CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS ALPHA KING

chapter 6

They sent a black carriage for me. No crest on the doors, nothing marking it as a King's, just good craftsmanship, the kind that costs more than it lets on. My father walked me out to it himself. For the first time in three weeks he didn't look like a man trying to solve a problem. He looked like a father putting his daughter on a road he wasn't sure was safe.

"You don't have to go," he said, hand still on the door frame.

Both of us knew that wasn't really true. I had two options left and one of them was exile. I hugged him instead of arguing about it, because nothing I could say would've made either of us feel better.

Two days on the road. I mostly just watched the land change out the window, forest thinning into hills, hills going colder and barer the further we got, like even the ground knew what kind of man ran this place. The driver didn't talk. I didn't ask him to.

I spent a lot of that time thinking about the stories. Everybody had one. An Alpha King who took his throne young and kept it through pure brutality, no negotiating, no mercy for anybody who threatened his territory. Nobody really knew why he'd never taken a Luna. Some people said he didn't trust anyone that far. Some said worse, that whatever it took to feel a mate bond properly, he didn't have it in him. I'd grown up hearing both versions, always told like ghost stories, half warning, half thrill.

None of that got me ready for actually seeing the place.

The territory opened up in front of us on the second day and it wasn't what I'd pictured. I expected something bleak. Instead there was dark stone built right into the hillside, roads in better shape than half of Silver Hollow's, and wolves in the streets who didn't look starved or broken, just careful. The kind of careful you learn after finding out exactly how much attention is safe to draw.

The castle sat above it all, black stone against gray sky, and I felt smaller looking up at it than I had standing in the middle of my own ceremony.

They took me in through a side door, not the front gate. I found out later that was either a courtesy or just a way to keep me out of sight until the King decided what to do with me. At the time it just felt like being smuggled in somewhere. A woman met me in a narrow room off to the side, older, sharp eyes, said only that she ran the King's household, and told me he'd see me within the hour.

I spent that hour trying hard not to throw up. Not the pregnancy this time. Just nerves.

When they finally walked me in, it wasn't some throne room. Long table, maps pinned along one wall, a fire burning low in a hearth big enough to walk into. He had his back to me, hands flat on the table, looking down at one of the maps, and something about how he stood there made the whole room feel too small before he even turned around.

He turned around.

I stopped walking.

For a second I couldn't get a word out. Something in his jaw, the way he held himself, still but coiled, snagged straight on a memory I hadn't let myself look at head on in three months. My chest went tight. My wolf, quiet for weeks now, sat up sharp like she'd caught a scent she already knew.

I told myself I was imagining it. Grief does strange things to a person's head. Makes you see a face you miss in every stranger who stands a certain way.

"Elara Stone." He said my name like paperwork, nothing behind it. His voice was low and even. Not the rough half used voice I remembered from a fire on a mountain. Or maybe it was and I just didn't want it to be, because the other option was more than I could handle standing up.

"Alpha King." I didn't know what else to call him, and the title felt safer than trying to talk plain with my pulse going the way it was.

"Damian Ashford." No hand offered. He just watched me, the way you watch something you haven't decided to trust yet, and I did the same right back, hunting his face for anything that would confirm what my body already half believed.

Pale eyes. That much matched. Gray with something gold near the center, maybe, though the light in there was mostly fire and shadow and I couldn't swear I wasn't just filling in the rest to match a memory I'd been dragging around like a bruise for three months.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," he said. Flat. Almost bored, except his eyes weren't bored at all, they stayed locked on me in a way that didn't match his voice one bit.

"Sorry." I made myself breathe. "You remind me of someone."

Something crossed his face, gone too fast to name. "Do I."

"It's nothing. A stranger I met once. It's not important."

"No," he said, easy, a little too easy. "I imagine it isn't."

I wanted to just ask him straight out. Stood there with it sitting right at the back of my throat, *were you on Silver Peak three months ago, is that why nothing about that night has faded, am I standing in front of the reason I still shake like this.* I didn't ask. Something about how blank his face stayed told me I wouldn't get a real answer even if I did, and I didn't have it in me that night to get handed a lie on top of everything else.

"You know why you're here," he said, moving us somewhere safer for both of us.

"My father said you asked for me by name. I don't know why."

"I have my reasons."

"That's not an answer."

His mouth did something small, not quite a smile, gone before it finished. "No. It isn't."

"I'm pregnant." I said it plain, because somewhere on that two day ride I'd decided I wasn't going to let him find out later and use it as a reason to back out, wasn't going to let one more thing get sprung on me the way everything else had these past months. "Not yours. Not anyone's, far as anybody here needs to know. I don't have a name to give you for the father. If that changes what you're offering, I'd rather find out now."

The room went still. He looked at me a beat too long, and when he finally talked his voice had dropped out of that careful even tone into something quieter.

"Doesn't change anything," he said. "I already knew."

"How."

"Word travels." He turned back to the map, giving me his side instead of his face, which felt less like an accident and more like a choice. "Silver Hollow's not as far from here as your family probably thinks. A story like yours moves fast. It got here before you did."

That should have counted as an answer. It didn't really, not fully, because something underneath it sat wrong, something about the way he'd said *I already knew* like the words weighed more than he wanted them to.

"Why would you want a mate carrying another man's pup," I said. "You could have anybody. Every pack around here would hand you their daughter without blinking if you asked. Why me?"

He didn't answer right away. Stood there with his hands on the table again, staring down like the map had the answer printed on it somewhere between the borders.

"Because I don't want anybody else's daughter," he said finally. Quiet. "I want you."

"You don't know me."

"Maybe not the way you think." He looked up, and for one second something in his face looked like guilt, or grief, hard to say which, gone before I could pin it down. "But I know enough."

I should've kept pushing. Should've kept at it until whatever he was hiding behind cracked open all the way instead of just flickering at the edges every few minutes. But my legs had started shaking, two days of travel and three months of fear finally catching up all at once, and he must've seen it happen because he crossed the room before I said another word, close enough that I finally caught the smell of him properly.

Pine. Copper underneath it, faint, the kind of thing that gets scrubbed off skin that's worn it too many times to ever fully lose it. Something else under that, something that made my wolf go still and quiet and wanting all at once, the exact same way she had on that mountain three months back, and I had to grab the back of a chair just to stay upright.

"You're worn out," he said, and for the first time all that careful control slipped out of his voice completely. "We can finish this tomorrow."

"Wait." I made myself look right at him, made myself hold it even though everything in me wanted to look away before he could see what this was costing me. "I need to know what I'm walking into. I need to know if I can trust you."

He was quiet a long time. When he finally spoke, it wasn't really the answer I wanted, but it was honest in a way that scared me more than a lie would've.

"You'll have to decide that yourself," he said. "I'm not going to convince you with words. Never been much good at that part."

He called the woman back to walk me to my room. On the way out I looked back once, caught him still standing at the table, watching me go with a look I couldn't read and didn't have the energy left to try reading that night.

Walking down that long stone hallway, I told myself I'd made it up. That grief plays tricks. That there was no way the Alpha King of the Black Moon Empire and a nameless, bloodied stranger on a mountain three months ago were the same person.

I almost believed it.

Almost.