Claimed By My Cheating Mate’s Rival Alpha Chapter 01

Claimed By My Cheating Mate’s Rival Alpha Chapter 01

SCARLETT

I checked my phone again. It was 9:47 PM, and Mason; my husband was more than three hours late to my birthday dinner.

My messages sat unread in our chats.

Me: Are you on your way yet?

Me: The restaurant closes at ten.

Me: Mason, it’s my birthday. Please, where are you?

The candles on the cake had burned down to nothing.

Fourteen of them melted into sad little pools of wax on a cake I’d ordered three days in advance. It was Vanilla buttercream with honey drizzle—Mason’s favorite, not mine.

Even on my own birthday, I chose what he liked. That should have told me everything about this marriage.

I sat alone at the corner table of the Black Elk Lodge, the one Mason always reserved for us because it overlooked the river and the old pine forest beyond.

It was the place where he first told me he loved me when we were seventeen.

That was six years ago. Tonight, the chair across from me was empty.

The waitress had stopped asking if I wanted to order. She just refilled my water with that careful, pitying expression that made me want to crawl under the table and disappear. I could feel the other diners glancing over, who probably already knew more about my marriage than I did.

I was ‘poor Scarlett.’ The Blackwood princess with my pack in ruins, and a husband who can’t be bothered to show up.

I pressed my nails into my palms until the pain grounded me. I would not cry. Not here at least. My father and my brothers raised me better than that.

They raised me to hold my spine straight even when the world was collapsing around me, and the fact that they were all dead didn’t mean I could stop.

I picked up my phone one last time and called Mason. It rang five times and went to voicemail.

Fine. If that’s how he wants it, so be it.

I left enough cash on the table to cover the drinks I’d nursed for two hours, picked up the gift I’d brought him—yes, I got my husband a gift on my own birthday, because I was still that kind of fool—and walked out into the cold.

The October air hit me like a slap. I was halfway to my car when I felt hands suddenly grab me.

A hand clamped over my mouth. An arm locked around my waist and dragged me backward into the dark so fast my heels left grooves in the dirt.

My wolf surged to the surface with a snarl, but before I could shift, something sharp pricked my neck—a needle, the kind laced with wolfsbane extract that dulled our abilities.

Panic surged through me.

No. No, no, no.

I fought anyway. Clawed at the arms holding me, bit down on the gloved hand over my mouth until I tasted blood. But there were three of them, and they were rogues with no Pack scent.

They shoved me into the back of a vehicle. My head cracked against something metal and the world tilted.

“Don’t damage her pretty face yet,” one of them said in a bored, like he was handling cargo. “We were told she needs to be in one piece.”

Told? This wasn’t a random attack.

Immediately the trunk shut, my fingers found my phone in my coat pocket. I could barely feel the screen through the wolfsbane haze, but muscle memory is a powerful thing when you’re terrified. I hit Mason’s name and pressed the phone to my ear.

He picked up on the second ring, which was a miracle.

“Scarlett.” He sounded agitated—the way you sound when someone interrupts something more important. “Hey, honey, Listen, I’m sorry about tonight. Celeste ahd an accident and hurt her ankles. I’ve been helping her get it looked at. You know she doesn’t have anyone else.”

Something ugly and painful twisted in my chest, a heavy ache that came every time her name fell out of his mouth

Celeste.

Of course it was Celeste.

I knew who Celeste Monroe was to him. I’d known for months now even though he never admitted it.

It was the late nights. The scent of her perfume on his collar. I’d found her hair on our couch. A tube of her lipstick in his car. Once, a bruise on his neck that he said was from training.

Mason was sleeping with Celeste. And the cruelest part wasn’t the affair, but Celeste’s betrayal.

Two years ago, Celeste had arrived at the Crowford border with nothing. She was packless, and half-starved. My heart shattered the moment I saw her because I knew what it felt like to lose everything.

So I took her in personally. I used my family’s money—now managed under the Crowford name—to provide everything for her. I gave her a position in the Pack’s office, and Introduced her to every econnection I’d spent years cultivating.

I saw her as the sister I never had. And the whole goddamn time, she was sleeping with my husband.

