His Rejected Mate, His Hidden Heir

Chapter 26 — The Night Shift

He slept in his truck.

I know because I watched him from the window, standing in the dark of my living room with the curtain pulled back just enough to see the parking space beneath the streetlight. His truck was old — older than I expected for an Alpha, a battered silver Ford with mud on the wheel wells and a dent in the passenger door. He'd pushed the seat back as far as it would go, and even then, a man his size couldn't have been comfortable.

He could have compelled a room. Could have used his Alpha presence to take whatever he wanted from this small, human town. Could have demanded I let him stay in the apartment.

Instead, he curled up in the cab of his truck like a dog guarding a door, and he slept.

I told myself I didn't care. I told myself it was his choice, his problem, his ridiculous Alpha pride that wouldn't let him ask for help. I told myself all of these things while I stood at the window for forty-five minutes, watching the fog of his breath on the glass.

Then I went to bed.

* * *

I should have known the peace wouldn't last.

At 2:14 AM, the scream split the apartment like a lightning bolt.

I was out of bed before my eyes were fully open, my bare feet slapping the cold floor, my heart already in my throat. Kael's room. The door was open — I always left it open — and the light from the streetlamp spilled across his small bed.

Kael was sitting upright, his eyes blazing gold, his small body rigid and shaking. The air around him crackled with Alpha energy — I could feel it pressing against my skin like static electricity, making the hair on my arms stand up. His blanket was shredding. Not falling apart from wear — *shredding*, the fabric tearing itself apart as if invisible claws were raking through it.

"No, no, no — baby, it's okay." I crossed the room in three steps and reached for him.

The energy hit me like a wall. It was like pressing my hand against a live wire — not painful exactly, but *intense*, a buzzing current that made my teeth ache and my mark flare. I pushed through it anyway, wrapping my arms around Kael's small, trembling body.

"Mommy," he gasped, and his voice was wrong — too deep, resonant with something ancient. "Mommy, it *hurts*."

"I know, baby. I know. Shhh."

I held him tighter. His skin was burning — not fever-hot, but *wolf-hot*, the kind of heat that meant his body was trying to shift and didn't know how. I'd seen this before, the night terrors that came with the full moon pull, but never this bad. Never with this much power bleeding off him.

I started the lullaby — my mother's lullaby, the wolf-tongue words that had always worked before. *Ailo, naro, viras te...*

Kael screamed. Actually screamed, his small hands fisting in my shirt, his claws — *claws*, real claws, just starting to emerge from his fingertips — catching in the fabric.

"Ailo, naro — "

The words weren't working.

His eyes were fully gold now, not flickering but *burning*, and the Alpha energy was building, building, pressing against the walls of the small room like something trying to escape. The lamp on his nightstand flickered. The window rattled in its frame.

I couldn't do this alone.

The thought was a physical pain, sharper than the energy pressing against my chest. I'd been alone for four years. I'd done everything alone. And now, standing in my son's room while his power spiraled out of control, I had to admit what I'd been refusing to admit since Kane walked into the diner.

I needed him.

I made it to the front door in six steps, yanked it open, and there he was.

Not climbing out of his truck. Not groggily waking up. Already there, already on the stairs, already moving, like he'd felt it through the bond the moment it started. His hair was wild, his eyes were bright in the darkness, and he was wearing nothing but a t-shirt and jeans he must have slept in.

"Kael?" he said, and his voice was sharp with something I'd never heard in it before — not Alpha command, not cold authority. Fear. Raw, unguarded fear.

"Nightmare," I said. "He's — I can't — the lullaby isn't working."

Kane didn't ask questions. He didn't hesitate. He moved past me into the apartment, following the sound of Kael's ragged breathing, and I followed him.

He stopped in the doorway of Kael's room.

For a moment, he just looked. At the boy with the golden eyes and the crackling energy and the claws emerging from his small fingers. At the shredded blanket and the rattling window and the flickering light. At his son, losing control of something vast and terrifying inside him.

Then he moved.

He didn't cross the room. He didn't reach for Kael with Alpha authority or try to command the wolf down. Instead, he lowered himself to the floor — sat down, cross-legged, in the middle of the room, below Kael's eye level. Making himself smaller. Less threatening. The opposite of everything an Alpha was supposed to do.

"Hey," he said. His voice was low and steady, a rock in the middle of a raging river. "Hey, little wolf. I hear you're having a rough night."

Kael's golden eyes fixed on him. The energy around him didn't diminish, but it shifted — less like a storm, more like a question.

"My bones hurt," Kael whispered.

"I know," Kane said. "I know exactly how that feels. Like they're trying to rearrange themselves, right? Like there's something inside you that's too big for your skin?"

Kael nodded, a tiny, desperate motion.

