The Alpha Rejected Me, But I Carry His Heir

Chapter 2: The Return

Five years.

That's what it takes to mold a rejected girl into a weapon.

The Silvercrest convoy is sifting up the mountain road at sunset, and I am leading it — not in the back of a cart, not covered in my own blood or someone else’s, not begging—but in black and silver—the colors of the pack who took in a girl with nothing more than a broken bond and two heartbeats growing within her. Wolves of Ravenscliff lining the road as we pass by; I can feel their gaze skim over me, and let it do so without recognition.

Let them look. Let them wonder who the hell the Silvercrest heir is — the woman with the cool gray eyes, the crown of braided steel on her head.

They will never know I crawled out of their great hall on my hands and knees.

"Jaw thing again," Rurik murmurs from my flank, always the closest thing to a brother that broad, scarred beast had ever been, and ever would be to me. "The one where it looks like you’re deciding which throat is next to remove."

"I'm smiling."

"You're really not."

I let the corner of my mouth lift infinitesimally. "Better?"

"Terrifying. Keep that."

The summit was never an idea of my own. Alliances are broker by the old and the ambitious, and the aging Alpha of Silvercrest-the man who found a dying girl on the boarder and took her in, contradicting every custom, naming a lost-cause girl his heir-wants a pack truce before he dies. He sent me to negotiate it.

He doesn't know the price that place put on my head.

No living soul knows it all except for me.

And the twins. My Aria, my Rowan. Five years old, both of them, both silver-eyed and safe and three hundred miles away, tucked behind Silvercrest’s strongest wards with instructions to their nanny not to bring them to the mountains on any account.

Because their eyes are their father’s. And their father is the man I am about to face.

The great doors of Ravenscliff swing open.

The great hall looks as I remember it-the arched stone ceilings, the fur-draped banners, the dais where my life came to a definitive end. My chest tightens with something I refuse to name, and I push it flat. I did not come here to feel; I came here to win.

And then he is there.

Kaelen Thorne comes down the steps off the dais; the man is five years older, somehow more everything — the looming presence, the sharp jaw, an Alpha in his full and brutal bloom. Seraphine is nowhere at his side, I noted dispassionately. His grey eyes sweep across my delegation, boring with the practiced, boring boredom that only comes from a man who has never been denied a single thing he has asked for in his life.

They linger on me.

They freeze.

I see it—the quick flicker. A faint, involuntary crinkle between his eyebrows; his nostrils flare as though catching on a scent he can’t quite place. The severed bond is dead and gone between us, cold ashes where a stream of light used to exist, and it should remain silent.

It hums.

Only for a moment. Only for enough.

Kaelen’s head tilts back and, for the first time in five years, the Alpha of Ravenscliff looks as if he is staring straight through me to the ghost of the past.

"Have we met?" he asks.

I hold his gaze and wear the expression Rurik finds so terrifying.

"No," I say. "I think I would have remembered."