Sold As The Breeder Of Three Alpha Brothers

WHAT THE RECORDS DON'T SAY

Lyra didn't sleep again that night.

You're not the first woman the Moon Temple has called the Breeder Mate.

The words circled in her head long after Lucien had slipped back out into the hallway, promising to find a safer place to talk and vanishing before she could press him further. She lay awake staring at the ceiling of a room that wasn't hers, in a palace full of people who all seemed to know more about her fate than she did.

By the time the sun rose, she'd made a decision.

She wasn't going to wait for any of them to decide when she deserved the truth.

"I want to see the palace archives," she told the maid who brought her breakfast.

The girl blinked. "The archives, my lady?"

"Records. History. Anything about the Moon Temple and the prophecy."

"I don't think that's permitted without—"

"Without whose permission?" Lyra kept her voice even, though her patience had worn thin overnight. "I was told my choice is the entire prophecy. If that's true, I should be allowed to understand what I'm choosing."

The maid hesitated, then bobbed a quick, uncertain curtsy. "I'll ask, my lady."

It took most of the morning, but eventually a guard arrived to escort her, not to the archives themselves, but to a small study where Darius sat waiting, a stack of leather-bound books already arranged on the table in front of him.

"You asked for the archives," he said, before she could speak. "The full archives require Council approval I don't have authority to grant alone. This is what I could gather without raising questions I'm not ready to answer yet."

"You went and got these yourself?"

"I didn't trust anyone else to be discreet about it." He gestured to the chair across from him. "Sit. I'll help you look, if you'll let me."

She studied him for a long moment, weighing whether this was kindness or another kind of performance. But there was no audience here. No Council, no nobles, no reason for him to bother if he didn't mean it.

She sat.

"Lucien told me something happened to a woman before me," Lyra said, watching his reaction carefully. "Another Breeder Mate. He said nobody knows what happened to her."

Something shifted behind Darius's eyes, brief but unmistakable. "He shouldn't have told you that."

"Why not? Is it a secret?"

"It's a wound," Darius said quietly. "One this family doesn't discuss, even among ourselves."

"Then discuss it with me. Please." She leaned forward. "I'm not asking as court gossip, Darius. I'm asking because whatever happened to her might be about to happen to me, and I'd rather know than be surprised by it."

He was quiet for a long moment, jaw working like he was deciding how much of the family's history he was willing to hand to a woman he'd known for less than two days.

"Her name was Wren," he said finally. "Twenty years ago. The Temple declared her the Breeder Mate the same way they declared you. My father and his brothers courted her, the same rites you saw last night."

"What happened?"

"She chose my father." His voice had gone carefully flat, the tone of a man reciting something he'd rehearsed rather than something he was living through fresh. "Six months later, she vanished from the palace grounds. No trace. No body. The Council called it an accident, or an escape, depending on who you asked. My father never spoke of her again."

"And you don't believe either explanation."

"I was young when it happened. Too young to remember her clearly." He finally met her eyes. "But I've read every record the Temple kept on her disappearance, and none of them agree with each other. That's not what an accident looks like. That's what a cover-up looks like."

Lyra sat back, the weight of it settling over her. "Selene called me sharper than the last one. She let it slip, and I don't think she meant to."

"Selene was High Priestess then too."

The room went very quiet.

"You think she knows what happened to Wren," Lyra said slowly.

"I think Selene knows a great many things she's never chosen to share with this family." Darius's jaw tightened. "And I think it's not a coincidence that the Temple's prophecy has conveniently protected her position of influence for three decades running."

"Then why hasn't anyone challenged her?"

"Because the Temple's authority is older than the crown's, technically. Challenging Selene without proof isn't politics. It's heresy." He pushed one of the books toward her. "This is a record of Temple activity from the years surrounding Wren's disappearance. I haven't been able to make sense of half of it. I was hoping a second set of eyes might see something mine has missed."

Lyra opened the book, running her fingers over pages dense with formal Temple script, half of it clearly redacted in places, ink scratched out by someone who hadn't wanted certain names remembered.

"Why show me this?" she asked quietly. "You could have kept this from me. Most people in your position would have."

"Because you asked for the truth instead of comfort," Darius said. "And because if the same thing that happened to Wren is somehow connected to what's happening to you, I'd rather you walk into it with your eyes open than protected by ignorance the way she apparently wasn't."

Lyra looked up at him, searching his face for the performance she kept expecting to find and still couldn't locate.

"Thank you," she said. "For trusting me with this."

"Don't thank me yet." He nodded toward the redacted pages between them. "We don't know what we're going to find."

Outside the study door, unseen by either of them, a shadow lingered a moment longer than it should have before moving quietly back down the corridor, already carrying word of exactly what the Crown Prince had shown the Breeder Mate.