CHAPTER 3
1482 Words
Zirah's POV
The question hung between us like a blade suspended by a thread.
"What did you just say to me?"
Lucien's hand was still on my stomach but his fingers had gone rigid. Like he was touching something contaminated.
"You heard me, Zirah. Whose pup is it?"
"Yours." My voice shook but the word came out clear. "It is yours, Lucien. Healer Nessa tested me herself. The moonstone confirmed it. One week along. From that night after the territorial dispute when you came to our room and..."
"Stop."
He pulled his hand away from my stomach like my skin had burned him. Then he wiped his palm on his trousers. Slowly. Deliberately. Making sure I watched him do it.
"Two years," he said. "Two years of me filling you with my seed. Two years of your worthless body producing nothing. And now suddenly, out of nowhere, you are pregnant?"
"It is not sudden. It is biology. Healer Nessa said that sometimes with dormant wolves the body takes longer to..."
"I don't care what the healer said."
He reached into my hand where I had been clutching the moonstone like a lifeline. I had brought it to show him. Proof. Evidence that the Goddess had not forgotten me after all.
He held it up. The silver glow pulsed between his fingers, steady and alive. Proof of the tiny heartbeat forming inside me.
Then he crushed it.
His fist closed around it and the crystal cracked like bone. Fragments fell to the marble floor in a scatter of dull light. He brushed the dust from his palm the same way he had wiped my touch from his skin.
"Lucien, please."
"Explain yourself." His voice dropped low. The Alpha tone. The one that made every wolf in the pack drop to their knees. My legs buckled but I locked them. "How dare you stand in my house, in my hallway, and try to pass off some bastard as my heir?"
"There is no bastard. I have never been with another man. You know that. You know I have never even left this estate without permission. When would I have..."
"You tell me." He stepped closer and I stepped back. My shoulder blades hit the wall. "You tell me when you opened your legs for whoever fathered that thing inside you."
"That thing is your child!"
The slap came so fast I didn't register the motion. Only the sound. A sharp crack that echoed down the empty corridor. My head snapped sideways and my cheek erupted with heat.
I tasted copper on my tongue.
"Do not raise your voice at me."
I pressed my hand to my face. The skin was already swelling. But the pain in my cheek was nothing compared to the feeling of something cracking open inside my chest.
"Lucien." I lowered my voice to barely a whisper. "Feel it. Please. Just feel it. Your wolf will recognize your own blood. You know it will."
Something flickered in his eyes. Just for a second. A fraction of hesitation so small that anyone else would have missed it.
He grabbed me by the arm and pressed his palm against my stomach again. Hard this time. Not gentle. Not searching. His claws extended halfway, pricking through the fabric of my dress and dimpling my skin underneath.
I felt the sharp points threatening to break through. One push. One flex of his fingers and he would pierce me open.
"Lucien, the baby."
His jaw clenched. I watched the muscles in his face work as he concentrated. Searching for the connection. Reaching through the bond for a heartbeat that matched his own.
Then his hand dropped.
"Nothing," he said flatly. "I feel nothing."
"That's because you rejected the bond months ago. Your wolf has been pulling away from mine since the day you started sleeping with Maren. If you would just..."
"If I would just what?" He grabbed my chin. Forcing my face up. "Pretend? Play along with your little fantasy? Parade a bastard child around my pack and let every Alpha from here to the coast laugh at me?"
"It is not a fantasy!"
His claws sank in.
Not into my stomach. Into my arms. Both hands gripping me so tight that I felt the skin split. Blood ran down my forearms in thin warm lines and dripped onto the white dress his mother had left behind.
I screamed.
"Lucien, stop! You are hurting me! The baby!"
"There is no baby that belongs to me!"
Footsteps echoed from down the corridor. Dorian appeared first, then two of the ranked wolves from the meeting. They stood and watched. Not one of them moved to intervene.
Maren came last.
She leaned against the doorframe with her arms folded across her chest. Her dark hair falling perfectly over one shoulder. Her lips curved into a smile so faint it could have been mistaken for pity.
But I knew better.
"Lucien." Her voice was silk. Calm and measured like she was soothing a child. "Don't waste your energy. She isn't worth it."
He released me. I collapsed against the wall, clutching my bleeding arms, gasping for air.
"You will go to Healer Nessa tonight," he said, straightening his shirt. Fixing his cufflinks. Becoming the polished billionaire Alpha again. "And you will have her remove it. Whatever it is. Whoever it belongs to. I want it gone before sunrise."
"No."
The word came out broken but it came out.
He stopped.
"No?" he repeated. Like he had never heard the word before. Like I had spoken in a language that did not exist in his world.
"I will not kill my child. Our child. You can call me every name you want, Lucien. You can hit me, starve me, humiliate me. But you will not touch this baby."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Lucien straightened to his full height. Six foot three of pure Alpha authority wrapped in a ten thousand dollar suit. He looked down at me on the floor and I watched the last flicker of anything human drain from his eyes.
"Then by the authority of the Silvercrest bloodline and under the witness of the Moon Goddess, I, Lucien Ashford, Alpha of the Sinclair Pack, reject you, Zirah. I reject our bond. I reject the claim you hold over my name and my house."
The bond snapped.
It did not break gently. It did not fade. It detonated inside my chest like a grenade wrapped in silver wire. I felt every thread that had ever connected us tear apart at once. My wolf howled somewhere deep inside me. A sound so agonized that I didn't recognize it as my own.
I hit the floor. Both knees. Both palms. Blood from my arms smearing across the marble.
"I curse the day I let your father walk free," he said from above me.
I looked up through tears and blood and two years of swallowed silence.
"The Goddess will remember this, Lucien. She will make you pay."
"The Goddess has never once looked in your direction, Zirah. And she never will."
He turned to Dorian. "Get her out. Tonight. No belongings. No escort. She leaves the way she came. With nothing."
The gates opened and the rain hit me like a wall of ice.
No coat. No shoes. The white dress soaked through in seconds, turning pink where the blood from my arms mixed with the water. My hair clung to my face and my body trembled so violently I thought my bones would crack.
I pressed both hands to my stomach.
My wolf was barely conscious inside me but I forced her forward. Forced every drop of healing energy she had left toward the tiny life inside me. I felt my skin split in other places as the cost of internal healing spread outward. Cuts opened on my shoulders. My lip cracked. A gash appeared along my collarbone.
But the heartbeat in my belly held.
I don't know how long I lay there. Minutes. Maybe an hour. The rain didn't stop and neither did the bleeding.
Then arms slid under me.
Strong. Warm. Lifting me from the mud like I weighed nothing at all.
I forced my eyes open and saw a face I had only ever seen in photographs and whispered warnings.
Kylan Sinclair.
Lucien's uncle. The exile. The man they said was more beast than wolf.
"Why?" I managed. The word barely made it past my cracked lips.
He looked down at me with eyes the color of a winter storm. Calm on the surface but something ancient and dangerous moving underneath.
"Because you and that pup deserve to live."
My body gave out. My vision tunneled toward black. But just before it took me, I heard him say one more thing.
"And because my nephew just made the worst mistake of his miserable life."
- Writer
