CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS ALPHA KING

chapter 5

Chapter Five: No Doors Left

My father didn't yell. That was almost worse.

He got home that evening, took one look at my mother's face, then at mine, and just sat down at the kitchen table like his legs had figured out how bad this was before the rest of him caught up. Nobody talked for a minute. Then he asked me the same thing my mother already had, almost word for word, and I gave him the same answer I'd given her.

"I don't know his name."

He put his head in his hands. Not crying. Just still, the way somebody gets still when they're doing math they don't want to finish.

"An unmated she-wolf," he said, mostly to the table. "Pregnant. No father's name for the pup. And that's on top of what already happened at your ceremony." He looked up at me and it wasn't anger on his face, it was something worse, some tired kind of grief I'd never seen on him before. "Do you get what this does? To you, to us?"

"I get that it's bad."

"It's not bad. It's finished." He rubbed his jaw. "No Alpha takes a mate carrying somebody else's kid. Not for Luna, not for anything. And once the pack finds out, they will find out, we can't stop what people are going to say about you."

Nobody said the word exile out loud that night. But it was sitting there at the table with us the whole time, waiting for someone to be the one who said it first.

My mother reached over and took my father's hand, and for a second the two of them just looked at each other like they were trying to solve a problem that didn't have an answer.

"We'll ask around," my father said finally. "Quiet, at first. Maybe there's an Alpha somewhere who isn't in a position to be picky, who'd take you both if it meant an alliance with us." He didn't look at me saying it. I don't think he could.

Even then I understood this wasn't really about finding me a husband. It was about making an embarrassing problem go away without the shame of exile stuck to it. I hated that I understood that. I hated more that I couldn't even really blame them, because it was how the whole pack thought, me included, three months ago.

The next two weeks were worse than the ceremony itself, and that's saying something. The ceremony was one bad night. This was slower, and it kept happening.

My father called in every favor he had. An Alpha two territories over who owed him one from years back. A widower Beta in a smaller pack who might, my father figured, take a wife regardless of the story if the alliance was worth enough to him. Even a cousin who'd married north, in case she knew somebody desperate or decent enough to say yes.

Every answer came back the same shape even when the words were different. No.

The Alpha who owed him a favor sent word he was sorry, but this wasn't the kind of debt he could pay, his Luna wouldn't allow it and truthfully neither would he. The widower Beta didn't even answer himself, just had somebody else pass along that he'd changed his mind. Our cousin sent three pages of sympathy and not one useful name in the whole letter.

I went with my father to two more packs myself. Stood in rooms full of strangers while he made his case, tried to keep my chin up the way I had at the ceremony, told myself I wasn't going to fall apart twice in one life in front of people who didn't know me. Didn't help. I watched Alphas who'd never met me look me over and decide I wasn't worth the trouble before my father even finished talking. One of them, older guy, tired eyes, was almost decent about it. Told me privately after that in some other life he might've taken the chance, but he had a pack to answer to and a reputation that couldn't carry my story on top of it.

I told my father I couldn't do that again. For once he didn't push.

By the third week the whole pack knew. Of course they did. I couldn't walk to the market without feeling every set of eyes drop to my stomach, barely showing yet and already the thing everyone had something to say about. The pity from after the ceremony had gone sour into something sharper. Pity at least didn't come with judgment attached. This did.

Brynn caught up to me outside the market once, hanging back like she wasn't sure I'd even let her near me. I almost didn't.

"I never wanted any of this to happen to you," she said.

"I know."

"If there's anything I can do."

I almost laughed, not because it was funny, just because there wasn't anything and we both knew it. "Unless you know an Alpha who wants somebody else's pup and somebody else's scandal, there isn't."

She didn't have an answer. Neither did I.

My mother started talking about exile like it was a plan instead of what it actually was, which was giving up. We'll find you somewhere safe first, she said. Outside pack lands, but not all the way rogue. Somewhere I could raise the baby without pack law breathing down my neck. She said it like it was a kindness. I heard it for what it was.

I was sitting on the porch one night, three weeks and change into all this, running the same useless thoughts in a circle, when my father came out holding a piece of parchment like it might bite him.

"You need to see this."

I took it. Official seal, the kind used for pack announcements, the kind that gets copied and passed to every territory inside a week. I read it twice before the words actually landed.

*The Alpha King Damian Ashford of the Black Moon Empire announces his intent to take a mate. The Empire formally requests the hand of Elara Stone of Silver Hollow.*

I read my own name three more times. Kept thinking there had to be some other Elara Stone somewhere, some other, less complicated life this was actually meant for.

"The Black Moon Empire." My father said it slow, like saying it twice might make it true or might make it stop being true, and I don't think he knew which one he was hoping for. "You know who that is."

I did. Everybody did. Alpha King known across the whole region for a temper that had reportedly wiped out entire bloodlines, a court run on fear instead of anything close to loyalty, a man who'd never once in the years he'd held that throne shown the slightest interest in taking a Luna.

"Why would he want me." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "He doesn't know me. Nobody in the Black Moon Empire has any reason to know my name, let alone ask for it."

My father didn't have an answer. Neither did my mother, who'd come out on the porch behind him and gone dead still reading over my shoulder.

I sat there holding that piece of paper, cold all over despite the warm night, and felt whatever careful despair I'd built myself over the last three weeks shift into something I didn't have a word for yet. Relief, maybe. Or the start of some other kind of fear entirely, one I wouldn't understand the full weight of until I was standing in front of him again, close enough to see that scar through his eyebrow, and finally figured out why a man I'd never told my name had already known it.