The Alpha's Rejected Mate

Chapter 5 THE RIVAL PACK

CHAPTER 5

The Rival Pack

The border summit was held on neutral ground three days later, in a clearing exactly halfway between Emberfall's southern fence and Ashgrove territory, marked by a ring of standing stones old enough that no one alive remembered who had raised them.

Lira had not wanted to come. Kade had not wanted her to come either, which was, perversely, most of why she'd insisted. If Ashgrove already knew her name, she'd told him, then hiding her away like something fragile would only confirm to their enemies exactly how valuable she was. Better to stand in the light where she could see them coming.

She hadn't expected to feel quite this exposed doing it.

Ashgrove's delegation arrived exactly on time, which Kade had warned her was itself a kind of insult — early would have suggested eagerness, late would have suggested disrespect, and exactly on time suggested a pack that controlled every variable it could, including its own manners. At the front of the delegation walked a man Lira hadn't met but recognized instantly from the way the Emberfall warriors around her went very still.

Sorin Ashgrove moved like water finding the fastest way downhill — unhurried, but never wasting motion. He was lean where Kade was broad, dark where Kade was gold, and he wore an expression of pleasant, unbothered interest that Lira suspected he'd cultivated specifically because it unsettled people more than open hostility would have.

His eyes found her before the introductions had even finished, and something in his expression sharpened with an attention that made the hair on her arms rise.

"You must be Lira," he said, before Kade could perform whatever careful introduction he'd clearly planned. Sorin's voice was warm, almost intimate, entirely inappropriate for a border summit between two packs one bad afternoon away from open war. "I've heard a great deal about you. None of it, I should say, from anyone in your own pack."

"Then you have the advantage of me," Lira said, keeping her voice level with an effort. "I haven't heard anything about you at all."

Something like delight flickered across Sorin's face. "How refreshing. Most people arrive at these things already primed to hate me." He glanced toward Kade, and the warmth in his expression cooled several degrees, though it didn't disappear entirely. "Draven. You're looking tense. I do hope that's not because of anything I've said."

The summit itself was a careful, bloodless dance of accusation and denial — Emberfall demanding to know why Ashgrove had breached the border in daylight, Ashgrove's elders insisting, with the particular smoothness of people well-rehearsed in lying, that the raiders had acted without sanction, rogue elements, deeply regretted, would be dealt with internally. Lira watched Kade absorb each denial with visible skepticism and no visible progress, and felt her own patience fraying at the seams.

It was Sorin who broke from the script.

"May I speak with her," he said, cutting smoothly across one of the elders mid-sentence, nodding toward Lira without waiting for permission from either side. "Alone. Briefly. I think we both know this summit isn't actually about border grievances, and I'd rather stop pretending otherwise."

Kade's whole body went rigid. "Absolutely not."

"It's her choice to make, Draven, not yours." Sorin's gaze slid to Lira, patient, waiting. "Isn't that rather the point of everything that happened at your Choosing Moon? Someone finally asking instead of deciding for you?"

The comment landed exactly where he'd aimed it, and Lira hated him a little for how precisely he'd aimed it — and hated herself a little more for how much it worked.

"Five minutes," she said. "In full view of both delegations."

They walked to the edge of the standing stones, just far enough to be out of easy earshot, and Sorin turned to face her with an expression that had lost its performative warmth and become, for the first time, something that looked almost like genuine curiosity.

"You don't know what you are yet," he said. "Do you."

"I know enough."

"You know a fraction." He studied her with an intensity that made her want to step back, though she held her ground on principle. "The prophecy doesn't name Kade Draven as the one who ends this war, Lira. It names Moonfire. And Moonfire has never, in four hundred years of recorded history, belonged to anyone but the woman who carries it. Not to the pack she's born into. Not to the man she's mated to. To her." His voice dropped, quieter, almost gentle. "I would treat that truth with a great deal more respect than the Alpha's household has shown you so far."

"You're trying to turn me against my own pack."

"I'm trying," Sorin said, "to make sure you understand you have a choice at all, which is more than anyone in Emberfall has bothered to tell you." He inclined his head, the picture of courtesy again, already stepping back toward his delegation. "Think on it. I'm not your enemy, whatever Draven's told you to believe."

When Lira turned back toward the Emberfall side, Kade was watching the two of them with an expression she'd never seen on him before — not the icy control from the Choosing Moon, not the raw guilt from the council room, but something sharper and more unguarded, jealousy sitting badly on a face built for command. It should have satisfied some petty part of her. Instead it only made the bond in her chest pull taut, insistent, entirely unasked for.

She was still turning that over when she noticed the servant.

He stood near the edge of Ashgrove's delegation, unremarkable in every way that mattered — grey tunic, downcast eyes, the careful invisibility of someone trained to be overlooked. It was only when he shifted his weight, reaching to adjust the strap of a satchel, that his sleeve rode up and Lira caught the flash of silver beneath it.

A spiral. Delicate. Unmistakable.

The same mark climbing her own arm was climbing his.

Her breath caught, and across the clearing, as if he'd felt the shift in her attention, the servant's eyes lifted and met hers for exactly one heartbeat before he looked away — long enough for Lira to see, with a chill that had nothing to do with the autumn wind, that he wasn't surprised to be recognized at all.