Claimed by the Alpha After One Night | Read Free Preview
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Chapter 1 — I, A Married Woman, Slept With A Stranger
Sylvie's POV
The first thing I remembered was his scent.
Cedar, mint, and something darker underneath, like expensive leather warmed by skin, wrapped around me so completely that for one dizzy second I forgot my own name, forgot the banquet hall, forgot the glass of champagne I should never have taken from a smiling stranger.
Then the heat came back.
It rolled through me in waves, sharp and humiliating, dragging a helpless sound from my throat before I could swallow it down. My body did not feel like mine anymore. It felt feverish, desperate, and dangerously alive, as if every nerve under my skin had been lit on fire and the only thing that made the burning bearable was the man holding me against him in the dark.
His voice brushed my ear, low and rough enough to make my stomach tighten. "Stay with me, sweetheart. Breathe."
Sweetheart.
The word should have frightened me. It should have snapped me back to myself, to the cold fact that I was a married woman, a Luna in name if not in anyone's heart. Instead, my fingers curled into the sheets and I clung to him as if he was the only solid thing left in a world that had tilted under my feet.
The drug had stolen every clean edge from my thoughts.
I remembered the banquet, the bright smiles, the glass pressed into my hand, then one sip, two, and a sweet burn spreading through my veins.
By the time I understood what had been done to me, it was already too late.
Someone had slipped a heat-inducing drug into my drink, the kind that could push even a trained she-wolf past reason, and I had stumbled through the hotel corridor half-blind with panic until a pair of strong arms caught me before I hit the floor.
After that, everything blurred.
His hands were careful at first, almost painfully controlled, but the more I pleaded without meaning to, the more that restraint frayed. I could feel the strength in him, the danger, the way his body seemed built for command, yet he held me like he was afraid I might break if he forgot himself for even a second.
That almost made it worse.
I wanted to hate him. I wanted to hate myself. But every time his breath warmed my skin, every time his mouth grazed the marks he had left against my shoulder, shame and need tangled so tightly inside me that I could no longer tell them apart.
The room stayed dark until dawn.
When the first weak line of morning slipped between the curtains, the fever finally loosened its claws, and clarity crashed over me like ice water.
I lay still for one stunned second, staring at the ruined sheets, the clothes scattered across the floor, and the man's oversized shirt hanging half-open on my body. My skin was sore. My throat felt raw. Faint marks bloomed across my collarbone like accusations I could not hide.
Oh Goddess.
I had slept with a stranger.
I, Sylvie Miller, the unwanted wife of Lorenzo Marchesi, Alpha of the Eternal Night Pack, had spent the night in another man's arms.
Panic slammed into me so hard I nearly stopped breathing.
I had been married for three years, though marriage was too generous a word for the cold arrangement my father had forced me into. I had never shared a room with Lorenzo. I had never shared a meal with him. I had not even seen his face since the day our vows were spoken and my life was traded away like a damaged piece of property.
Still, he was my husband.
And he was terrifying.
Every northern pack knew the rumors: Lorenzo had killed a mate, hidden a ruined face, and carried a Moon Goddess curse that made every woman poisonous to him.
I did not know which stories were true.
I only knew that if the Eternal Night Pack discovered what had happened last night, no one would care that I had been drugged. No one would care that I had been frightened and barely conscious. To them, I would be a filthy, faithless Luna who had finally given Maria Marchesi the excuse she had been waiting for.
I scrambled out of bed on shaking legs.
My dress was ruined beyond saving, torn and wrinkled from the chaos of the night, so I pulled on my jeans and stole the stranger's shirt, buttoning it high enough to hide the worst of the marks. It smelled like him, clean and dangerous, and the scent followed me out of the hotel like a secret pressed against my skin.
I told myself I would find whoever drugged me.
I told myself I would make them pay.
But first, I had to get back before anyone noticed I was gone.
