The Alpha Rejected Me, But I Carry His Heir

Chapter 4: His Eyes

A profound silence falls on the hall. All eyes of the wolves in the room turn towards the doors; I'm already on my feet without quite knowing how I got there, moving faster than my thoughts. Five years of well-constructed barriers; five years of distance, of spells and hundreds of miles… all for two five-year-olds who wanted to see their mother.

"Aria.

Rowan.

I told you to stay."

They're in the doorway, the two of them small, caked in mud and defiance; my daughter's chin angled just like mine. Behind them, their nurse is ghostly white with dread, whispering incoherent apologies; 'they're too clever for the spells, Heir Vale, I only looked away for one second...'.

I don't hear any of it, because Aria is staring at me from across the hall, a look of sheer relief on her face, and then she's running.

"Mama!"

She hits my side with the force of a battering ram, I catch her, lift her, feel her little arms around my neck; for a single heartbeat the whole awful room is gone, and it’s only my child. Rowan joins us a moment later, pressing close to my side; quieter than his sister, watchful, as always.

And then, I feel it. The silence behind me shifts. It's weighty now.

It has teeth.

Slowly, shifting Aria to my hip, I turn. Kaelen has pushed himself to his feet. He's looking at my children with an expression I've never seen on him in the years I loved him, or the months I've hated him-something stripped bare; all authority, all arrogance, all defense gone. His face is the color of ash.

His gaze is locked on my daughter's face, and I know, with a mother's sickly certainty, exactly what he's seeing.

Her eyes. Rowan's eyes. A silver ring around a deep grey-a rare color; an Alpha's color.

The exact same color as the man frozen ten feet away.

"How old?"

Kaelen asks, his voice strange and rough.

"Cracked right down the middle."

"How old are they?"

Not a question at all, but a man working out arithmetic he already knows the answer to. Every instinct in me screams for me to lie. To laugh it off, tell him about some hypothetical Silvercrest baby-daddy, a long-lost spouse-anything.

I've been so, so convincing all evening.

The best damn liar in this hall. But Aria, my brave child, wriggles free to gaze up at the tall pale man, his gaze so heavy, and says, with the devastating simplicity of a five-year-old: "I'm five. Rowan is five too.

We're twins!"

He frowns at Kaelen.

"Why are you crying?"

I hadn't noticed, but the truth is there-a single, thin trace of moisture trailing down the face of Kaelen Thorne, Alpha of Ravenscliff, the man who swore I was less than nothing, who kicked my body aside as he trod past.

The whole hall has figured it out by now. I can feel it in the intakes of breath spreading through the room like a disease, the murmurs starting up, the math being done at every table. Rurik has already come to his feet, his hand on the hilt of his blade, waiting for my sign. Kaelen takes a step forward, towards my children.

I pull Aria behind me so quickly, she squeaks, and plant myself directly between the Alpha and my babies.

And when I speak, my voice is no longer quiet or amused, or diplomatic; it’s the voice of the she-wolf Silvercrest made of the girl he discarded. "You will take one more step towards them, and I will kill you." Kaelen stops dead.

His silver-grey eyes slide away from the children, and up to my face. I watch the realization wash over him, five years too late.

"Nova."

The word is a whisper.

"Now you remember me."

A wolf's grin, not a human one, spreads across my face.

"How convenient."

"They're mine."

His voice vibrates with an immense power.

"Nova-they're my children-" "No."

The word hangs in the air, sharp as shattered glass. "They're mine.

You were with their mom. You rejected them with every wolf in this room watching. You told me I was worthless; you jumped right over the top of my body so they could drag me into the shadows!

The old wound and the new anger twine within me, becoming something unbreakable.

"You don't get to claim them now. You gave up that right under the Blood Moon, Alpha. And I've spent five years making certain you wouldn't get it back." A fragile silence hangs, thick with tension.

And Kaelen Thorne, who has never known what it means to be denied, drops to one knee on the cold stone-the same stone where I once knelt shattered and alone-and stares up at me with ruined, wet eyes.

"Then tell me what it costs," he rasps, "to earn them."