners. Isadora sat across from us with her flat eyes and her small smile, and I looked back at her and kept my face empty. It cost me more than I let myself think about. Every morning I had to build the version of myself that still believed before I could walk downstairs. Every dinner I had to sit close enough to touch him and remember what his voice sounded like in that room and keep eating. I was so good at it that sometimes I caught myself wondering if I had imagined the whole thing. Then I would go back to my desk at night, open the folder, and remind myself that I had not. I had gone three weeks without letting myself finish the sentence Isadora had started in that storage building. Our son. Yours and mine. I had filed it with the rest of the evidence and told myself I did not have enough yet to be certain, that certainty was for the folder, not for the middle of the night. I was not certain. I only knew what I had heard, and what I could not stop seeing every time I looked at him now. Ren's light was still on. I pushed open his door. He was sitting up in bed with his blanket around his shoulders. He looked up at me and said "Evie" with so much relief it almost broke me all over again. "You should be asleep," I said, and sat on the edge of his bed. He burrowed under the blanket and I reached over to tuck it around him, smoothing it down over his small shoulders. He fought sleep, blinking heavier and heavier until his eyes finally gave up the fight. His breathing evened out. I stayed where I was. My hands went cold against the blanket. I looked at his face. His father's jaw. His mother's eyes. Four years and I had never seen it. My hands stayed on the blanket, and my wolf refused to answer me at all. Ren turned his face toward me, an old habit from every night he had fallen asleep against my arm. I do not know when I reached for the pillow. It was already in my hands, and I was looking down at his face, his father's jaw, his mother's eyes. And I understood what I was doing and I did not stop. The pillow moved toward his face. Every ugly thing I had carried for three weeks was in my hands right then. The affair, the lies, the years of believing I was loved when I was only being used. He looked like the proof of all of it, this small sleeping boy who had no idea what he was born into or what his existence had cost me, and I was standing over him. Then Ren murmured "Evie" in his sleep and his small hand came up and found my arm the way it always did, holding on without knowing he was holding on. I froze. He was not reaching for the betrayal or the cruelty or any of the ugliness of that night. He was reaching for me, the only constant he had ever known, because even in his sleep I was the person he trusted most in the world. The pillow hit the floor before I knew I had let it go. I stood there shaking, looking at his face, and the anger drained out of me, leaving only the weight of what I had almost done to a child who loved me, a child I had loved first, a child innocent of every bit of it, before I knew any of the truth. Four years of rocking him through fevers and small hands finding mine in the dark, and I had stood here with a pillow. I had raised this boy. I had been the one he called for when he was afraid, the one whose voice he knew before he could string a sentence together, and I had still stood here with a pillow in my hands over him. I did not have a name for what that made me and I did not want one. None of it was his. I heard footsteps in the corridor, quick and light, a sound I knew all too well. By the time she reached the door, her dark hair had already come loose from the braid she wore for rounds this late. Dara, the former Elder's daughter, had been beside me since before I was Luna. She knew me well enough that lying to her was not worth attempting. She had a healer's instincts, and she had always used them on me. Right now I did not know what she was going to see on my face. The door opened. She took one look at me standing over Ren's bed with my hands at my sides and went still. "Evie." Her voice was low, the way it went when she was keeping herself steady so I could fall apart. "What happened."