THE ALPHA WHO REJECTED HIS FATE

Chapter Six

Seraphine POV

The first scream didn't belong to me.

I heard it through the wall, high and short and cut off too fast, and my whole body went rigid around the pain already tearing through my middle. Wren's hands stilled against my knees. For one terrible second neither of us breathed, straining to hear what came next.

What came next was the horn.

Not the low, steady call the settlement used for storms or wandering predators. This one was short and frantic, three sharp blasts repeating, the sound Zane had taught every wolf in Duskfen to fear because it meant the thing none of us had said out loud in eight months had finally found me.

"Wren." My voice didn't sound like mine. "That's not a storm horn."

She didn't answer. She didn't need to. I watched her face do the thing faces do when a person decides, in half a second, to stop being gentle and start being fast.

"Nyx," she called, and Nyx was already moving, already dragging the heavy oak chest in front of the door before anyone told her to.

I wanted to stand. My body had other plans. Another contraction rolled through me, lower and harder than the last, and I pressed my palm flat against my stomach the way I had every night for eight months, except this time I wasn't reassuring myself that the strangeness was still there. I was begging the strangeness to wait.

"She can't wait," I whispered, and I don't know if I meant it as a question or a confession.

Nyx crouched in front of me and took my face in both hands, dirt already under her nails from shoving the chest, and said the only thing that mattered.

"Then she won't."

Outside, something struck the outer wall of the healing quarters hard enough that dust sifted down from the rafters. I heard Zane's voice through the woods, low and controlled in the particular way I had learned meant he was holding something back so I wouldn't hear how bad it truly was. I heard another voice answer him, wrong, foreign, unfamiliar in the shape of its vowels, and then I heard nothing from that second voice ever again.

I was still trying to make sense of what that silence meant when the next contraction took the thought away from me entirely.

"Eyes on me," Wren said, and I gave her what I had left.

Somewhere beyond the door, beyond the wall, beyond the burning smell now threading under the floorboards, Zane was standing between my daughter and a war that had finally, after eight months of running, found the address it had been looking for the whole time.

I thought, absurdly, of the corridor outside the meeting rooms at the Iron Keep. Of silver eyes gone unguarded for the length of one held breath. I thought, this is what that night cost. This room. This fire. This impossible, terrible, perfect timing.

And then I stopped thinking about Kael at all, because Wren said the word close, and there was no more room in me for anything except the next thirty seconds.

Kael POV

I had ridden hard before. I had ridden through border skirmishes and winter storms and the long, grim nights after my parents died, when speed was the only thing standing between grief and duty.

I had never ridden like this.

My horse's flanks were slick with lather beneath me, and I didn't slow him, because slowing meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering every one of the two hundred and forty nights I had lain awake with my wolf pointing south-east while I told myself, again and again, that following him would mean admitting something I wasn't ready to survive admitting.

I am ready now. Eight months too late, and ready now.

The sky ahead of us had gone the wrong color. Not the deep, clean black of a Duskfen night, but something bruised and orange at the edges, low over the tree line like a second, sicker sunset.

"Faster," I said, and my warriors, who had followed me into worse things without question for years, said nothing, only rode faster, because they had seen my face when the scout gave his report and none of them wanted to be the reason I arrived one second later than I had to.

My wolf was not pacing anymore. That was the thing that frightened me more than the sky. Eight months of restless, grieving circling, and now, riding into the smell of smoke and blood carried by the wind from a settlement I had never once visited, he had gone utterly, unnervingly still. Fixed. Certain.

He knew exactly where we were going. He had always known. I was the only one who had spent eight months refusing to admit it.

Vexara's message had said only two words. She's here. No location beyond what my own scouts had already given us, no explanation, nothing but the two words and the silence that followed when our messenger birds stopped answering entirely an hour ago.

I told myself the silence meant nothing. I told myself a great many things in that hour that I did not believe.

We crested the last ridge before the Duskfen border, and the settlement spread out below us, and I understood, in the space of a single breath, that we were not arriving in time to prevent anything. We were arriving in the middle of it.

Fire had already taken the eastern storehouses. Figures moved against the flame in shapes I recognized instantly and hated instantly, Ironblood formation stripped of Ironblood insignia, thirty strong if the scout's count had been right, cutting through the settlement toward the one building that still had wolves fighting to hold its door.

The healing quarters.

My chest did something I had no name for, something that was not quite pain and not quite relief and not quite the terror I should have been feeling, all three at once, tangled together into a single unbearable pressure behind my ribs.

I drew my sword. I did not slow my horse.

And then, from somewhere inside that burning building, carried on the wind along with the smoke and the screaming and eight months of everything I had refused to face, I heard a sound I would have known anywhere in the world, in any lifetime, even one I had spent trying to convince myself she was never mine to recognize.

A newborn's cry.