Rejected By My Alpha , Claimed By His Father

Chapter Seven: The Warning

The war room smelled like old smoke and older secrets. Luna sat stiffly at the long table, Elena bandaged and resting against her shoulder, while Magnus paced at the head of the room, still shirtless, the bite wound at his shoulder stitched closed by the pack’s second healer but clearly still aching with every movement.

“Explain,” Magnus said, voice a low growl directed at his brother. “Why would Victor send an assault team for a healer with no political standing?”

Damon dropped a folded piece of parchment onto the table a message, intercepted from one of the retreating Cole wolves. Kane, sitting across from Luna with his jaw tight and his eyes refusing to meet hers, snatched it up first and read it aloud, his voice going flat with disbelief.

“Retrieve the Reyes girl alive. Her bloodline carries the old healer magic confirmed by pack elders. She is worth more to the Cole alliance than any treaty. Do not return without her.”

The room went dead silent.

“Old healer magic,” Marcus, the pack elder, said slowly, leaning forward with an expression Luna had never seen on him before something between reverence and dread. “Luna, what do you know about your grandmother?”

“Almost nothing,” Luna admitted, throat tight. “She died before I was born. My mother never talked about her.”

Marcus exchanged a look with Magnus that made Luna’s skin prickle. “There was a bloodline,” Marcus said carefully, “generations back, of healers who could channel pack-bond energy without a mate claim. Wolves who could turn a pack’s collective strength into a weapon. The line was thought extinct hunted to extinction, actually, two centuries ago, because a healer like that, properly bonded to a powerful alpha, could reshape the entire balance of territory power in the North.”

Luna felt the blood drain from her face. “You’re saying what I did back there throwing that wolf twenty feet that wasn’t a fluke.”

“I’m saying,” Marcus said gently, “that Victor Cole has apparently known about your bloodline longer than you have. And he didn’t send an assault team to kill you, Luna. He sent one to claim you for his own pack, for his own bloodline, before Magnus could.”

Kane’s hand slammed flat against the table, chair scraping back as he stood. “This is my fault,” he said, voice cracking. “I rejected her in front of the entire territory. I made her vulnerable. I told the whole North she had no pack protection”

“You told the whole North she was available,” Magnus corrected coldly, “which is precisely what Victor was waiting for.”

Luna felt sick. Every piece of this the rejection, Magnus’s sudden offer, the deal in the woods had felt like it was happening to her, decisions made by men fighting over what she represented rather than who she was. Now she understood it was worse than that. She’d been a target long before Kane ever rejected her. The rejection had simply been the opening Victor Cole was waiting for.

“So what happens now?” she asked, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. “You claim me before Victor can try again? Is that the plan? Another man deciding what happens to my bloodline?”

The room went quiet. Magnus turned to look at her, something unguarded flickering across his face for just a moment.

“No,” he said. “Now, you decide. I won’t force a claim on you to solve a political problem. But I need you to understand something, Luna whether you choose me, choose no one, or choose to run, Victor Cole isn’t going to stop. Not now that he knows what you are.”

Elena’s hand tightened around Luna’s. “Lu,” she whispered. “I heard them. Before Magnus’s wolf hit mine. One of the attackers said something about a second team, waiting at the eastern ridge in case the first failed.”

Every head in the room turned toward the window at the same moment a second horn sounded three sharp blasts, closer this time, coming from inside the territory itself.