He Chose Her Pup, I Revealed My Royalty

Chapter 3

"Dominic has decided to announce our marriage at the Full Moon Rite this month."

"Seraphina."

"You're nothing but a slut who clawed her way into an Alpha's bed by trickery."

"I'll bet you've never figured out why, in five whole years, you couldn't conceive a single one of Dominic's pups, have you?"

She had attached an encrypted video.

In it, she straddled Dominic, her eyes hooded and seductive, her voice teasing.

"Darling,are you sure you can perform?"

"Otherwise, how could that Seraphina, in five whole years, never lift her station with a child? Never get the elders' blessing?"

Dominic, flushed and lazy, laughed and answered her teasing.

"How could I be the problem?"

I listened to Chloe's breathy laughter, and to Dominic's idle, careless drawl.

"Of course she'll never carry. She is a Rogue. Her blood is filth. The Council would never have accepted such a line, and I cannot truly cast aside the future of this Pack."

"It's no great trouble to slip a little wolfsbane and a suppressant into her food. Nothing, really."

His voice was lazy,and yet each word was a knife driven into my heart, twisting deep into my wolf-soul.

"To take her as a mate. To give her the Luna title at all. That alone was charity."

"For a creature like her to receive that kind of honor in a single lifetime,she should be on her knees thanking me."

"Otherwise."

"She'd have rotted in some Rogue den until her dying day."

My vision blurred.

So this was what his "protection" had been,playing the role of devoted husband in public, while quietly drugging my food, stealing motherhood from me, and laying every grain of the blame at the feet of my so-called inferior blood.

I closed the video and looked into the mirror.

The strange thing was: knowing the truth, I did not collapse into the hysteria I had imagined. The wound inside my chest,the gaping, bleeding hollow that betrayal had carved into me,now thrummed with a hot, ancient force I had never known before.

My belly began to burn. A current of dominance,old as the bones of the earth,flooded through my blood.

It was not the convulsion of poison. It was the awakening of a power that had been chained for more than twenty years.

My wolf threw back her head and gave one long, deafening howl,proud, regal, ringing with the sovereign authority of a creature born to rule. In a single instant, every trace of wolfsbane in me was burned out.

I looked into the mirror. The pupils that had been an ordinary black now glowed with an eerie, sacred light: violet shot through with gold.

I laughed.

So that was it.

Dominic had assumed I could not bear children because my blood was lowly. He had not understood that his thin, derivative Alpha line was simply too weak to carry the kind of child my blood would conceive.

Common poison. Common poison could not touch me.

I picked up the dissolution agreement on the desk. With a calligrapher's grace, I signed my name at the bottom.

Seraphina.

The last stroke completed, I slammed the agreement down on the desk, turned on my heel, and walked out of the cage that had held me for five years.

In the great hall below, Dominic was holding Chloe,her hand bandaged,close against him. They were murmuring something to one another, and the air around them sickened me with its sweetness.

When he saw me coming down the staircase with my suitcase in hand, Dominic's brow tightened. He had not believed I would actually walk out so cleanly.

Chloe's eyes lit up. She slipped from his arm, and,pregnant belly thrust forward,came to plant herself in front of me, the smile of a victor on her mouth.

She raked her gaze down me with imperious contempt.

Dominic needs a vessel who can give him strong pups,her voice dripped,not someone of your inferior blood. Five years. Whatever novelty he ever found in you expired long ago.

She unbuttoned her coat, deliberately exposing her belly. The pulse of a wolf-pup's life beat strong inside it,a flagrant act of war.

I can carry the strongest Alpha line for this Pack,she stepped closer,and you? What can you give him? Beneath that worthless Rogue blood, you are nothing.

I looked at her,at the ambition stamped across every feature,and then at Dominic, standing a short distance off, silent, accepting every word of her humiliation as if it were doctrine.

I smiled,brilliantly. The violet-gold of my irises flickered through the shadow of my lashes, and for a single instant, the room seemed to hold its breath.

What could I give him?

I dropped my suitcase to the floor. I straightened my collar,and the gesture carried the new, quiet authority of a wolf who had at last awakened to herself.

"I will step aside, of course," I said, softly. The volume was nothing,but the pressure inside the words pushed every spine in the room to bow. "After all,the Lycan King's daughter has no use for the Luna's seat in some second-rate pack."

Silence,perfect, utter,collapsed onto the hall.

Dominic's head snapped up. He stared at me as though he could not credit his own ears. The smile on Chloe's face froze,and then warped into a small, ridiculous mask of horror.

I did not wait for them to speak. I pushed open the front doors and walked out into the snow.

The throne that belonged to me was waiting for me to come home.