Rejected Mate, Claimed by Three Alphas

Chapter 2

Luca POV

THE RUNNER ARRIVED at the Sill after midnight, half-frozen and stinking of fear.

I smelled him before he created the ridge sweat gone sour with urgency, the metallic bite of blood from a split lip where he'd fallen on the trail. Costel had him by the collar before his feet found flat ground, one hand already at the knife.

"Name," Costel said.

"Petru. Third house runner." The boy because he was a boy, maybe seventeen swallowed hard. "I carry the word for the Winter line."

The Winter line. The name that didn't exist anymore, according to every house in the valley. The dead bloodline. The purged family.

My family.

"Let him speak." I didn't raise my voice. Didn't need to.

Costel released him. The boy stumbled forward, rubbing his throat, eyes darting between the half-dozen men who'd materialized from the dark at the sound of his arrival. Our camp didn't look like much lean-tos built against the ridge, a fire kept low enough to be invisible from below but we moved like what we were. Soldiers.

"The old wolf is failing," the boy said. "Dragomir can't hold court without being carried to his chair. They're saying days, maybe weeks."

I absorbed this. Set it beside everything else I knew.

"Who sent you?" I asked.

"Lia. From inside the Hush House."

Lia. The name registered one of the quiet daughters, one of the network that still fed us scraps when they could. Brave or desperate. Usually both.

"And the succession?" Costel asked. He'd moved to my left shoulder, the position he always took close enough to counsel, close enough to countermand if he thought I was wrong.

"Tiffany." The boy said it was inevitable. "He rejected his intention tonight. Took a new one Florescu's daughter. Consolidating."

The fire crackled. Someone shifted in the dark behind me Soren, by the weight of his step. He'd been running the perimeter, and the cold still clung to his coat.

"So the leash comes off," Soren said. His voice carried that loose, easy quality it always did, even when he was talking about something that could get us all killed. "Our dear cousin finally gets his throne."

"He's not our cousin." The correction was automatic. Meaningless. Tiffany was Kane, we were Winter or had been, before Dragomir razed our holdings and put every Winter alpha to the sword. My father. My uncle. My brother, who'd been fourteen.

I was twenty when they came. Old enough to fight. Old enough to fail.

"What else?" I asked the boy.

"The rejected one the quiet daughter. Seraphina. He traded her. Binding gift to house Grigore."

The name meant nothing to me. Another quiet daughter. Another woman was treated as currency. The valley was full of them Dragomir's great peace had been built on silencing women he couldn't control. I noted it and dismissed it.

"Go," I told the runner. "Eat. Sleep. You leave at dawn."

He went. The camp settled.

It didn't settle.

Costel waited until the boy was out of earshot. Then he turned to me with that look the one that said he'd already decided what I should do and was extending the courtesy of letting me refuse.

"The seat is open, Luca."

"The seat is Tiffany's."

"The seat is contested." He stepped closer. Lowered his voice, though everyone here was ours twelve men who'd survived the purge and chosen exile over bending the knee. "If Dragomir dies without naming, any bloodline claimant can step forward. You have the blood. You have the right."

"I have twelve men on a frozen ridge." I kept my voice flat. Factual. "Tiffany has three hundred wolves and every major house's backing."

"You have something he doesn't." Costel's eyes were steady, dark in the firelight. "Legitimacy. The Winter line was the founding line. The valley knows it. They remember."

"The valley also remembers what happened to the last Winter who pressed a claim."

My father's head. On the gate of Dragomir's Hall. I was not going to say it. I didn't need to.

Costel exhaled a sharp sound through his teeth.

"Then what? We rot here? We watch him take it?"

"We survive."

"Surviving is not living, boy."

He was the only one who still called me that. He'd earned it he'd taught me to fight when my hands were still soft, and had dragged me out of the burning hold with my brother's blood on both our coats. I owed him more than I could repay.

I owed him more than obedience.

"The answer is no."

He held my gaze a moment longer. Then he nodded not agreement, but the acknowledgment that tonight was not the night I'd break. He turned and walked into the dark, toward the ridge where he kept his watch.

The camp breathed around me. Men settling back into their posts, the conversation already being replayed in whispers around the low fire. I could hear all of it. I chose not to listen.

Soren appeared at my right the other shoulder, the counterweight. Where Costel was blade and pressure, Soren was warmth and lateral thinking. Between them, they'd kept me functional for eleven years.

"He's not wrong," Soren said. Quietly. For me, not for the camp.

"I know."

"Doesn't mean he's right, either." He crouched by the fire, held his hands to it. His knuckles were split he'd been sparring with the ridgeline pines again, the way he did when he couldn't sleep. "But the math is changing. If Dragomir goes..."

"Then Tiffany takes the seat and nothing changes for us."

"Or Tiffany takes the seat and decides loose ends need tying." Soren looked up at me. No humor in his face now rare enough to notice. "We're at a loose end, Luca. We've always been. The only reason he hasn't come for us is that we're not worth the climb."

He was right. I knew he was right. I said nothing.

Soren stood, clapped my shoulder with one cold hand, and walked toward the lean-to where Victor would be or wouldn't be, because Victor rarely slept where you expected him to. He was somewhere on the ridge, in the dark, reading the wind the way other men read books.

I stayed by the fire. The moon was a blade overhead thin, sharp, offering no warmth. The valley spread below us, a darkness broken by the distant pinpricks of Kane holdings. Somewhere down there, a dying alpha clung to a throne he could no longer fill. Somewhere down there, a man I'd never meet was readying to claim it.

And I the last Winter. The blood-right heir to a line older than Dragomir's by three generations. I sat on a frozen ridge and did nothing.

My jaw ached. I unclenched it.

The fire burned lower. The men's whispers faded into sleep-breathing, and the wind picked up from the east, carrying the smell of snow and pine and something animal moving through the timber below.

Costel was not wrong. Surviving was not living. But living required a kind of ambition I'd cut out of myself the night they burned my home a deliberate amputation, clean and necessary. To want the throne was to become the thing that killed my family. A man who valued power over people.

I would not become that.

The alternative watch Tiffany consolidate until even this ridge wasn't safe I would address when it became immediate. Not before.

I banked the fire. Checked the watch rotation. Confirmed that the runner was fed and the perimeter was clean.

Then I lay on my bedroll and stared at the stars through the gap in the lean-to's roof and did not sleep.

Somewhere in the valley, the vacuum I refused to fill was already beginning to pull things into it. I could feel the draw not in my body but in the logic of the situation, in the way a position abandoned doesn't stay abandoned. Something would rush in to fill it. Someone.

If not me, then Tiffany. Unopposed. Unchecked.

And the twelve men sleeping around me the last of the Winter would have survived all these years for nothing.

I closed my eyes. My wolf stirred against its leash, a low rumble of disagreement I felt in my chest rather than heard.

Not yet, I told her. Not yet.

The wolf settled. Reluctantly.

Below us, in the valley, the throne sat empty and waiting, and I let it wait.