His Mistaken Mate

Prologue :

  I was never supposed to be standing here.

  The dress I'm wearing belongs to my sister. The vows I'm about to say were written for her. Even the man waiting at the front of this hall — cold, powerful, terrifying — was never meant to be my problem.

  But my sister is gone.

  And someone had to take her place.

  That someone is me. Nyra. An Omega — the lowest rank in my pack. The girl nobody ever really notices. Three days ago I was sitting on the floor of the back laundry room reading a borrowed book, and now I'm here, in a hall full of strangers, about to marry a man they say is the most dangerous Alpha alive.

  His name is Kael Dravon.

  He hasn't looked at me once since I arrived. Not when I was brought in, not during the elder's long speech, not even when I was placed right in front of him. To him, I'm just a body filling a spot. A replacement. A girl with the wrong name wearing the right bloodline.

  I understand that. I really do.

  What I didn't expect was how angry it would make me.

  Because the longer I stand here — in a dress that's slightly too big, in shoes that are half a size too small, doing something I never agreed to — the more that fear in my chest stops feeling like fear and starts feeling like something else entirely.

  Something harder.

  Something useful.

  Kael finally turns from the window.

  When his eyes land on mine for the first time, my breath catches. His gaze is dark and heavy and completely unreadable. He looks at me the way you look at something you didn't order and aren't sure you want.

  I know that look. I've been on the receiving end of it my whole life.

  So I do the only thing I know how to do.

  I stare right back and I don't look away.

  Something flickers across his face — small, fast, gone before I can name it.

  But it was there.

  The elder clears his throat.

  "Shall we begin?"

  Kael looks away first.

  And somewhere under all the fear and the anger and the shoes that are killing my feet —

  I almost smile.

  Chapter One: The Girl Nobody Sees

  Let me tell you something about being an Omega.

  It means you are last. Last to eat, last to speak, last to matter. In a pack built on power and rank, an Omega is the person everyone steps around without thinking — like a crack in the floor you've learned to avoid. You don't fix it. You just stop seeing it.

  I had been that crack for nineteen years.

  My name is Nyra. I lived in the Holt Pack compound in a small room on the ground floor with one window that faced the wall of the building next to it. I ate in the main hall but sat at the end of the last table. I did my tasks — laundry, record keeping, supply inventory — quietly and without complaint. Nobody asked how I was doing. Nobody particularly cared.

  And I was fine with that.

  Being invisible had its advantages. When people forget you exist, they stop watching you. And when nobody is watching you, you can do all sorts of things you're not supposed to.

  Like reading files in the restricted records room before anyone else woke up.

  That's where I was on the Tuesday morning everything began to fall apart. I'd cracked the lock — the code was embarrassingly simple, the founding year of the pack — and I was sitting cross legged on the floor with a file about the Dravon Pack open in my lap.

  I liked knowing things. I always had. Information was the one currency I could collect without anyone noticing.

  I was halfway through a page about Dravon Pack territory borders when the bell rang from the main hall.

  Three sharp rings.

  Morning assembly. Early.

  Something had happened.

  ---

  I slipped the file back exactly where I found it and was three hallways away before the first doors started opening.

  Assembly was held in the great hall — long wooden tables, high ceilings, mounted animal heads on the walls that I had always found deeply unnecessary as decoration. Pack members filtered in by rank. Alphas and Betas at the front. Everyone else behind them.

  I took my usual spot near the third pillar on the left. Far back enough to be ignored. Close enough to hear everything.

  Our Alpha, Doran Holt, stood at the front of the room. Big man. Silver hair. The kind of person who had been in charge for so long he'd forgotten what it felt like not to be.

  Beside him stood my mother.

  She wasn't officially a Beta, but she had been Doran's personal advisor for over a decade, which put her in a position the rank system didn't have a proper name for. She stood with her hands folded neatly in front of her, face calm and unreadable, like always.

  She was good at that. Never showing what she was thinking.

  I'd spent my whole life trying to learn it from her. I'd gotten about halfway there.

  "The treaty ceremony with the Dravon Pack is in three days," Doran announced, his voice easy and low. "The arrangement stands. The alliance will be sealed. Preparations continue as planned."

