After My Mate Cast Me Out Pregnant, I Became a Lycan Princess

The sun had fully set by the time I sat down in Aidan’s study. Hope was asleep upstairs, exhausted from our afternoon trip.

I set a hot mug of black tea on the mahogany desk and gave Aidan the report. Not like a victim, but like the strategist I had always been.

"Julian crossed into the neutral market," I said evenly. "He approached me. He grabbed my wrist, assumed I was an Omega servant, and offered to keep me as his paid mistress in the city."

Aidan didn’t flinch. He didn’t curse. He simply went entirely, unnervingly still.

Anyone who didn’t know the Lycan Prince might have mistaken that stillness for calm. But through our mate bond, the truth crashed over me. It wasn't a hot, reckless temper. It was an ice-cold, structural fury. It felt like an iron vise tightening around a mountain, a primal urge ready to march an army south and reduce Shadowvale’s borders to splintered bone and ash before midnight.

I stood up, walked around the desk, and placed my palm flat over his chest. His heart pounded beneath his linen shirt, heavy and lethal.

*Not yet,* I told him through the link, looking straight into his dark eyes. *Not like that.*

Aidan took a long, slow breath. The ozone tang in the air softened just enough to breathe.

"I won't let him touch you again, Hadley," he murmured. His large hand covered mine, warm and calloused, pressing me against his chest.

*I want him broken by the rules he thinks protect him,* I replied. *I want him to lose everything in the light.*

Aidan held my gaze for three seconds. Then he nodded once. He reached for the desk phone and summoned his Gamma. Within two minutes, the orders were issued: full surveillance on every step Julian took on neutral ground, with direct alerts sent straight to Aidan's phone if Shadowvale wolves came anywhere near the Ironveil border line.

Aidan didn't say it out loud, but through our bond, his wolf’s snarling command echoed against my ribs: *Destroy him.*

***

Julian, as I expected, was not a man who could handle a mystery.

Narcissists don’t back off when their pride is bruised; they obsess. The cedar-and-thunderstorm scent clinging to my sweater had crawled under his skin. His wolf, accustomed to dominating lesser packs, had recoiled in biological dread at the market. Instead of listening to that ancient warning, Julian’s arrogance twisted it. He convinced himself that I was merely cleaning floors on some rich estate—that the scent was just residual dust from scrubbing a Lycan's halls.

By the next afternoon, Ironveil perimeter security picked up a Shadowvale tracker sniffing along my tire tracks.

The tracker followed the road deep into the forest, right to the outer perimeter of our estate. But the Lycan boundary wards were too heavy. The moment the tracker’s boots touched the ward line, his wolf dropped straight to its belly in sheer terror. He retreated in shame and reported the truth to his Alpha: the scent led directly to the Ironveil Court.

Julian dismissed the man’s panic as cowardice. He decided to handle it himself.

***

Dusk settled over the estate garden in shades of violet and gold.

The air was mild, smelling of crushed mint and damp earth. I sat on a carved stone bench near the rose beds, turning the page of a book while Hope laughed on the lawn. She tossed a battered tennis ball across the grass, and Buster—all ninety pounds of gray fur and floppy ears—scrambled after it with clumsy joy.

Then the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

A soft thud broke the quiet near the perimeter wall.

Twenty yards away, Julian dropped from the top of the stone barrier into the flowerbeds. He brushed off his jacket, entirely oblivious to the fact that scaling an Ironveil boundary wall was a high-level territorial offense under pack law.

He looked around, caught sight of me, and adjusted the lapels of his leather coat. That smug, familiar swagger was right back in his stride.

"I knew you were hiding out here," Julian said, marching across the grass toward my bench. His voice was loud, brimming with that hollow Alpha authority. "Did you really think you could run from me, Hadley? You always did run when things got complicated."

I didn't stand up. I marked my page and closed the book on my lap.

"You're trespassing, Julian," I said, my voice dead flat.

He scoffed, stopping five feet from me with his hands shoved into his pockets. "Trespassing? Please. You’re working for some low-rank border guard, aren't you? Swallowing your pride to scrub his baseboards." He leaned forward, giving me a patronizing smirk. "You don't belong out here living on scraps. I’m giving you an out. Let me rescue you. Be smart for once, pack your things, and take the apartment in the city."

Before I could answer, little sneakers pattered across the grass.

"Mommy?" Hope walked up, holding the tennis ball against her chest. Her dark, curious eyes flicked to Julian, then back to me. Buster trotted up beside her, his ears perking forward in suspicion.

Julian froze. His gaze dropped to Hope, taking in her small frame, her messy pigtails, and the clear absence of any pack mark on her collar.

A cruel, dismissive sneer pulled at his lips.

"Well, look at that," Julian said, his tone dripping with venomous pity. "The runaway Luna had a stray. Fatherless, obviously. Probably doesn't even carry a name."

I didn't blink. I didn't yell. My face remained as smooth as polished marble.

Julian sneered down at the child he had abandoned before her first breath, completely blind to the Ironveil crest stitched onto the collar of the wolf-dog standing at her side.

Deep behind my ribs, in the silent, pitch-black hollow where nothing had lived for six long years, an ancient weight suddenly shifted.

It wasn't a flicker. It wasn't an ember.

A low, vibrating growl ripped through the dark of my chest.