CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS ALPHA KING

chapter four

Chapter Four: Weeks Later

By the third week I'd stopped waiting for the ache to fade.

Everyone said it would. The older women, the ones who'd whispered about heat bonds at dinner tables their whole lives like it was something shameful to know too much about, they all agreed on that much. If you didn't claim a bond properly, if it was only ever going to be the one night, the pull faded inside a month. Sometimes less.

Mine wasn't fading. If anything it had gotten worse, quieter but heavier, like a bruise that stopped hurting to the touch and just sat there aching on its own instead.

I told myself it didn't matter. Silver Hollow had gone back to treating me the way it treats anyone who's had something bad happen to them in public, which is to say carefully, at a distance, with a kind of pity dressed up as politeness. Caleb and Brynn had already announced their engagement. I'd sat through the announcement dinner because my mother insisted appearances mattered, and I'd smiled at the right moments and said the right things and gone home afterward and been sick in the upstairs bathroom for reasons I told myself were entirely about heartbreak.

I should have known sooner. I look back now and I'm almost embarrassed by how long it took me, except I also understand exactly why. I wasn't looking for it. I didn't want to find it.

It was my mother who said it out loud first, which somehow made it worse.

She'd come into my room without knocking, which she never did, and stood in the doorway watching me for a long moment before she said anything. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, same as most mornings that month, waiting for the nausea to pass before I tried standing up.

"How long has this been happening," she said. Quiet. Not accusing yet, just quiet.

"A few weeks. I think it's stress."

"Elara." She said my name the way she'd said it the morning after the ceremony, like she already knew and just needed me to catch up. "You haven't bled once since your birthday."

I hadn't actually let myself count. That was the part that scared me most once she said it, that some part of me had known and had been carefully, deliberately not counting, the way you avoid looking directly at something you're afraid will become real the second you do.

I didn't say anything. I didn't need to. My mother's face did something complicated, grief and fear and something almost like anger all moving through it at once, and she sat down on the bed next to me and took my hand like she was bracing for me to pull away.

"Whose is it," she said.

"I don't know."

"Elara."

"I mean it. I don't know his name." Saying it out loud for the first time made the whole night feel suddenly real in a way it hadn't been since I'd walked back down that mountain. "I met him after the ceremony. In the rogue territory past Silver Peak. He wouldn't tell me who he was."

My mother went very still. "You slept with a rogue."

"He wasn't like that. He didn't feel like that." Even as I said it I heard how it sounded, how little it would mean to anyone who hadn't stood in that clearing and felt what I'd felt. "It wasn't a choice, not really. The bond hit me right after the ceremony. I didn't even know what was happening until he was already there."

"A heat bond." She said it like a diagnosis. "With a nameless rogue, the same night your mate chose someone else."

"I know how it sounds."

"Do you." Her voice cracked on the second word, and that was worse than anger would have been. "Do you understand what this means? An unmated she-wolf, pregnant, with no father's name to put beside the pup's. No pack will want you as Luna now. No Alpha will take that on willingly, not with the shame already attached to your name from the ceremony."

I hadn't gotten that far in my own head yet. I'd been so consumed with the fact of it, the sheer impossible weight of it, that I hadn't let myself think past the pregnancy itself to what it would mean for everyone around me, what it would mean for me, going forward, in a world that had very specific ideas about what an unmated she-wolf carrying a stranger's pup was worth.

Not much. That was the honest answer. Not much at all.

"What am I supposed to do," I asked, and I hated how small my voice sounded asking it.

My mother didn't answer right away. She sat there holding my hand, staring at the wall like it might give her a better option than the ones she was clearly running through, and when she finally spoke her voice had gone flat in a way that scared me more than the crying had.

"Your father's going to have to know today," she said. "And once he knows, this stops being something we can handle quietly."

She was right, though I didn't want her to be. Word moved through Silver Hollow the way water moves through cracked ground, finding every gap, filling every space it could reach, and there was no version of this where it stayed contained inside our house for more than a day or two. My father would know by dinner. The pack would know within the week. And once the pack knew, there would be no more careful, distant pity extended toward me. There would just be judgment, plain and unhidden, the kind reserved for a wolf who'd broken every rule that mattered in a single night and now had proof of it growing inside her.

I put a hand against my stomach, the same place I'd pressed it the night of the ceremony, the same place I'd pressed it walking away from him at dawn. It didn't feel real yet. It would, soon enough, but that morning it still felt like a fact I'd been handed rather than something happening inside my own body.

"I don't regret it," I said, mostly to myself, testing whether it was true.

My mother looked at me like I'd said something reckless. Maybe I had. But sitting there with her hand still wrapped around mine, I thought about his hands shaking against my side in that clearing, the way he'd looked at me like I was something he wasn't allowed to want and wanted anyway, the softness that had come over his face while he slept that I doubted anyone else alive had ever gotten to see.

I didn't regret it. I was terrified, and ashamed of how the pack would look at me now, and completely unprepared for what came next.

But I didn't regret it.

"We'll figure something out," my mother said, though her voice didn't have much conviction behind it. "There has to be someone willing to take you both in. Some Alpha, somewhere, who won't care about the circumstances."

I almost laughed at that, except nothing about the moment was funny. No Alpha in his right mind wanted a pregnant, unmated she-wolf carrying a rogue's pup. Not for a Luna. Not for anything.

I didn't know yet how wrong that assumption was going to turn out to be. I didn't know that three weeks later, an announcement would come out of the Black Moon Empire that would upend everything my mother and I sat there believing that morning, or that the ruthless Alpha King at the center of it already knew exactly whose pup I was carrying, because he'd been the one holding my necklace since the morning I'd left it in his palm.

That morning, I just sat on my bed with my mother's hand in mine, both of us staring at a future that looked like nothing but closed doors.