Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by the Monster

The Face in the Water

The figure in the water lifted its head.

Lira didn't dare turn around. Whatever stood behind her wasn't casting a reflection by accident, and every instinct in her body screamed that looking away from the water might be worse than looking at it.

"Kael." Her voice came out barely above a whisper. "Tell me what you're seeing."

He didn't answer right away. His gaze stayed locked on the water, and something in his expression had gone past fear into something closer to disbelief.

"A woman," he said finally. "Standing exactly where nothing should be standing."

The reflection sharpened as he spoke, gold light bleeding into the details until Lira could make out dark hair, a familiar set to the jaw, eyes that held her own gaze with an intensity that made her chest ache before she understood why.

"She looks like me," Lira breathed.

"She doesn't look like you." Kael's voice had gone rough. "She looks like your mother would have looked, if your mother had lived long enough to stand in this water."

Lira's whole body went cold. "You don't know anything about my mother."

"I know she died the night you were born." He said it carefully, like a man handling something that might shatter. "Everyone in Blackthorn knows that story. What nobody knows is why."

The figure in the reflection raised one hand, slow and deliberate, and pressed it flat against the surface of the water from the other side, as though testing whether the barrier between them could be broken.

"Lira." The voice arrived the way the entity's had, not through the air but directly behind her eyes, except this one didn't feel cold or hungry. It felt achingly familiar, threaded through with something like grief. "You found him. Good. You were never meant to do this alone."

"Who are you?" Lira's hands had started shaking again, though this time it had nothing to do with fear of dying. "How do you know my name?"

"Because I gave it to you." The reflection's mouth didn't move, but the words landed anyway, quiet and certain. "I don't have long. The seal only lets me reach this far when the wards and your blood are both awake at once, and that won't last."

Kael's hand found Lira's shoulder, steady despite everything unraveling around them. "Ask her what she knows about the entity beneath the forest."

"He's right to be careful," the figure said, before Lira could repeat the question. "That thing beneath the roots isn't your enemy, little flame. Not entirely. It's a keeper. Old and starving and dangerous, yes, but it was never meant to hunt you. It was meant to protect what you carry until you are strong enough to carry it yourself."

"Protect what?" Lira's voice cracked. "What am I supposed to be carrying?"

"I hid something inside you before you'd even drawn your first breath." The figure's eyes shone gold now, matching the mark on Lira's wrist exactly. "It was the only way to keep it from the ones hunting our bloodline. I paid for that choice with my life, and you paid for it by growing up believing you were broken."

"You're saying you did this to me." Something hot and furious rose beneath the shock, sharper than grief. "You made me into this. You let me spend twenty-one years thinking I was worthless."

"I made you into someone they couldn't find." The figure's composure cracked for the first time, something raw and pained slipping through. "I would give anything to have done it differently. I didn't have anything else to give."

The water rippled, harder this time, and the figure's outline began to blur at the edges like ink dissolving in rain.

"I don't have much time left in this form," the figure said, urgency sharpening every word. "Listen carefully. There's another piece. It's not inside a person this time. It's hidden somewhere they already know to search."

"Where?" Kael's voice cut in, low and hard, before Lira could ask it herself.

The figure's eyes shifted to him, and something like recognition passed across her fading face.

"You already carry a piece of the answer, Kael Raven, whether you know it or not." Her voice was growing fainter now, dissolving with the rest of her. "Ask your father what he buried the year you were born, and why he never let you near the eastern ridge again after that."

Kael went utterly still beside her.

"That's not possible," he said, echoing his own words from earlier tonight, though this time there was no fear left in his voice, only something closer to dread, realizing it had finally caught up with him.

"Wait." Lira pressed her palm flat against the water, desperate, chasing the last traces of gold light disappearing beneath the surface. "Don't go. I have a hundred more questions."

"You'll have to find the answers yourself now." The figure's voice had thinned to almost nothing, one final thread of warmth cutting through the cold that had settled over the clearing. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there to answer them in person. I'm sorry for all of it. But you are so much stronger than they ever let you believe, Lira. Trust him. Trust yourself. And whatever you do—"

The water went dark and still, ordinary again, reflecting only moonlight and two stunned faces staring down at nothing.

"Whatever I do, what?" Lira's voice broke on the question no one was left to answer.

Beside her, Kael hadn't moved, his gaze fixed on the empty water like it had reached inside him and pulled something loose that had been buried for twenty-eight years.

"My father," he said quietly, more to himself than to her. "I need to find out what my father buried on that ridge. Tonight, if I have to drag the truth out of him myself."