The Eternal Night estate was already awake when I slipped through the side entrance, dawn turning the pale stone walls soft pink while servants moved across the grounds with trays, linens, and lowered eyes. I kept my head down, praying I could reach my room, wash away every trace of last night, and think before the world collapsed on me.
My luck ran out three steps from the staircase.
Maria Marchesi stepped into my path like a blade sliding from its sheath.
"Where were you last night?" she snapped, her eyes sweeping over the man's shirt with instant, vicious satisfaction. "And whose clothes are those?"
My stomach dropped. "I stayed with a friend."
"Liar!" Her voice cracked through the foyer sharp enough to make the servants freeze. "You reek of another man. Do you think I am stupid, Sylvie? Do you think I would not know when my son's so-called Luna crawled home smelling like a slut?"
Heat rushed to my face, but exhaustion burned hotter than shame.
"Move," I said, trying to step around her.
A servant blocked me at once.
Maria's mouth curled. She had hated me from the moment she learned the truth, that I was not the cherished legitimate daughter my father had promised, but his illegitimate child, the girl who had spent half her life working like a maid in the Winter Frost Pack while my half-sister Elara wore silk and called me trash.
My father had sold me to save his dying power.
Elara had been meant to marry Lorenzo, but my stepmother would never sacrifice her precious daughter to a feared Alpha, so they sent me instead. The disposable one. The bastard. The girl no one would miss.
For three years, Maria had treated me like a stain on her perfect pack.
Now she finally had blood in the water.
She grabbed my collar and yanked me forward. Her gaze locked on the embroidered letter L on the stolen shirt, and fury twisted her face red.
Her slap cracked across my cheek before I could move.
Pain burst hot over my skin.
"You worthless little mongrel!" she screamed. "You were brought here to give Lorenzo an heir, and you could not even do that properly! Three years of eating our food, breathing our air, carrying our name, and this is how you repay us?"
I pressed a hand to my burning cheek. "I owe this pack nothing."
The words shocked even me.
Maria's eyes widened, then narrowed into something crueler. "Then get out. I am expelling you from the Eternal Night Pack right now. Pack your pathetic things and leave before I have the guards throw you into the road. When Lorenzo returns, he will sever your bond himself, and then you can rot as a rogue where you belong."
The foyer went silent.
Somewhere inside me, my wolf Leah growled, low and furious, not because Maria had hurt us, but because she dared to take from us the only rank we had ever been allowed to hold.
Luna.
A title without affection. A marriage without a husband. A cage dressed in gold.
For three years, I had endured it because I had nowhere else to go, because my mother's life was in my father's hands, because everyone had taught me that survival meant lowering my head and swallowing the hurt.
But that morning, with a stranger's scent still clinging to my borrowed shirt and Maria's palm print burning on my cheek, something inside me finally snapped.
"Good," I said, lifting my chin as my voice steadied. "I am tired of living like a forgotten widow anyway."
Maria recoiled as if I had struck her back.
I drew in one trembling breath and called on the old words, the ancient ritual every wolf knew and most feared. Power stirred weakly under my skin, not enough to impress anyone, but enough to make the servants gasp.
"I, Sylvie of the Eternal Night Pack," I said, each word ringing clearer than the last, "reject Lorenzo Marchesi, Alpha of the Eternal Night Pack, as my mate."
Chapter 2 — Luna Is The Woman From The One-night Stand
Sylvie's POV
The iron gates of the Eternal Night Pack shut behind me with a heavy, final clang.
For a long moment, I stood on the cracked road with one hand wrapped around the handle of my suitcase, staring at the estate that had never truly been my home. The morning air was cold enough to sting my lungs, yet panic made my skin feel too tight, as if I had been thrown out of my own body along with the pack.
I had no room to return to.
No money worth counting.
No pack that would open its gates for a woman publicly accused of betraying her Alpha.
Once Lorenzo came back and accepted the rejection, the last thread tying me to Eternal Night would snap, and the official records would brand me as rogue. I had seen what happened to rogues. They slept in broken tents near the west woods, fought over food scraps, and lost pieces of themselves little by little until even their wolves forgot how to speak.
