After My Alpha Scented Another, I Walked Away

The iron hissed across the collar of Atticus's white shirt, and I pressed down harder than I needed to. Steam curled up into my face. I did not flinch.

Seven years. I had ironed this man's shirts for seven years. I knew the way the starch sat in the cuffs, the exact angle his shoulders preferred, the small fray on the third button he refused to let me replace because his father had given him the shirt. I knew the shape of his life better than I knew the shape of my own.

My name is Lyra Wilson. I am twenty-three years old. I have been the fated mate of Alpha Atticus King of the Ironveil Pack since the night my wolf woke up at sixteen and told me, in a voice shaking with reverence, that the Moon Goddess had given us a king.

She had not given me a Luna title. She had not given me a mark. She had given me a kitchen and a laundry room and a standing invitation to wait.

"He'll be home by eight," I said to Buster, who was lying across my feet with his chin on my slipper. His tail thumped once against the tile. Golden retrievers do not care about rank. It is one of the many reasons I loved him more than I loved most of the wolves in this house.

I finished the shirt. I hung it in the closet between the navy and the charcoal, in the order Atticus preferred. I set the dinner plate in the warmer. I lit the small lamp in the foyer because he liked to come home to soft light. I told myself, as I had told myself every night for seven years, that patience was a form of power. That the bond would deepen. That one day he would look at me the way I had been looking at him since I was a girl.

My wolf did not answer. She had been quiet for days. Too quiet.

He came through the door at nine-forty. I heard his boots on the hardwood before I saw him — the particular weight of an Alpha who had been traveling and wanted to be done with it. I met him in the foyer with my hands folded the way I always did.

"You must be tired," I said.

He nodded. He did not look at my face. He shrugged out of his jacket and held it toward me without breaking stride toward the staircase. "Dinner?"

"In the warmer."

"Good girl."

He said it absently, the way a man speaks to a dog he has owned too long to notice. I took the jacket.

It was still warm from his body. I turned toward the hall closet, lifted it to the hanger, and the scent hit me full in the face.

Jasmine. Cedar.

Not a brush. Not a handshake. Not the accidental drift of a woman who had passed too close in a crowded room. It