My Alpha Rejected Me to Claim My Pregnant Sister

Valerius's royal guards were not subtle. They stood outside the medical wing door like two slabs of carved stone—silent, immovable, their presence alone enough to make every pack member who passed slow their steps and drop their eyes. I watched them through the narrow window in my door and thought: good. Let them look. Let them wonder.

I finished the tribunal document before dawn. Maren witnessed it. She pressed her thumb to the seal line without hesitation, without asking if I was sure, without any of the careful hedging I might have expected from someone who still had to live inside these pack walls after I was gone. She just signed it, set the pen down, and said, "Tell me when you need me to testify."

I told her I would.

Valerius sent a messenger by midmorning—a young wolf in royal livery who moved through the pack house corridors with the quiet confidence of someone who answered to a higher authority than any Alpha in this territory. I handed him the document through the doorway. He tucked it into a sealed case, bowed once, and left.

I sat back down on the bed. I thought about Kashton reading it.

I let myself picture it very clearly.

---

Kashton was in his office when the messenger arrived. I know this because Maren heard it from one of the junior healers who had been passing the corridor.

He read it standing up. Then he threw it.

The paper hit the far wall and fluttered to the floor, which was probably not as satisfying as he wanted. A Lycan Council summons doesn't tear easily. It's made to last.

He shouted for Edric.

Edric came. Edric picked up the document from the floor—carefully, the way you handle something that might bite—and read it in silence. His expression, apparently, gave nothing away. He set it on the desk when he finished.

Kashton demanded to know what Edric planned to do about it.

Edric said nothing for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, that a Lycan Council summons was not a request.

Kashton told him to get out.

Edric left.

I heard all of this secondhand, filtered through the medical wing's thin walls and the careful, understated delivery of a healer who had learned to observe without appearing to. But I didn't need to be in the room. I knew exactly what Kashton's face looked like when something didn't bend to his will. I had spent years watching it—the jaw, the eyes, the way his hands went very still right before he decided someone else was to blame.

He had no one left to throw this at.

The summons sat on his desk. Unanswerable. Immovable. A decree from a king whose authority made Kashton's Alpha title look like a child's paper crown.

I hoped he slept badly.

---

That evening, I walked to the window.

The medical wing faced west, toward the older part of the territory—the tree line, the long grass, the distant ridge where the wolfsbane grew in thick, silver-leaved rows that I had tended every season since I was old enough to follow my grandmother's instructions without understanding why. I had always thought it was just something I did. A habit. A comfort.

I understood now what it actually was.

I pressed my palm flat against the glass. I closed my eyes.

The wards were not a sound or a feeling I could point to precisely. They were more like a hum—something I had always been doing the way a heart beats, without deciding to, without stopping. A constant, quiet effort running beneath everything else. Ironveil's wolfsbane barriers stretched across miles of border, and somewhere underneath all of it was me, holding the thread.

I let go.

It left me like an exhaled breath. No drama. No rupture. Just—release. I felt the barriers dissolve outward from the borders in a slow, steady wave, the way ice thins and clears from glass in the first warmth of morning. The territory opened. The edges of Ironveil, sealed for years against rogue intrusion, went soft and permeable and bare.

I stood at the window for another moment. The night air outside looked the same. The trees were still. Nothing had visibly changed.

But I could feel the difference. The absence of the weight I had been carrying without knowing it. My shoulders were lighter. My chest was clearer.

I did not feel guilty.

I felt precise.

Beyond the farmstead—Nora's farmstead, my grandmother's land, with its own older and separate wards that I now consciously claimed as mine—Ironveil had nothing left. Whatever protection this pack had enjoyed for the last twenty years, they had enjoyed because of me. Because of blood I hadn't known I carried and a gift I hadn't known I held.

They had left me bleeding on stone.

I pulled the curtain closed and went back to bed.

---

Forty-eight hours later, the eastern border patrol filed their first report.

Rogue wolves. Testing the perimeter. Three of them, circling the tree line in patterns that suggested they'd been watching for a while—waiting for exactly this kind of gap. The patrol captain ordered them driven back. They scattered. But they came back the next night. And the night after that.

By the fifth day, they stopped testing.

Three rogues broke through the eastern tree line at dusk, moving fast and low through the undergrowth. Two Ironveil warriors went down before the others could regroup and push them back. The rogues retreated, but not in panic. They retreated like wolves who knew the door would be open again tomorrow.

I heard the commotion from the farmstead, where Maren had finally agreed to transfer my care. Through the window, I could see the distant lights of the pack house flickering as warriors moved between buildings. Urgent voices carried on the wind, too far to make out words.

Kashton ordered a ward inspection by morning.

There was no ward-keeper left to call.