Leah shuddered inside me, offended down to her bones.
My wolf was not powerful, but she was absurdly proud about cleanliness, order, and dignity. Once, after a muddy morning run, she had bullied me into bathing in near-freezing water because she refused to smell like wet grass for another minute. The thought of becoming a filthy, unwanted rogue made her so miserable that I almost laughed.
Almost.
"Hey," I whispered, rubbing my thumb over the suitcase handle. "It is still better than staying in there and letting them spit on us forever. We will figure something out. Maybe another pack will take us in. Maybe we can start over."
Leah gave two unhappy huffs in my mind, which was as close to agreement as she ever got when she thought I was being stupid.
I could not blame her.
I had never been the kind of she-wolf packs fought to claim. When I turned eighteen, my wolf did not awaken on time, and Winter Frost called me defective before the birthday candles had even gone cold. It took Elara shoving me off a cliff half a month later, my skull striking a jagged rock hard enough to nearly kill me, for Leah to finally tear herself awake in my soul.
She had saved my life.
She was not an Alpha wolf, not a Beta, not even strong by noble-blood standards, but she was mine, and I loved her with the desperate gratitude of someone who had spent too many years alone inside her own head.
"Where do we go?" Leah asked, her voice quieter than usual.
I opened my mouth, though I had no answer.
My phone rang first.
Andrew Miller flashed across the screen.
Of course my father had heard already. Shame traveled faster than fire between packs, especially when it belonged to a daughter he had never wanted but still found useful.
I answered because ignoring him had never stopped him from hurting me.
"Who gave you permission to leave Eternal Night?" Andrew roared before I could speak. "Do you have any idea what you have done? I heard you slept with another man and got yourself thrown out like a whore. You have humiliated me for the last time!"
His voice dragged me back to childhood in an instant, to cold kitchens, burning dishes, Elara's laughter, and my mother's pale hand lying still in a hospital bed I was rarely allowed to visit.
I tightened my grip on the phone. "You only care because you cannot profit from me anymore."
"You will return to Winter Frost within one hour," he snarled. "Or you will regret every choice you made this morning."
A bitter smile touched my lips. "Fine. I will come back. But this time, I want my grandmother's belongings. You promised they would be returned to me after my marriage. Three years have passed. Where are they?"
Silence crackled across the line.
Then Andrew's voice dropped, soft enough to be more frightening than his shouting. "If you still care about that woman in the hospital, you will come home now."
That woman.
My mother.
Rage hit so hard my vision blurred, but fear followed close behind it. He had found the only chain strong enough to drag me back.
I turned away from the Eternal Night gates and started toward Winter Frost.
---
Lorenzo's POV
When I woke, the woman was gone.
For one brutal second, I thought I had dreamed her.
Then her scent reached me from the ruined sheets, sweet and warm beneath the traces of fear, heat, and roses, and every muscle in my body tightened with a hunger I had not felt in years. The bed was a wreck. There were faint scratches across my chest. A strand of golden-brown hair clung to the pillow like proof that the impossible had happened.
She had been real.
And she had run.
Five years ago, I collapsed in the southern forest and woke with a curse buried under my skin. No healer could remove it. No priestess could name it. The scent of any she-wolf made nausea rise in my throat, and the brush of feminine skin against mine burned like poison, leaving rashes that felt as if my own body was rejecting life.
The elders insisted only my true mate could break it.
They were wrong.
I had felt no mate bond last night.
Arlo, my wolf, had searched for it again and again in the darkness, pushing against my ribs with confusion, but there had been no sacred snap, no glowing thread from the Moon Goddess, no certainty that this woman had been created for me.
Yet in her arms, the curse had gone silent.
The full-moon torment that usually chewed through my bones had vanished the second her feverish body pressed against mine. For one night, I had touched a woman without pain. I had breathed without sickness. I had felt almost human again.
And now she was gone.
I grabbed my phone and called my Beta.
