After My Mate Rejected Our Lycan Heir

The garden at dusk was quiet, which was why I liked it. No betas watching me eat. No pitying half-smiles from Silvercrest staff who didn't know what to do with a rejected Luna wandering their halls.

Then the pup went still, then not-still, all at once—a jolt through the mind-link like a held breath breaking.

*Something's wrong,* she said. *I don't know what. It just feels wrong.*

"Nothing's wrong," I whispered, pressing both hands flat over my stomach. "We're safe. We're inside the walls."

*It doesn't feel like walls matter right now.*

I didn't have an answer for that. I sat on the stone bench with my knees pulled up as far as they'd go and breathed through it, the way Aris used to tell me to breathe through the treatments, except this time there was no needle, no burn, just a fear I couldn't name coming from something that wasn't fully born yet.

Footsteps on gravel. I didn't look up until the bench dipped beside me.

Kael didn't ask what was wrong. He didn't ask anything. He just sat, hands loose on his knees, looking out at the same dark hedges I was looking at, and let the silence stretch between us like it belonged there.

Slowly, the pup's panic uncoiled. I felt it happen in real time—the frantic edge softening, smoothing, settling into something almost like curiosity. *Warm,* she said. *That's warm. Pine and something sharp. I like it.*

I kept my face still. I didn't want him to see what that admission cost me.

"She's calmer," I said finally, because the silence had gone on long enough that saying nothing felt like its own kind of confession.

"Good," he said, and nothing else.

I studied the side of his face, the tight line of his jaw that never fully relaxed, not even here, not even now. "How do you live with grief that big?" I asked. "Losing a brother. Wearing a crown you didn't want yet."

He didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice was low, even, worn smooth by however many nights he'd turned the question over alone.

"I stopped living with it," he said. "I just carried it."

I looked away first. The mate bond hummed low and warm between us, unasked-for, unclaimed, and my hand drifted toward the dead scar on my neck before I caught myself and pulled it back into my lap.

---

Marcus's warriors caught Aris at the border crossing two nights later, sweating through his coat with a duffel bag half-packed and no plan past *away*. By the time they walked him into the compound in silver-lined cuffs, he'd already started confessing before anyone asked him a question, words tumbling out faster than his own fear could catch up to them.

Two hours of interrogation gave the Council everything. The wolfsbane. Remy's payments. The panicked night of the swap, his hand closing around the wrong vial in the cryo-reserve because his own hands wouldn't stop shaking.

I asked to see him alone. Kael's jaw tightened. "I don't think—"

"I didn't ask what you think."

He let me go.

Aris wouldn't meet my eyes across the small table. His glasses had slid down his nose and he didn't push them up.

"How long," I said, "was I being poisoned before I stopped even trying to shift?"

His mouth opened, closed. "The dosage was low. Cumulative. I didn't think—" He stopped, started again. "Within the first year. It would have started suppressing wolf development within the first year of treatment."

Something in my chest went very quiet. "So I was never wolfless."

"No," he whispered. "You were never wolfless."

I stood, thanked him for his honesty, which felt obscene even as I said it, and walked out. In the corridor I pressed my back to the cold stone and breathed until my legs remembered how to hold me up. Then I kept walking.

---

The report came through Marcus that evening, delivered flat and fast, no softening in it.

"A Nightshade informant confirms Conner knows Aris is in our custody. He and Remy met with a bribed Omega from your safehouse detail two hours ago." Marcus's eyes cut to Kael, then to me. "They have the location. They're moving tonight. No moon. No warning window before they cross the perimeter."

I felt the pup go rigid inside the link, her fear sharpening into something almost like a scream.

*They're coming,* she said. *Mama, they're already coming.*