My Alpha Took A Second Mate

Vera Callow was the Luna of the Greyfell Pack. She stood beside Alpha Malcolm Hargrove through border wars and hard winters. She kept his stores, nursed his sick, and built the sugar trade that made his pack rich.

Then, at the spring gathering, Malcolm caught the scent of a young woman from the low houses. Before the entire pack, he named Ivy Lockhart his second mate and second Luna.

“It is the Goddess’s will,” he told his wife. “We do not question what she has chosen.”

In Greyfell, nobody argues with the Goddess.

So Vera swallowed her pride and made room. She watched Ivy take her seat, her rooms, her keys and her husband’s smiles. She told herself he would remember what they had built.

Then came the night of first frost.

Vera’s heat came, as it had every season for twenty years, and she waited for her mate. But Ivy’s heat came the very same night, out of season, and Malcolm walked to the other woman’s door.

Vera spent that night alone. By morning, she was finished begging.

She did not scream. She did not fight. She did not curse the girl who took her place.

She started counting.

Ivy’s heats were coming far too often. They came whenever Malcolm drifted back toward his first mate. And Ivy’s mark had never turned silver the way a true mate mark does.

Then Ivy stood before the pack and announced she was carrying the Alpha’s pup.

When the harvest moon came and went with no birth, Vera was the one dragged to the smokehouse, accused of poisoning the Alpha’s unborn child.

Now the entire pack is waiting for the hunter’s moon, when the elders will decide her fate.

But Vera has spent two years watching. She knows what grows in the midwife’s garden. She knows what the healer wrote in her book. And she knows the one question the Alpha cannot answer before the Goddess.

Did he ever truly feel the bond?

They took her quiet for weakness.

She was only waiting for the right time to walk away.