Title: Wrong Bed, Right Alpha: His Wolfless Bride

Nora POV:

"Tyler... slow down..."

He didn't.

If anything, the hand on my waist tightened, dragging me back across cool sheets until my spine met a chest that was hard and burning hot. A low sound rumbled against my neck. Not a laugh. Not a word. A growl.

Tyler had never growled at me before.

I couldn't open my eyes. My head was full of warm, heavy fog, and every inch of my skin felt like it was on fire. I'd been so thirsty. So hot. Then there had been a dark room, and a door that clicked shut, and a pair of arms that caught me before I hit the floor.

"Tyler," I whispered again.

The body behind me went still.

For one second, I thought he would stop. Then teeth grazed the side of my throat, right over my pulse, and the fog swallowed everything else.

The last thing I remember is a voice against my ear, rough as gravel.

"Wrong name, sweetheart."

The sun hit my face like a slap.

I groaned and rolled away from it, and my whole body screamed. My thighs ached. My hips ached. Places I didn't have names for ached. My mouth tasted like stale champagne, and my skull was being split open by a very small, very determined man with an axe.

Then I felt the arm.

It lay across my stomach. Heavy. Warm. Thick with muscle and dusted with dark hair.

Tyler's arms were slim. Tyler did Pilates.

I turned my head very, very slowly.

The man asleep on the pillow next to mine was not my boyfriend.

He wasn't anyone I'd ever seen. Black hair falling over a hard brow. A jaw that looked cut with a blade. Lashes too long to be fair on a man. Even unconscious, his face had a cold, closed-off arrogance, the kind of face you see on billboards for watches that cost more than a house.

I stopped breathing.

My heart started slamming so hard I was sure the sound would wake him.

Pieces came back in jagged flashes. My twenty-third birthday. The private booth at Velvet. Tyler pressing glass after glass into my hand, his friends chanting my name every time I tried to put one down. Tyler's lips at my ear: I booked us a room upstairs, babe. 3306. Go lie down. I'll be right behind you.

A keycard pressed into my palm.

A long hallway that kept tilting.

A door.

I looked down at myself, and my face went up in flames.

There were marks everywhere. My collarbones. The curve of my breasts. The insides of my wrists, where someone had pinned them. A dark bruise sat on the side of my throat, exactly where I'd felt teeth.

I hadn't been with Tyler. In four years, I'd never been with anyone.

And now I'd been with a stranger.

I slid out from under his arm one inch at a time. When my feet hit the carpet, my knees buckled, and I had to grab the nightstand to keep from going down. Something rolled off the edge. A silver cufflink. I caught it before it could hit the floor, set it back with shaking fingers, and didn't let myself look at what was engraved on it.

My dress was draped over the arm of a velvet sofa. My bra was hanging off the lamp, one hook torn clean off. My underwear was on the floor, trapped under a charcoal suit jacket that probably cost more than my rent.

I yanked it free and nearly sobbed.

I dressed in thirty seconds flat, grabbed my purse and my heels, and ran for the door barefoot. With my hand on the handle, I made the mistake of looking back.

He hadn't moved. One arm was thrown over the place where I'd been lying. The sheet had slipped low on his hips, and there were thin red lines across his shoulders. Scratches.

I'd done that.

I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood and slipped out.

The door clicked shut behind me. I turned, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

Brass numbers gleamed on the door.

3806.

Not 3306. Eight. I had been so drunk I'd read an eight as a three. But then how had Tyler's card opened it?

I didn't wait to figure it out. I ran.

The elevator ride down was the longest of my life. I kept my head bowed, my hair pulled forward over my throat, my heels dangling from two fingers. When the doors opened on the lobby, a bellhop looked at me, then at the marks on my neck, then quickly away.

I made it to the sidewalk before my phone buzzed.

Tyler.

Forty-one missed calls. Twelve voicemails.

My chest caved in. He had been looking for me all night, and I had been upstairs in a stranger's bed. I didn't deserve him. I'd have to tell him. I couldn't lie to the man I was supposed to marry.

I swiped to answer. "Tyler, I..."

"Where the hell were you?"

His voice was wrong. Not worried. Not relieved. Furious, and something else underneath. Something that sounded almost like fear.

"I'm so sorry," I whispered. "I need to see you. There's something I have to tell you, and you're going to hate me, but..."

"Do you have any idea what you've done to me?" Tyler snarled. "I told you 3306, Nora. Three. Three. Three. Mr. Chase sat in that room waiting for you all night, and you never showed up!"

I stopped walking.

People flowed around me on the sidewalk. A cab honked. Somewhere a dog was barking.

"Mr. Chase," I repeated slowly. "Your boss?"

Silence on the line.

"Tyler," I said, and my voice didn't sound like mine anymore. "Why was your boss waiting for me in our hotel room?"

