His Rejected Mate, His Hidden Heir

Chapter 21 — Dreams of Fire

The second vision came three nights later.

This one was stronger. The door in the bond was wider now, cracked open by the first vision and not closing again, and what poured through was not loneliness but *memory*. His memory. Flooding into me like water through a broken dam.

I saw Kane through his own eyes.

He was standing in the Great Hall again — the empty hall, 3 AM, his nightly vigil — and his hand was pressed against the mark on his own chest. *His* mark. The mirror of mine, placed on his skin by the same moon that had placed mine, a bond sealed without either of us choosing it.

The mark pulsed under his palm. He felt it — the same way I felt it, a warm throb, a second heartbeat — and his jaw tightened.

There.* A whisper of something through the bond. Faint. Distant. South. *There.

He didn't know what it was. Didn't know *who* it was. But the wolf in him — the Alpha wolf, vast and restless and starving for something it couldn't name — was howling: *Find it. Find her. Find what's ours.*

He didn't move. He never moved. Four years of feeling the pulse and never moving, because moving meant acknowledging, and acknowledging meant facing what he'd done.

I marked her without her consent. I broke the most sacred law of the bond. I violated her and then I rejected her and she's gone and I don't deserve to find her.

The guilt hit me like a physical blow. Not my guilt — his. Four years of it, compressed into a single surge of emotion that made my eyes sting and my throat close and my hand go to my own chest where the mark burned.

Then the vision shifted.

Kane was in the training yard, fighting. Not a border skirmish this time — sparring, practice, the mindless repetition of a man who needed to exhaust his body so his mind would shut up. Darius was across from him, the Beta, loyal and steady and increasingly concerned.

"You need to rest, Alpha."

"I'm fine."

"You haven't slept in three days."

"I'm *fine*."

Darius didn't push. He'd learned, over four years, that pushing Kane about the bond was like pushing a wall — pointless and potentially painful. But I could feel Darius's worry through the bond's echo, the way a friend looks at someone they love and sees the cracks spreading.

Kane won the spar. Of course he did. He was an Alpha — stronger, faster, more ruthless than any wolf in the territory. But when it was over, he walked to the edge of the training yard alone, and his hand went to the mark on his chest, and the wolf in him whimpered.

South. It's south. She's south. Why can I feel her now? Why after four years of nothing?

The question was a knife in my heart.

Because our son pushed a boy across a playground, and the energy that released was enough to wake the bond. Because Kael's Alpha blood is so strong it's sending signals through a connection that should have died. Because you can feel your bloodline waking up, even if you don't know what it means.

The vision shifted again.

Night. Kane's quarters. The drawer.

He opened it again — the same drawer, the same apron, the same careful fold. But this time, he reached in and touched it. His fingers brushed the stained hem, and the bond *flared* — a surge of heat and longing and grief so intense it knocked the breath out of both of us.

He closed the drawer. Quickly. Like he'd burned himself.

The vision shifted one final time.

Kane was asleep. And in his dream, the forest was burning.

Not the peaceful green-and-gold forest of his other dreams. This one was fire and ash and smoke, and he was running through it, not away from something but toward it, toward a shape in the flames — a woman, a child, *his* — reaching, always reaching, and the fire was closing in, and the shape was getting further away, and he was screaming something I couldn't hear over the roar of the flames—

He woke up.

The sound that came out of him was a howl. A real one, raw and agonized, the sound of an Alpha wolf who'd lost his mate and his child and didn't even know they existed.

* * *

I woke up too.

My mark was on fire. Not the gentle pulse of the last three weeks — this was a conflagration, a brand, the bond screaming at me from both sides: *here I am, here he is, feel me, feel him, FEEL.*

I pressed both hands against my chest and held on.

"Stop," I whispered. "Stop it. Stop. *Stop.*"

The bond didn't stop. It pulsed and pulsed and pulsed, and with each pulse came the echo of his pain — his guilt, his loneliness, his four years of sleeping in a room with an empty drawer and a mark on his chest that he refused to acknowledge because acknowledging it meant admitting he'd destroyed the only person the moon had chosen for him.

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.

I sat in the dark until dawn, my hand on my mark, my son's steady breathing the only thing keeping me from drowning in a man's grief.

And somewhere, three hundred miles to the southwest, an Alpha sat alone in his quarters with a burned-closed drawer and a mark on his chest and the growing, terrible certainty that something was out there. Something he'd lost. Something the bond was trying to give back.

I don't want it,* I thought at the bond. *I don't want his grief. I don't want his guilt. I don't want to feel sorry for the man who rejected me.

The bond pulsed, warm and steady and patient, and it said nothing at all.

It didn't have to.

I already felt it.

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.