7 Years As Luna, My Alpha Sent Me To Asylum

In my fifth year as Kael's secret mistress, I was finally crowned Luna. Lyra, the woman who once screamed at me, calling me cheap and filthy, signed the termination contract without a word of protest. Before she left, she asked me softly, "Elara, do you believe in karma?" I scoffed. If there were such a thing, I wouldn't be sitting where I was sitting. If she wanted someone to blame, she could blame her own withered inner wolf for failing to hold on to an Alpha's heart. Seven years into our mating, Kael never grew tired of me, and Lyra's twins, Darian and Elowen, treated me as their real mother. I had thought karma was just the howling of the losers. Until today. I caught the scent of someone else's heat on Kael's suit jacket, sickeningly sweet and cloying. And caught between my fingertips: a single, long, pink curl. Kael had never let another scent touch him. In all our years together, whenever his inner wolf got restless, his habit was to press his fangs gently against the back of my neck. The clean cedar scent on my skin was the only thing that ever settled him. He had told me, more than once, that what he hated the most were low-ranking she-wolves who tried to disguise themselves with cheap aphrodisiac herbs. To match him, in all twelve years, I had never changed my own scent. I bathed regularly in pure stream water and kept my body untouched by anything artificial. But on this pink curl, there was a cloying, low-grade scent of herbal liquid. Layered over the unmistakable, overpowering scent of a she-wolf in heat. I didn't even need to close my eyes—my instincts painted the picture for me with perfect clarity: that she-wolf, on the edge of shifting, throwing herself at him in submission, baring her vulnerable belly. "Why isn't the calming incense lit?" The bathroom door opened. Kael walked out wrapped in a heavy cloud of steam, the pressure of a top-tier Alpha rolling out into the room with him. He pulled me back against him from behind out of habit, his breath warm on my ear as he searched for the mate mark on the back of my neck. My body went rigid. I didn't tilt my head and offer him my neck the way I always had. I turned around and held the pink curl up in front of his eyes. Kael stopped moving. Something flickered through his pupils. The next second, his fingers came up, careless, and flicked the curl off into the air. "Just some rogue she-wolf who went into heat at the edge of our territory." His tone was offhand. "She brushed against me by accident while I had the patrol tear into her." His tone stayed flat, as if nothing had happened at all. I stood there, my inner wolf growling low inside my chest, restless. "By accident"? If it had really been a routine border patrol, how would he have come back covered in a scent that strong? And besides, this wasn't the first time. I looked at him, cold. Months ago, I had already picked up a scent that wasn't mine on the collar of his shirt. There had been face powder in the seam of his SUV's passenger seat, even traces of witch powder used to cover one's tracks. I knew the laws of pack life too well. In this rigidly stratified world, there were countless low-class she-wolves who tried to ride their heat cycles up the ladder and replace the Luna. Before this, their methods had been crude, and Kael wouldn't even waste a glance on them. But now, this kind of filthy, lust-soaked thing had walked right into my bedroom. "A rogue in heat?" I let out a small, mocking laugh. "Those low-class Omegas. The things they'll do during heat just to claw their way into the Pack House—it's disgusting." "Tch." The word low-class seemed to have hit a nerve in Kael. The warmth that had been in the air a moment ago crashed to freezing. The full force of an Alpha's pressure locked my breathing in an instant, and Kael grabbed me by the chin, forcing my head up. Those eyes that had been full of tenderness only seconds ago now held nothing but ice. "What? Sat on the Luna's throne too long, have you? Forgotten what kind of mud you crawled out of yourself?"