The Alpha Rejected Me, But I Carry His Heir

Chapter 9: The Chapel at Moonrise

I do not go to the chapel unarmed. Nor do I go alone-whatever the note meant.

Fifty paces behind, Rurik follows like the predator he is, blending into the woods like Silvercrest trained him to. If it is a trap, he is my escape route. And strapped to the hip under my cloak is the silver dagger the old Alpha gave me the day I was made his heir.

A wolf who trusts a stranger's note deserves whatever is under it, he'd said.

But carry a blade when you do go.

The ancient chapel off the north wall is falling apart. The roof is in half, light and the moon filtering through the broken beams onto the cracked floor below. It once housed a shrine to the Moon Goddess before Ravenscliff let it decay.

There’s something poignant in that.

Something that brings no relief.

A figure waits at the ruined altar, cloaked, motionless.

"You came." It's a woman’s voice, thin and brittle. "I wasn't sure you would. Most smart ones don't."

"Smart ones bring a knife," I say, letting the cloak fall enough to see the hilt. "What was so urgent that it brought you dragging me to the middle of nowhere."

The figure pulls back her hood.

I don't know her face-wrinkled, silver-haired, sharp-eyed. But I know the mark at her throat-a Ravenscliff healer's sigil, old style, from before Kaelen's father died. This one served the pack for a long, long time.

"My name is Maera. I was the pack healer when you lived here and I was the one who told you of the life inside you five years ago. And took the coin you could never spare to keep my mouth shut."

She coughs, a dry, painful sound.

"Every day since. But I could not hold my tongue for another moment, and die without telling you. I'd rather you hear it from me than waste away in ignorance."

The ground feels unsteady beneath me. "You knew? All this time you knew..."

"I knew more than you could imagine." Maera steps closer, and the moonlight gleams on her face, etching real, unacted-upon fear in the lines around her eyes. "Your rejection wasn't Kaelen's idea, Nova."

It’s a riddle and my mind scrambles for the hook. "He was there. He spoke the words. He walked over my body!"

"He spoke the words," Maera insists. "But the doubt that prompted him, the utter certainty that he had no feelings for you, that your bond was a burden-that was planted. It grew and festered for months before he spoke them.

It didn't occur to me it was poisoning the man I'd served for twenty years; that I couldn’t speak then, was the reason for my continued cowardice.

He couldn't-they-couldn't let you carry a child." Her voice dwindles to a whisper. "They wanted you out, child. So bad, the person doing it could manipulate Kaelen, make him turn on the very she-wolf who shared his heart, sever your mating bond with his own breath-and now they know you’re still alive.

And that you carry the child he rejected."

The ice that snakes down my spine could never be called cold.

"Seraphine..."

"No," Maera whispers back; Rurik's denials echo in my head. "Seraphine's reach doesn't extend to making a bond break on a grand scale. Her power base was only that-the Luna's place.

This is something far greater.

Whoever pushed Kaelen was not interested in his succession-it was in ensuring the direct bloodline died out. Yours and his. The bloodline I carried; the one you were meant to create. You must understand, Heir Vale-who is afraid of a child born of a broken bond and a wolf returned to repentant Alpha?"

She turns to me then, her silver-haired eyes locked with mine.

"And more importantly, who has spent the past five years ensuring such a child could never live-and knows there is absolutely nothing in the world they wouldn't do to stop him from finally breathing air?"

Outside, an owl hoot falls silent. The night hangs in its own hushed terror.

"Why? Why this now? Why risk it all on me?"

"I am dying," Maera says simply, unvarnished. "Some waste disease, my time is limited. I have nothing left to lose, and the weight of my sin for not speaking out when I could have was too great for me to bear.

They gave me an easy life here.

It is time I paid it back tenfold." She reaches into her robe, pressing something cold and metallic into my hand. "A seal. It is the western gate's.

Not the one the children came through under Seraphine’s supposed mark when I took your payment.

Seraphine's personal seal vanished last month; it was copied to frame her as the power behind the conspiracy, a small pawn, to divert your gaze away from the real threats."

I clench my fist around the cool metal disc.

"Who-Maera who controls what kind of influence?"

The old woman's lips part.

-and the arrow finds her throat.

She collapses without a sound. I’m off my feet before her body hits the stone, the dagger out of its sheath, spinning to the jagged opening where the shot originated. And for a split-second, in the moon's pale glare, I see it-a shape against the night sky, a silhouette whose face is just lost, and the quicksilver flash of a bow drawn back, ready to unleash another bolt, aimed squarely at my chest.

"NOVA-DOWN!" Rurik's warning shot cracks the night from the treeline.

I fling myself behind the cracked altar just as the second arrow pings off the stone where my heart had been. In the deafening silence that follows, the heavy, foreign weight of a dead woman's seal burning a hole in my palm and half a confession that cost her everything, two things become devastatingly clear.

Someone has been hunting me for five years.

And I just walked straight into their waiting trap.