"Wenger," I said, my voice rough from sleep and something far more dangerous, "bring me clothes. Then find the woman who was in my room last night. I want her name, her pack, who brought her to that banquet, and who drugged her."
Wenger arrived fifteen minutes later and stopped dead in the doorway, his eyes widening at the state of the room.
"Alpha," he breathed. "You... the curse?"
"Not the point." I pulled on the shirt he handed me. "The woman."
He swallowed and held out a folder. "Her name is Sylvie Miller. She attended the graduation banquet last night. From what I can gather, someone slipped a heat drug into her drink, and she ended up on your floor by accident. It does not look like a trap."
A lost lamb walking straight into a wolf's den.
My jaw tightened.
I opened the folder and found her photograph.
Soft golden-brown hair fell in loose waves around a delicate face, and her amber eyes looked warmer than sunlight in a glass of whiskey. She wore a simple white dress and a tiny daisy clip near one ear, nothing flashy, nothing calculated, but somehow the image hit harder than any painted seduction could have.
She looked gentle.
She had not felt gentle in my arms.
Memory flickered through me, her breathless voice, her trembling hands, the way she had clung to me when the drug became too much to bear. Heat rose low in my body before I forced it down.
"Sylvie Miller," I repeated, frowning. "Why does that name sound familiar?"
Wenger's face changed.
That was never good.
I looked up slowly. "Say it."
"Your mother called this morning," he said, each word careful. "She said the Luna betrayed you, so she expelled her from the pack and wants you to return to complete the severing ritual. The Luna's name is Sylvie. Sylvie Miller."
For a second, the room went very still.
My wife.
The woman I had ignored for three years because the marriage had been a political nuisance, because her father sold her for territory and money, because Maria told me the girl was merely a low-born replacement bride from a failing pack.
The woman in my bed had been my own Luna.
My cursed body's only cure.
My runaway wife.
A slow, dangerous smile pulled at my mouth.
"Prepare the car," I said.
Wenger blinked. "To the company, Alpha?"
"No." I picked up Sylvie's photograph and slid it into my inner pocket. "We are going to bring my Luna home."
Chapter 3 — I'll Take Her Home
Sylvie's POV
Winter Frost had grown fat on the price of my marriage.
That was my first thought when I reached the old pack territory and found new training grounds where empty fields used to be, fresh stone cabins lining the road, and polished iron lamps standing proudly along the path as if the whole place had not been built from the bargain that sold me away.
Every wall looked like it had been painted with my silence.
After I married Lorenzo, Andrew forbade me from stepping onto Winter Frost land. He also blocked every attempt I made to see my mother, who had been lying unconscious in a hospital bed for years while doctors kept her alive with machines, medicine, and bills I could never afford on my own.
That was why I had agreed to the marriage.
Not because I wanted power. Not because I dreamed of becoming Luna. Because Andrew promised my mother's care would be paid for, and because he swore my grandmother's belongings, the only pieces of family that truly felt like mine, would be returned once I obeyed.
Three years later, I had nothing.
No husband. No home. No heir. No proof that my mother was even being treated with the money paid for my body and name.
A low-ranking omega hurried toward me at the gate, contempt flashing over her face before she remembered I was still technically Luna of Eternal Night.
"The Alpha is waiting," she said stiffly.
I let a thin thread of Luna authority sharpen my gaze.
She flinched and lowered her head. "I will take you to him."
Leah gave a small satisfied rumble.
She was not strong compared to noble wolves, but I was still above common omegas while Lorenzo had not accepted my rejection, and I would take every scrap of dignity I could get.
The pack members stared as I crossed the compound. Some looked curious. More looked entertained. I knew those smiles. I had grown up under them. Elara had spent years teaching Winter Frost that I was a servant pretending to be blood, a bastard girl who should be grateful for scraps.
The villa's living room smelled of expensive tea and old arrogance.
Andrew sat in his leather chair with a pipe in hand, broad shoulders squared as if the room itself belonged to him. Gretchen perched beside him in a cream dress, all polished cruelty and painted concern, while Elara stood near the fireplace with a smug little smile that made my fingers itch.
