His Rejected Mate, His Hidden Heir

Chapter 23 — The Scent

It happened on a Thursday.

I was at work. The lunch rush had just ended — the last customer paying, Hector starting the grill cleanup, the normal post-rush lull settling over the diner like a held breath. I was behind the counter, restocking napkins and sugar packets, my mind a thousand miles away on Kael's birthday party list — cake or cupcakes? Balloons or streamers? Would Sophie bring her camera?

The mark on my neck pulsed.

Not the usual pulse — not the warm, distant throb I'd been feeling for weeks. This was *different*. Sharp. Immediate. Like a hook in my chest, pulling, pulling, *pulling*—

I dropped the napkin dispenser.

"Nova?" Mabel's voice, from the kitchen doorway. "You okay, honey?"

I wasn't okay. The pull was getting stronger by the second, a gravity I couldn't resist, and every nerve in my body was screaming the same word:

Him.

"Him," I whispered.

"What?"

But I couldn't answer, because the door of Mabel's Kitchen was opening, and the afternoon sun was pouring in, and silhouetted against that light was a figure I hadn't seen in four years but would recognize if I was blind and deaf and dead.

Tall. Broad. Shoulders that filled the doorframe.

He didn't come in. He just stood there, outlined in gold, and the mark on my neck *erupted* — not pain, not pleasure, but something in between, something that was both and neither, a sensation so overwhelming I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but feel.

Four years of running. Four years of hiding. Four years of building a life from nothing and praying to a moon I didn't believe in that he'd never find me.

And here he was. Standing in my doorway.

The coffee pot slipped from my fingers and shattered on the floor.

Mabel was saying something — my name, maybe, or a question, or a curse — but I couldn't hear her. All I could hear was the roaring in my ears. All I could feel was the bond, wide open, flooding me with *him* — his presence, his proximity, his Alpha energy rolling through the diner like a wave, and underneath it all, the thing that terrified me most:

Relief.

He was here. After four years. He'd found me. And some treacherous part of me — the part that was still connected to him by a silver thread that wouldn't die — was *relieved*.

His eyes found mine. Those storm-gray eyes I saw in my dreams, in my visions, in the mirror when Kael looked at me with his father's face.

And his eyes — *his* eyes — were fixed on me like I was the only thing in the world.

The coffee pot slipped from my fingers and shattered on the floor. Mabel was saying something, but I couldn't hear her. All I could hear was the roaring in my ears. All I could see was him. Kane. After four years. Standing in my doorway. And his eyes — those storm-gray eyes — were fixed on me like I was the only thing in the world.