Nora POV:

We met at the coffee shop on Fifth, the one where Tyler had asked me out four years ago.

I got there first. I sat in our old booth with a latte I couldn't drink, a scarf wrapped twice around my neck to hide the bruises, and my hands clenched in my lap so no one could see them shaking.

He pushed through the glass door ten minutes late. Same sandy hair, same pressed shirt, same easy smile he wore at his office parties. Except today the smile didn't make it to his eyes.

"Babe." He slid into the booth across from me. "Look, last night got messed up. That's all. We can fix it."

"Fix what, Tyler?"

He glanced around, then leaned in and lowered his voice. "Gregory Chase decides who gets the regional manager spot. You know that. He told me, if you were... friendly... for one night, the job was mine. One night, Nora. And then we'd have everything. The house. The wedding. The life we talked about."

I just looked at him.

The memories I'd been too drunk to hold on to came crawling back. Tyler's friends pouring my drinks. Tyler taking a phone call outside the booth, his voice low and eager. Don't worry, sir. She's almost ready. I'll send her up.

Gregory Chase. Fifty years old. A gut that strained his shirt buttons and a wedding ring he took off at parties. At Tyler's Christmas party, he had cornered me by the coat rack and sniffed my hair like I was something on a dessert tray.

I'd told Tyler about it that night. Tyler had laughed and said, He's an old wolf, babe. They're all like that.

"You planned it," I said. "You got me drunk on my birthday so you could hand me to your boss."

"Don't say it like that." He reached for my hand. "It's how things work. You're wolfless, Nora. You don't understand pack politics. Guys like me don't move up unless we have something to offer."

Wolfless.

He had never said it to my face before. Not in four years. He said it now like it was a reason. Like it was a price tag.

I picked up my latte and threw it in his face.

Tyler sputtered and jerked back. Foam dripped from his eyebrows. The barista froze with a pitcher in her hand. Two tables over, a woman gasped.

"You disgusting..." Tyler's chair scraped back. He grabbed for my wrist across the table, and then he stopped.

His nostrils flared.

I watched his pupils blow wide. He leaned closer and inhaled, long and slow, the way wolves did when something was wrong in their territory. When he looked up at me again, his face had gone a sick, splotchy red.

"You smell like a male," he hissed.

I didn't answer.

"You smell like..." He breathed in again, and his lip curled back off his teeth. "Who was he? Where did you go last night? You went to the wrong room, didn't you? You let some stranger..."

His hand shot out and yanked my scarf down.

The bruise on my throat was right there for everyone to see.

The coffee shop went silent.

I slapped him so hard his head snapped sideways.

"Don't touch me," I said.

"You little..." He lunged.

I slapped him again. Harder. My palm stung all the way to my elbow.

"The first one was for last night," I said. My voice shook, but I kept going. "The second one is for the four years I wasted on you."

Tyler stood there with coffee in his hair and two red handprints blooming on his face. Every wolf in the shop was staring at him. A barista had her phone out. I saw the exact moment he realized it.

"We're done," I said, and I fixed my scarf with hands I refused to let tremble. "Don't call me. Don't come to my apartment. What you did last night is called trafficking, Tyler. If you come near me again, I'll go to the Pack Enforcers and tell them everything."

I walked out.

I made it half a block before the tears came. I didn't stop walking. I didn't let myself sit down on the curb and fall apart, even though every part of me wanted to.

Four years.

I had planned a life with him. I had picked out names for children with him. And he had looked at me and seen something to trade.

At the corner of Fifth and Main, the light turned red. I stood at the crosswalk, wiping my face with the back of my hand, waiting.

Above the intersection, the giant screen on the side of the Crown Holdings tower flickered from a perfume ad to the morning financial news.

BREAKING: SILVERCREST HEIR RETURNS TO TAKE THE THRONE.

I didn't care. I worked on the twenty-eighth floor of that tower, and I couldn't have cared less about which rich wolf was going to run it.

Then the camera cut to a man stepping out of a black car in front of a sea of reporters.

Black hair. Charcoal suit. A jaw like it had been cut with a blade.

The world went silent around me.

The reporter's voice floated down from the screen, bright and cheerful.

"Lucian Shaw, future Alpha of the Silvercrest Pack, officially takes over as CEO of Crown Holdings this Monday..."

The man on the screen looked straight into the camera.

Ten hours ago, I had woken up with his arm around my waist.

Lucian POV:

I heard her the second she woke up.

The hitch in her breath. The racing of her heart. The tiny, horrified sound she made when she turned her head and saw my face.

I kept my eyes closed and let her run.

It was the hardest thing I had ever done.

