The Alpha Rejected Me, But I Carry His Heir

Chapter 5: The Terms

I don't allow him to stay kneeling long. It isn't out of mercy-out of strategy. And a whole hall of wolves watching their Alpha grovel to a foreign heir?

An Alpha humiliated in front of his pack is a dangerous beast, and I didn't haul my children up these mountains to make Kaelen Thorne desperate.

I turn my back on him, pull Aria and Rowan close against me, and tell Rurik to clear the hall.

"Everyone," I command. "Out. Now."

Rurik asks no questions. It's why I keep him around. In seconds, the great hall empties, leaving only the handful of people who are in any way important to the decision-me, my children, my seconds, and the man who fathered the two tiny heartbeats I birthed from myself and carried alone out of this frozen hell.

"Nurse," I say, pressing Aria and Rowan into the woman's shaking hands. "Take my pups to my chambers. Bar the door.

If anyone but Rurik or I knock, you scream at the top of your lungs and Silvercrest burns this entire mountain down around our ears.

Do you understand?"

She nods and takes my children out at a run, Aria throwing a fleeting, uncertain glance back at me over the nurse's shoulder-and then damn her fearless heart, she waves at Kaelen. A tiny, tentative little wave, and I watch the little movement sink straight into his chest like a spear.

Then the doors shut, and it’s just the two of us and five years of absolute ruin between us.

"You have questions," I say. "You will ask them once, and then you will listen. It is not a request.

I am not here to rehash the past, merely to discuss its rather disastrous consequences.

I am only going to say this once." I fold my arms. "Yes. Those are your children.

I discovered I was pregnant three weeks after you told me to take a long, painful run off a cliff on the edge of the world, utterly alone, without a pack, a name, or even a handful of coin.

I birthed them both in a Silvercrest border shack over the course of an entire night with a midwife I could no longer afford to pay by the dawn-Aria arrived before Rowan, and Rowan nearly didn't arrive at all." My voice doesn't waver. I've practiced this cruelty until it's etched onto my soul.

"Do you really want to know where you were, Kaelen Thorne, the night your second-born son almost died screaming as he was ripped from my body? You were here, warm, healthy, and the beloved Alpha of all you surveyed. You never once stopped to wonder where your pregnant betrothed, and my life, had gotten to."

Kaelen looks suddenly as if he's aged ten years. "I would have come," he croaks out. "Had I known..."

"You ensured you wouldn't," I interrupt. "You severed the bond. You banished me and what I carried within myself as if I were some disease you were trying to burn off.

A rejected mate cannot reach you through a broken bond-that's the point.

And now you stand there and mourn because you can't see what you yourself tore down around you."

He flinches, and something in my chest tightens with perverse satisfaction. Good.

"Why did you even come?" he says, his voice rough. "If you hate me that much – what compelled you to throw yourself before me like this, to set foot into my hall?"

"Because I do not make my decisions with my hate," I tell him. "I make them with my head." I take a step forward so I can see him better when I say it.

"Silvercrest requires peace with Ravenscliff.

My Alpha is dying and his last wish before he moves to the Other Side was for me to secure this treaty. Finding you here, Kaelen Thorne, was a sacrifice of significant proportions to make that happen. Finding you-broken-" A thin, cold smile curves my lips. "That was my reward for being so utterly foolish."

Something breaks behind his eyes. The raw grief settles into something familiar-the Alpha digging deep to pull up whatever remains of his dominance, grasping only for what he knows best.

"They're my heirs," he announces. "My blood, my lineage-by any laws that count those two children are Ravenscliff. You can't just-"

"I can," I say, keeping my voice smooth as silk. "I have. They are registered as Silvercrest, under my name.

They have never been registered as your children.

Every rule, every protocol, every sacred law that pertains to pack dominance, Kaelen Thorne, you are simply the ex-lover who stopped by to complain about the canapés." I watch the words sink into him.

"However..."

His head snaps up at the single word, an uncharacteristic flash of alarm in his eyes.

"However, they are yours," I continue. "And I do not plan to raise my children in a nest of resentment where they hate their father for something he couldn't possibly understand. And those are my terms. They are not negotiable."

I hold up one finger. "Firstly. You tell no one that those are your children.

Not your Alpha, not your Beta, not your mate, not your council-no one.

Not until I deem it expedient or necessary. The survival of my children is worth far more than your ego."

My second finger. "Secondly. You wish to know them, you earn the privilege.

Slowly.

On my terms. The moment I suspect you are trying to remove them from my protection or claim them entirely, I vanish. And you will spend the rest of your very long Alpha life in agonizing ignorance, knowing the sound of their laughter."

I lean into the third for finality. "And thirdly-whatever it is that makes your chest ache whenever you think about it-whatever strange, desperate ache that Bond, that Thing, that unbreakable connection to you that won't just die will not make you-will never make you-allowed to claim what's mine in the way you are imagining. I am not the girl who braided moonflowers into her hair for you.

That girl died beneath your boots.

I will not tolerate you trying to claw her back. The only woman you will ever know, Kaelen Thorne, is the woman who now stands before you. And her, you have to fight for, just like everything else."

For a long moment Kaelen remains silent, his gray eyes raking my face as if he is trying to memorize a map to a country he's already lost. "All right," he finally whispers, the word barely escaping his lips, but it's firm, certain. "All of it.

Whatever it takes.

I'll earn every single inch of it, Nova, if it kills me."

A nauseous twist coils in my stomach. I should feel victorious. I walked into the den of the lion and commanded him to bow.

And yet, I know this man.

And Kaelen Thorne has never loved a thing he has not eventually managed to bend entirely to his will.

The doors behind me swing open.

"Heir Vale!"

Rurik's voice is tight.

"Problem."

He shifts to allow her entry.

A woman swishes across the threshold in the deep blues and greens of the Eastern lands, five years more polished, ten years more dangerous, her cool gray eyes sweeping across the hall until they meet mine with a slow, knowing, devastating smile.

"Kaelen, darling," Seraphine purrs, her voice a low, melodious hum that would lull most to sleep and terrify the rest of us. "You failed to mention we were entertaining." Her cold gaze sweeps over the intricate moonflower embroidery at my collar-the single touchstone from the girl he discarded, that I somehow could never let go of-and her smile widens into something akin to a shark's.

"Ah.

Her. I remember her-the pretty little thing you kicked away."

She tilts her head in that familiar lupine posture that precedes a pounce. "I certainly hope you haven't come to cause any more trouble than you already have, Heir Vale."