His Rejected Mate, His Hidden Heir

Chapter 20 — Blood Calling to Blood

The dream came on a Tuesday.

Not the usual dream — not the running, not the forest, not the vast dark thing that followed at a distance it never closed. This was different. This was *real*, the way dreams are real when they're not dreams at all but visions, bleeding through a bond I'd spent four years trying to kill.

I was standing in a room I'd never seen. Large. Stone walls. A fireplace with no fire. A long table, bare except for a single chair, and in that chair—

Kane.

He was older. Four years older, which made him thirty-two, though he looked like he'd aged a decade. The storm-gray eyes were the same, but the face around them was harder, sharper, like someone had taken a chisel to the bones. His jaw was clenched. His hands — those large, capable hands that had marked me without knowing what they were doing — were pressed flat against his own chest, over his heart, over the mirror of my mark.

He was alone.

The Great Hall of IronClaw — because that's where this was, I recognized it from the one time I'd been allowed inside to serve at a council dinner — was empty at 3 AM. The fire was dead. The windows were black. And Kane sat in a chair built for an Alpha, in a room built for a king, and he was the most alone person I'd ever seen.

I felt what he felt.

The bond was a doorway now, cracked open by the surge of Alpha energy from my son's display at the park, and through it came *everything*. The hollow ache that lived in his chest like a second heart, beating out of rhythm. The wolf pacing inside him, restless and unsatisfied, howling at a moon it couldn't reach. The guilt — thick and black and constant — that ate at him the way acid eats at metal.

The marking was a mistake. She deserves nothing from me.

I heard the words again, the same words I'd heard through the wall four years ago, but now I heard them *from the inside*, and the context was different. He wasn't dismissing me. He was destroying himself. The mistake wasn't me — it was *the marking itself*, the frenzy that had stolen his control, the violation he'd committed without consent. He despised himself for it.

I hurt her. I marked her without choosing. Without asking. The wolf took over and I couldn't stop it and she looked at me like I was a monster.

The thought wasn't words. It was feeling — raw, unprocessed, leaking through the bond like water through cracked stone. I tasted his self-loathing on my tongue, metallic and bitter.

The vision shifted.

Kane was fighting — a border skirmish, maybe, or a challenge I couldn't see. He moved like a blade, efficient and brutal, and when it was over, he was bleeding from a gash across his ribs and he wouldn't let the healer touch him. He sat alone in the dark, pressing his hand against the wound, and I felt the pain like it was my own.

I deserve this.

Another shift. He was in his quarters — the Alpha's quarters, east wing, a room I'd never seen but could feel now through the bond like I was standing in it. Sparse. A bed. A desk. A window that looked out at the forest.

And a drawer.

He opened it. Inside, folded carefully, was an apron. White cotton, stained at the hem, fraying at the ties. My apron. The one I'd left behind the night I fled — I'd forgotten it, left it hanging on the hook by the kitchen door, and he'd kept it. For four years, he'd kept it in a drawer like a wound he wouldn't let heal.

He didn't touch it. Just looked at it. Then closed the drawer.

The vision shifted one more time.

Kane was asleep. And in his dream, he was standing in a forest — not the IronClaw forest, somewhere else, somewhere green and gold and warm. He was reaching for something. A silhouette. A woman's shape, just out of focus, her back to him. And beyond the woman, a sound — a child's laugh, high and bright and achingly familiar.

He reached. His fingers brushed the woman's shoulder. She began to turn—

He woke up.

The sound he made wasn't quite a howl. It was something rawer, more broken, the sound of a man who'd been reaching for the same dream for four years and could never quite touch it.

The vision snapped off like a light.

* * *

I gasped myself awake, my mark burning, my heart pounding, my pillow damp with sweat.

He kept the apron.

The thought was absurd. Stupid. I should be thinking about the implications — the bond was open, *two-way*, he could potentially see me the way I'd just seen him — but all I could think about was the goddamn apron, folded in a drawer, preserved like a relic.

He kept it for four years.

The bond pulsed with his loneliness, and I felt it — God help me, I felt it — like it was my own. The ache. The emptiness. The wolf pacing in its cage. The dream of reaching and never touching.

I pressed my hand over my heart and whispered into the dark: "Stop. Please stop."

The bond didn't answer.

It never did.

He kept the apron. After four years, he kept it in a drawer like a wound he wouldn't let heal. The bond pulsed with his loneliness, and I felt it — God help me, I felt it — like it was my own. I pressed my hand over my heart and whispered into the dark: "Stop. Please stop." The bond didn't answer. It never did.