Kane paced inside my skull the whole time, snarling, clawing, demanding. My wolf had never fought me like this. Not when I was sixteen and he came to me for the first time. Not during my worst ruts. Not even the night I had to put down a rogue with my bare hands.

Stop her, he roared. Mark her. She is ours.

I didn't move. I listened to her scramble for her clothes. I listened to her lift my jacket and pull her underwear out from under it, and I listened to her breath catch on a tiny, mortified sob. I listened to her pause by the door.

Then the door clicked shut, and she was gone.

I opened my eyes and sat up.

The room still smelled like her. Not like perfume. Like rain on cold stone, and something underneath that I had no name for. Something old, and silver, and quiet. I had been breathing it all night. I was going to be breathing it in my sleep for the rest of my life.

Mate, Kane said, and this time the word wasn't a roar. It was a vow.

I had stopped believing in mates years ago. My father hadn't waited for his. My mother had died believing she was his. And I had spent twenty-nine years refusing to let anything as stupid as fate decide who I was going to want.

Then a drunk girl had stumbled through my door at midnight, burning hot, calling another man's name, and my wolf had gone to his knees for her.

I looked at the pillow beside mine. A few long brown strands of hair curled against the dark linen.

There had been something else last night. Something that made no sense. She was a she-wolf, she had to be. She'd been born in Silvercrest territory, I could smell it on her skin. But there was no wolf in her scent. None at all. Holding her had been like holding a locked house with the lights on inside.

Wolfless.

My mate was wolfless.

I got up. I took a cold shower. I didn't look at the scratches she'd left across my back in the mirror, because if I did, I wasn't going to get out of this hotel today.

When I came out, my clothes were laid on the sofa where Leo always left them. I dressed. I buttoned my cuffs. I put on my watch. By the time I picked up my phone, I looked like what I was supposed to be. Cold. Controlled. Ready to take a crown.

Leo answered on the first ring. "Alpha."

"The woman who left my room twenty minutes ago," I said. "Find her."

A pause. Leo Reyes had been my Beta since we were twelve years old, and he knew every one of my silences. This one made him go very quiet.

"Understood," he said.

He called back in two hours.

"Her name is Nora Quinn. Twenty-three. Born in Silvercrest territory, no known parents. Raised by a pack widow who died three years ago. Never shifted. She's on record as wolfless." Papers rustled. "She was at Velvet last night for her birthday with her boyfriend, a Tyler Lane. Junior analyst at Harlow Trading. His manager, Gregory Chase, had a suite on your floor. 3306."

My jaw locked.

"Chase," I said.

"He has a reputation with unmated females. Lane got her drunk and sent her up with a keycard." Leo hesitated. "Alpha, it gets worse. The card she used wasn't a room key. It was a master key. Someone at the front desk gave Lane the wrong card. That's how she got into 3806."

Into my room. Instead of into Chase's.

Kane surged up so violently my vision went red at the edges. I put my hand flat against the window glass and breathed until it passed.

"And?" I said.

"And your uncle already knows." Leo's voice turned careful. "Someone at the hotel sold him the hallway footage of her leaving your suite. Julian's been calling the Elder all morning. He's using the words 'scandal' and 'unfit.'"

Of course he was.

"Send me the footage," I said.

It came through thirty seconds later. A grainy still from the hallway camera. A girl in a crumpled dress running barefoot, heels in one hand, her hair a wild mess over her shoulders. She was looking back over her shoulder at my door with her lip caught between her teeth.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I saved it.

"One more thing, Alpha," Leo said. "You should know where she works."

That night, I sat in the back of the Maybach on a dark street on the east side, in a neighborhood where cars like mine don't park.

I told myself I was there to make sure Chase hadn't come looking for her. I told myself a lot of things.

At ten past eight, she walked out of her building.

She had on an oversized hoodie and sweatpants, and her hair was twisted up in a clip. She went into the all-night pharmacy on the corner. When she came out ten minutes later, she was holding a small black plastic bag close against her stomach like she didn't want anyone to see what was inside it.

The wind shifted.

I smelled the antiseptic from the bag. And under it, faint, the copper edge of a hurt that hadn't healed yet.

I had done that to her.

Kane went silent. For the first time in my life, my wolf was ashamed.

She crossed into the convenience store, came out with a rice ball, and stood under the streetlight peeling the plastic off it. As the car pulled forward, she glanced up at us. I watched her eyes narrow on the tinted glass. I watched her start to frown.

I raised the window.

"Drive," I told the driver.

In the mirror, she stood frozen on the sidewalk, staring after us.

I looked down at the file in my lap. At the line Leo had circled in red that morning.

Employer: Crown Holdings. Acquisitions Division. Floor 28.

On Monday morning, my mate was going to walk into my building and ride my elevator and sit at a desk I paid for.

And she had no idea who her new boss was.