The fragile, wounded girl who needed saving was all a performance, and I’d fallen for it like a fool.

She wasn’t injured. I knew it in my bones because I knew Celeste’s true colors now.

“Mason—” My voice cracked. The wolfsbane was already polluting my bloodstream. “Mason, please, I’ve been kidnapped by rouges. I don’t know where they’re taking me to, there’s wolfsbane—please, you have to help me.”

I could hear Celeste’s voice in the background, feigning worry.

“Is everything okay? Is she alright?”

My fists clenched, as I bit down hard on my lip. I wanted to scream at her.

“Scarlett, you’re doing this because I missed your birthday?” Mason’s voice shifted into a tone that made me sound unreasonable. “Look, I know you’re upset about tonight. But you can’t do this every time Celeste needs me. She’s part of our Pack. I can’t just ignore her when she’s hurt.”

The words hit me like a blow to the chest.

“I’m not—this isn’t about Celeste! Mason, I’m telling you the truth! I swear on the Moon Goddess—”

“Enough.” His voice hardened. ” Celeste looks up to you. All this isn’t fair to her.”

Not fair to her?

I was the one in back of a stranger’s van with wolfsbane eating through my veins, and my husband was worried about being fair to the woman he was cheating on me with.

I felt like I was losing my mind.

“Go home.” His voice turned soft again, the way it used to be when we were seventeen and he’d brush the hair from my face and promise me the world. And that shattered me.

“Take a warm bath and get some rest. We’ll talk in the morning when you’re done being dramatic.”

The line went dead.

I stared at the phone in my shaking hand. The screen blurred from the tears I’d promised myself I wouldn’t cry.

I had loved Mason Crowford for years, before I understood what love cost. When my father and brothers died in that crash and my Pack crumbled, he was the one who held me at the funeral while I shook apart.

I let Mason take me into his Pack because I believed he would protect and love me the way they couldn’t anymore.

I had watched him take over my family’s territory, my father’s mining company, and the land that had been Blackwood land for five generations—and I’d said nothing, because I trusted him.

And now I was kidnapped and drugged in the back of a car, begging him to save me, and he thought I was performing , just to be with Celeste.

The vehicle stopped and the door opened. They pulled me out and my knees hit the ground hard. I looked around through my hazy vision. We were deep in the woods with no roads and lights in sight.

“She’s awake,” one of them said. “She shouldn’t be. Give her another dose.”

I felt the needle prickle my skin again and my vision swam. My wolf was howling inside me, clawing at the walls of my mind, but two doses of wolfsbane was too strong for us to fight through.

Suddenly, the forest moved.

It happened so fast my drugged brain almost couldn’t process it. A shape tore through the trees moving with a speed that wasn’t natural even for us werewolves.

The first rogue didn’t even scream. One moment he was standing over me, the next he was on the ground with his throat slit opened, twitching in the dirt.

The second rogue shifted mid-stride, his wolf lunging toward the shadow, but aclaws caught him by the skull and slammed him into a tree trunk so hard the bark cracked and splintered. The sound was sickening.

The third rogue ran.

He made it four steps before something hit him from behind and drove him into the earth. I heard bones breaking.

Then I couldn’t hear anything anymore except for my own labored breathing.

The figure shifted into their human form and straightened. He stepped into the moonlight so I could get a better view.

He was tall—taller than Mason, taller than any man I’d ever stood near—with broad shoulders that strained against a dark jacket. A black mask covered the lower half of his face, leaving only his eyes visible.

They were a deep blue.

I felt my wolf go completely still. It was a strange feeling I didn’t recognize and didn’t have the capacity to name with wolfsbane clouding my blood.

He crouched in front of me. His scent was that of pine, musk and a dark cologne. It made my insides hot.

“You’re drugged.” His voice was low, and rough like gravel.

I couldn’t answer. My tongue was thick, and my thoughts were scattered.

He reached out and pulled the mask down from his face. The moonlight caught sharp cheekbones, a hard jaw, dark curls falling across his forehead.

A gasp escaped my throat because I knew this face.

No. How was this possible?

He tilted his head, studying me with those blue eyes, and his mouth curved into a dangerous smirk.

“Happy Birthday. It’s been a long time, Scarlett.”