My Alpha Husband Branded Another Woman as His Mate

Mira's POV

On the seventh day of Cyrus's coma, the dream came for me every time I closed my eyes.

In it, he was already awake — propped against the headboard, chest heaving, a woman kneeling between his thighs whose face I could never quite make out. Alpha... let me use my hand... or my mouth... The dream was viscerally real. I could feel the exact sensation of Cyrus's fingertips grazing the woman's breasts, and the warmth of it bled into my own body, raising my temperature degree by degree. I fought to get closer, desperate to see her face — and just as she bowed her head downward, I jolted awake.

The bedroom was dark. Light filtered in from outside and lit the hallway in pale strips. Shadows shifted beneath the door gap, followed by voices pressed to their lowest possible register.

"Keep it down — are you trying to get us all killed?"

"If Luna finds out the Alpha's been awake this whole time, we're all losing our heads."

The words detonated behind my eyes.

Cyrus was awake. Had been awake.

I threw back the covers and ran. I didn't stop for slippers. The floor tiles were ice-cold against my bare feet and I barely felt them.

A week ago, we had been celebrating our eighth anniversary. Candlelight flickering on the dinner table. The steak cooked exactly right. Red wine poured to the halfway mark. Cyrus was wearing the white shirt I'd chosen for him myself, and he was looking at me — still chewing a bite of his side dish — when the hand holding his fork simply stopped. He didn't manage a single word. His body dropped straight onto the table, sending a wine glass toppling, the red wine soaking through the tablecloth and dripping from the table's edge onto the hardwood floor below.

I found out later that someone had laced the food with aconite.

And now he was awake.

My heart slammed against my ribs hard enough to hurt.

The treatment room was at the far end of the hallway. I was still three or four meters away when the smell hit me — Cyrus's scent, that particular cedarwood that belonged only to him. But it was wrong. Beneath the familiar note ran something heavier, something thick and animal that I recognized immediately: the scent of arousal that only surfaced during a rut.

"Luna — why are you here?"

The Gamma guard posted at the door stared at me with undisguised surprise and stepped instinctively into my path.

I frowned. The servants' words came back to me. Why weren't they supposed to let me know Cyrus had woken? Why was even the Gamma blocking my way?

Then my chest caught fire.

It was the wolf-spirit mark Cyrus had left on me — a bond-mark that only burned like this when an Alpha was overwhelmed with desire for his mate. I told myself he was thinking of me. That waking up, his first thought had been to find me.

But in the next instant, a wave of wet heat surged through me from deep inside — a slick, enveloping warmth that shot straight up my spine to the base of my skull.

I went completely still.

Behind the door, Cyrus's breathing was growing ragged. I could feel it through the bond — feel him pressing the woman's head down another inch.

I didn't stop to think. The pleasure was building too fast, cresting toward orgasm, wave after wave of heat rolling through me exactly the way it had in that dream every night for the past week — unstoppable, consuming. I bit down hard and forced myself forward two steps. My fingers found the door handle. I pressed it down.

The door swung open.

The room was dim. Cyrus sat naked on the edge of the bed.

A woman knelt on the floor between his legs.

This time, I could see her face clearly.

It was Angelina — the orphaned lone wolf his family had taken in three years ago.

Neither of them had noticed the door open. The air inside was thick enough to suffocate, the wet sounds and the sounds of kissing pushing directly into my ears.

I opened my mouth. My throat had gone bone-dry.

"Cyrus."

I called his name. My feet carried me one step forward without my permission.

He stopped.

He had been kissing Angelina's throat, and at the sound of my voice he turned his head and looked at me. The expression in his eyes sent cold seeping through every joint in my body. No warmth. No recognition. He looked at me the way you look at something that has wandered into your territory and has no right to exist there — an object, already dead.

Before I could react, he moved. In a single blur, his arm shifted mid-air, wolf claws erupting from his knuckles, and his hand closed around my throat. He drove me to the floor. My back cracked against the tiles. His claws sliced through my shirt without effort and sank into the soft skin over my sternum; blood welled up and ran down my ribs. The full crushing weight of his Alpha dominance crashed over me, and I couldn't produce a single sound — not a breath, not a word.

He looked down at me from above, his voice completely flat.

"I've said it before. Servants do not enter my room."

"Have you forgotten the rules?"

I was shaking from the pain, but my mind had gone blank. Servant. Rules. He looked at me like a stranger he could crush at any moment — like there was nothing between us, had never been anything. He remembered his territory. He remembered his rules. He had simply erased me from his memory, completely and without a trace.

The thought had barely formed when a soft laugh came from the direction of the bed.

I turned my eyes with effort.

Angelina sat up slowly, unhurried, and wiped the corner of her mouth with deliberate ease — smearing away a streak of cloudy white cum. She was wearing a silk robe I recognized immediately: mine. The neckline hung wide open, and her throat and chest were covered in a dense scatter of red marks. She gathered the lapels loosely, then reached out one slender arm and draped it around Cyrus's neck as naturally as breathing.

Cyrus didn't pull away. He withdrew the hand that had been pinning me down and settled his arm around her waist instead.

The pressure on my chest lifted.

I curled on the floor with one hand pressed over the bleeding wound, dragging air back into my lungs. I was about to speak when Angelina's voice cut across me.

"Someone come here."

She was leaning back against Cyrus's chest, chin tilted upward, calling out toward the open door. The Gamma guard stepped inside.

"This low-ranking Omega has violated the Alpha's rules and disturbed us." Her fingers traced idle circles on Cyrus's chest, her tone light and almost bored, the cruelty beneath it absolute. "Thirty silver lashes. Let her remember what the rules are."

The Gamma reached back for the silver whip at his hip. It cracked once through the air as he shook it loose — and then he walked toward me, and he saw my face, and he stopped dead.

Everyone in the pack knew. Cyrus treated me like I was his life. Anyone who dared touch a single hair on my head, Cyrus would break their bones one inch at a time.

The guard's hand began to tremble around the whip's handle. He looked at the blood on my chest. He looked at Cyrus on the bed.

"Alpha," he said carefully. "This is Luna. Your wife."