"There is," Kane said. "And it's okay. It's supposed to be there. You just need to let it know who's in charge."

"How?"

Kane closed his eyes. And he began to sing.

It wasn't the wolf-tongue lullaby I'd been using. It was something else — a melody I didn't recognize, low and warm and *old*, the kind of song that felt like it had been sung in the dark for a thousand years. The words weren't in English, weren't in wolf-tongue either — some older language, something that lived in the spaces between.

Hush now, little warrior, the moon is your friend...

I didn't understand the words. But Kael did.

The gold in his eyes flickered. Dimmed. His claws retracted, the small fingers relaxing, releasing my shirt. His breathing slowed, evening out, the ragged gasps smoothing into something steadier. The Alpha energy withdrew, pulling back like a tide, until the room was just a room again — small, warm, quiet.

Kael looked at Kane with eyes that were gray again, just gray, exhausted and grateful and *trusting* in a way that made my chest ache.

"How do you know that song?" Kael asked, his voice small and sleep-rough.

Kane's voice broke on the next word. "My mother sang it to me too."

It was such a small thing. A song. A memory. A thread connecting a father to a son through a woman neither of them had known — Kane's mother, who had died when he was twelve, who had sung this same melody in the dark of his own childhood bedroom, who had calmed his own wolf when it raged out of control.

Kael reached out.

His small hand — no claws, no gold, just the hand of a four-year-old boy — touched Kane's face. Palm against cheek, fingers against stubble, the touch electric and ancient and *right*.

Kane closed his eyes.

He leaned into it. Like a man dying of thirst finally finding water. Like a wolf that had been howling alone for four years suddenly hearing an answer. His hand came up — slowly, so slowly, giving Kael every chance to pull away — and covered Kael's small fingers with his own.

The bond pulsed. Not between me and Kane — between all three of us. A single, bright note that resonated through the apartment, through the walls, through my mark and my bones and the place in my chest where I kept everything I couldn't say.

Family,* the bond whispered. *This is what family feels like.

I stood in the doorway and watched my son calm my son's father, and I understood, with terrible clarity, that some doors, once opened, could never be closed again.

"Stay," Kael said. Not a question. Not a request. The command of an Alpha pup who had just discovered that the world contained something he'd been missing.

Kane opened his eyes. They were wet. I'd never seen his eyes wet before.

"I'm staying," he said.

Kael nodded, satisfied. His hand dropped from Kane's face, and he yawned — a huge, jaw-cracking yawn that belonged to any ordinary four-year-old who had just survived something extraordinary. "Will you sing it again? When my bones hurt?"

"Every time," Kane said. "Every single time."

Kael's eyes were already closing. He curled into his pillow, small body finally relaxed, the storm passed, and within thirty seconds, he was asleep.

Kane stayed on the floor.

I stood in the doorway, my arms crossed, my mark burning, my heart doing something complicated and painful behind my ribs. I should have said something. Thank you. Get out. I don't need you. I'm fine.

Instead, I said: "You can't sleep in your truck."

He looked up at me. His eyes were dry now, but the rawness was still there, the crack in the wall he'd shown me without meaning to.

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. It's thirty degrees out and you're the size of a refrigerator. The couch pulls out."

Something flickered in his expression. Not a smile — Kane didn't smile, not that I'd ever seen — but something adjacent to it. A softening.

"I don't want to intrude."

"You drove three hundred miles to find me. You're already intruding. Might as well be warm while you do it."

He stood up. He was very close to me in the narrow hallway, close enough that I could smell him — pine and cold air and something underneath that was just *Kane*, that had always been just Kane, that my mark and my bond and some traitorous part of my soul recognized like coming home.

"Nova," he said, and his voice was rough, scraped raw. "Thank you. For letting me — "

"Don't," I said. "Don't thank me. I'm doing this for him, not for you."

He nodded. Like he'd expected nothing less. Like he knew, better than anyone, that he didn't deserve my gratitude.

I got him a blanket and a pillow from the hall closet. I showed him how the couch folded out. I didn't meet his eyes when I handed him the linens, and he didn't try to make me.

"Goodnight, Kane."

"Goodnight, Nova."

I closed my bedroom door and leaned against it, pressing my palm flat over the mark on my neck. It pulsed — warm, steady, alive. Not the cold pulse of a rejected bond or the desperate throb of a bond in distress.

Something new.

Something that felt dangerously like *together*.

Down the hall, I heard the creak of the pullout bed, and then, so quiet I might have imagined it, a man humming a lullaby to an empty room — practicing, maybe, for all the nights to come.

I pressed my hand harder against the mark and closed my eyes.

This is either the beginning of everything or the end of everything.

The bond pulsed once, warm and sure, and didn't bother to specify which.