  Short. Simple. Done.

  He moved on to patrol schedules and a boundary issue in the north, but I stopped listening. Because my mother — who always glanced at me when I walked into a room, just once, just a small look that said *I know you're here* — hadn't looked at me once.

  Not when I came in. Not during Doran's announcement. Not now.

  She was looking everywhere else.

  That was the first sign that something was wrong.

  ---

  I found my sister in her room after assembly.

  Lena was three years older than me and the kind of person who lit up a room without trying. She was warm and funny and beautiful and everyone in the pack knew her name and said it gladly. She was everything I wasn't — high ranked, well-loved, chosen.

  She had been chosen for this marriage. Chosen to be Kael Dravon's bride and seal the treaty between our packs. She'd known about it for six months.

  When I pushed open her door, she was standing in front of the mirror in the wedding dress.

  It was beautiful. Ivory silk, long, with delicate embroidery along the collar. It had taken two seamstresses three weeks to make. It fit her perfectly.

  She looked perfect in it.

  "Close the door," she said when she saw me.

  I closed it.

  "You look beautiful," I told her. Because she did.

  "Don't." Her voice came out sharp. She reached up and started undoing the top button, then stopped. Her hands were shaking. "Don't say that right now, Nyra."

  I went quiet and waited. Lena always talked when she was ready.

  She turned away from the mirror.

  Up close, she looked terrible. Dark circles under her eyes. Jaw clenched tight. Hands pressed flat against her thighs like she was trying to hold herself together.

  "How long have you been awake?" I asked.

  "Nyra." She looked at me, and for a second she looked like the twelve year old version of herself, the one who used to hold my hand under the bed during thunderstorms. "I can't do it."

  "Do what?"

  "Any of it." She walked to the window, crossed her arms over her chest. "I can't marry a man I've never met. I can't leave and live in his pack and become — his. I just can't."

  My stomach dropped.

  "Lena. The treaty—"

  "I know what the treaty is." Flat. Final. "I've known for six months. I've smiled and nodded and let them make this dress and I've — " She stopped. Took a breath. "I'm not going."

  The room went very quiet.

  "What do you mean you're not going?"

  She turned around. And I saw it in her eyes — a decision already made. Solid and certain and not up for discussion.

  "I'm leaving tonight," she said. "There's someone. Outside the pack. We've been planning this for a while. By morning I'll be gone."

  I stared at her.

  "They'll come looking for you."

  "They won't find me."

  "And the treaty? If it falls apart, Doran will—"

  "Nyra." She crossed the room and held my face in both hands the way she used to when we were little. "I just need you to not say anything until morning. That's all. Just give me until morning."

  I looked at her for a long moment.

  "I won't say anything," I said.

  She let out a breath like she'd been holding it for days. "Thank you."

  She pulled me into a hug, tight and quick, and I hugged her back.

  But over her shoulder, my eyes drifted back to the dress hanging in front of the mirror.

  Ivory silk. Perfect embroidery. Made for one person.

  I didn't say what I was thinking. I didn't say that a treaty like this one didn't just quietly disappear. I didn't say that when Lena was gone and the pack was scrambling, someone would have to fill her spot — fast, quietly, without making the Dravon Pack suspicious.

  I didn't say any of it.

  But I thought it.

  And the thought sat in my gut like a stone dropped into deep, cold water.

  ---

  The knock came the next night.

  Three sharp raps on the laundry room door. The one with the broken latch. The one nobody ever thought to check.

  Three sets of boots had walked down the corridor to get there.

  I already knew what they were going to say before the door opened.

  The only thing that surprised me was my mother.

  She was with them. Standing just behind the two pack guards, hands folded in front of her. Perfectly calm. Perfectly steady.

  She looked at me — really looked this time — and said simply, "It has to be you."

  No apology. No explanation. No hesitation.

  Her hands didn't shake even a little.

  And that's what I couldn't stop thinking about, even now, even standing in that grand hall with the wrong dress and the wrong shoes and the wrong name on everyone's lips.

  Not that she sent me.

  But that she'd been ready to.

  Like somewhere in the back of her mind, she'd always known Lena would run.

  Like she'd already decided, long before last night, exactly who would go in her place.