"You finally crawled back," Andrew thundered.
I stopped near the center of the room, refusing to bow. "You threatened my mother. Let's not pretend I came because I missed you."
The air snapped tight.
Andrew's face darkened. He seized a porcelain teacup from the table and hurled it at me.
I stepped back, but not fast enough.
The cup shattered at my feet, and a jagged piece sliced my calf through my jeans. Pain flashed hot and bright, but I bit the inside of my cheek and stayed standing as blood trickled toward my ankle.
No one moved to help me. Not Elara, who watched the blood with open delight, not Gretchen, who merely lifted her teacup out of reach of the splatter, and certainly not Andrew, whose aura pressed harder the moment he saw I refused to cry. The old Sylvie would have apologized for bleeding on his floor. The woman standing there now only wished the cut had been deep enough to justify leaving a scar on the house that had made me one.
"Who taught you to speak to your Alpha father like that?" he roared.
"You called me here," I said, forcing my voice level beneath the pressure of his aura. "Say what you want, or let me leave."
Gretchen laughed softly, a delicate sound sharpened into a knife. "Still so dramatic. We called you to discuss the disaster you created. Did Eternal Night truly cast you out?"
"Maria did." I lifted one shoulder. "Apparently, I am only useful until your lies stop making money."
Andrew slammed his palm down on the chair arm. "You stupid girl! You should have begged them before you came here. You will return to Eternal Night immediately, kneel at their gates, and stay there until they take you back."
"Why?" I asked, and the single word felt more powerful than a scream. "So you can keep the land? So Elara can keep pretending she was never meant to marry Lorenzo?"
Elara's smugness cracked at once. "Dad, I told you I would never marry that monster! I would rather die!"
There it was.
The truth, bright and ugly.
I turned to Andrew. "You sent me because your real daughter was too precious to risk. You promised me my mother's safety and my grandmother's belongings. You kept neither promise. So tell me, why should I obey you now?"
Gretchen dabbed at the corner of her dry eye with a handkerchief. "Sylvie, after everything I have done for your mother, this is how you repay us? Your mother ruined my marriage, and I still allowed her the best hospital room money could buy. You should be grateful."
My wolf lunged inside me.
Leah hated many things, but nothing more than hearing my mother insulted by the woman who had built a life on her suffering.
Andrew's expression turned cold. "Perhaps gratitude can be taught. I will call the hospital today and stop paying for that woman. Then we will see how long your pride lasts."
For a moment, all I could hear was my own heartbeat.
He had used this threat for years. My mother's life was the collar around my throat, and every time I reached for freedom, Andrew yanked it tight.
But I was not the same girl who had walked out of Winter Frost in a wedding dress three years ago.
I smiled.
It was not a kind smile.
"Do it," I said. "Then explain to Lorenzo Marchesi why the family that sold him a fake bride also stole the money meant for her mother's care. You all know the rumors about him. Do you really want to test whether that monster is patient with liars?"
The color drained from Gretchen's face.
Andrew's grip tightened around his pipe.
I pressed on because fear had finally shifted sides. "Maria already knows I was a replacement. She told me if Lorenzo ever wanted a proper Luna, it should be Elara. After all, I was only the stand-in."
Elara shrieked. "No! I will not go there! Mom, tell him!"
Gretchen's eyes slid to me, cold and calculating. "There is another way. Alpha Victor from the neighboring ridge lost his fourth wife last winter. He is wealthy, powerful, and old enough to appreciate a woman who has already been humbled."
My stomach turned.
"You are not serious," I said.
"You will sacrifice yourself for the pack," she replied sweetly. "That is what good daughters do."
Before I could answer, the living room doors burst open.
An omega stumbled inside, face ashen. "Alpha Andrew!"
Andrew surged to his feet. "What now?"
The omega swallowed hard. "Alpha Lorenzo Marchesi of the Eternal Night Pack is at our gates."
The room froze.
My blood went cold.
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