His Rejected Queen

13

Chapter 13

Nobody came at midnight.

They came at nine, while the packhouse was still lit and occupied, which told me they were not trying to hide. Whatever Diana had called in, it was confident enough to arrive in plain sight.

I was in the upstairs corridor with Sage when the vehicles pulled through the Black Ridge gate. Two black SUVs, moving slow and deliberate up the long drive. I watched from the window with my arms crossed and my stomach tight and Sage pressed close beside me making a sound that was not quite words.

Damon appeared at the end of the corridor. “Luca wants you downstairs.”

I went downstairs.

Luca was in the entrance hall with four of his wolves and an expression that had gone very quiet in the particular way that meant something significant was being processed behind it. He looked at me when I came down and crossed to me immediately, dropping his voice low.

“Do you know the name Callum Voss,” he said.

I shook my head.

“Diana’s uncle. He runs the Northern Voss bloodline. Old money, old pack connections, significant council influence.” He watched my face. “He has a reputation for acquiring things he believes belong to him.”

“And he believes I belong to him.”

“He believes his family has a claim. Whether the document is real or fabricated, he is here to press it in person.” His eyes moved over my face. “You do not have to be in that room.”

“I am going to be in that room.”

He looked at me for one second. Then he nodded and stepped back and the front doors opened.

Callum Voss was nothing like Diana.

Diana was sharp and polished and operated through calculation and beauty. Her uncle was a different creature entirely. He was perhaps sixty, broad through the shoulders, with silver hair and the kind of face that had stopped trying to be likeable a long time ago. He moved through the entrance hall like a man who had never once walked into a room and questioned his right to be in it.

His eyes found me immediately.

And something happened in them that I did not like. Not desire, not quite. More like recognition. Like a man seeing something he had been looking for and had not been certain he would find.

“Aria Stone,” he said.

“Callum Voss,” I said back.

His mouth curved slightly. He looked at Luca. “Thorne. Thank you for receiving me.”

“I did not receive you,” Luca said pleasantly. “You arrived. There is a difference.”

Callum’s expression did not change. He reached into the jacket of his coat and produced a document, thicker than what Diana had shown at the meeting, bound with a council seal that looked considerably more official.

He held it out.

Luca took it. He opened it and read it and his face gave away nothing and then he handed it to me.

I read it.

It took me two readings to understand what I was looking at. The language was formal and dense but the substance of it assembled itself clearly enough. A bloodline agreement between the Stone family and the Voss family. Dated twenty two years ago, before I was born. My mother’s signature. My father’s. A promise that the female offspring of their union, if one existed, would be considered a Voss legacy ward upon reaching adulthood.

Not a mate claim. Not exactly. A ward agreement. Which was in some ways more binding.

I looked up from the document.

“My parents signed this,” I said.

“They did,” Callum said. “In exchange for Voss family protection during a period when the Stone bloodline was under considerable threat. Your father had enemies. Your mother made a practical decision.”

“She signed away her unborn daughter.”

“She secured her family’s survival.” He said it without apology. “You have been living under Voss protection your entire life without knowing it. Silver Creek accepted you because we asked them to. You were never an Omega, Aria. You were always under our umbrella. We simply allowed you to believe otherwise while we waited.”

The entrance hall was very still.

“Waited for what,” I said.

Callum looked at me with those flat assessing eyes. “For you to shift fully. For what you carry to manifest completely. We needed to be certain before we moved.”

“What I carry,” I repeated.

He opened his mouth.

“Do not.” Luca’s voice was quiet and absolute. He stepped forward, not aggressively, just enough to place himself in the line of space between Callum and me. “You will not discuss her bloodline or her wolf in this hallway like she is an asset you are evaluating. Whatever you have to say you will say to both of us together, in a room, with Black Ridge legal present.”

Callum studied Luca for a moment.

“You have developed an attachment,” he said. Not unkindly. More like a man noting a variable he had not accounted for.

“I have developed a position,” Luca said. “Which is that Aria is a guest of this pack and will be treated accordingly. Your document will be reviewed by my legal team tonight. If the claim is valid we will discuss a formal response through proper channels. If it is not valid you will leave Black Ridge land before morning.”

A pause.

“And if I choose not to wait for your legal team,” Callum said.

The temperature in the hall dropped.

Luca looked at him with black eyes that had gone completely flat and said nothing for a long moment, letting the silence do the work, and I watched Callum Voss, a man who clearly did not unsettle easily, recalculate.

“Tonight then,” Callum said. “I will wait for your legal review.”

He was shown to a guest room.

Diana, I noticed, did not come in from the SUVs. She stayed outside. I caught a glimpse of her through the window, standing by the vehicles with her arms wrapped around herself in the cold, and for just a moment she looked less like the woman who had smirked at my rejection and more like someone genuinely frightened.

Luca came to find me twenty minutes later. I was in the sitting room with Sage, who had been uncharacteristically quiet since Callum walked in, which told me the situation had graduated past the threshold where she felt commentary was appropriate.

He appeared in the doorway and looked at Sage.

Sage got up without a word and walked out and pulled the door closed behind her.

Luca crossed the room and sat down beside me on the sofa. Close. His knee touching mine, his arm along the back of the cushion behind me, and the warmth of him reached me and some of the cold tight thing in my chest loosened slightly.

“Tell me what you are thinking,” he said.

“My parents sold me before I existed.”

“They made a desperate agreement under threat. That is different.”

“Is it.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Yes. It does not make it right. But people under threat do not always have the luxury of right.”

I looked at my hands in my lap. “Diana was afraid of me in the garden. Callum just looked at me like I was something he had been waiting to collect.” I turned my head and met his eyes. “What do you think I am, Luca. Honestly.”

He held my gaze.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that you are something nobody has told the truth to. Not your parents, not Silver Creek, not Cole, and not the Voss family.” His hand moved from the back of the sofa to my shoulder, warm and steady. “I think whatever you are carrying is significant enough that multiple parties have been managing you toward their own interests your entire life without your knowledge.”

“That should terrify me.”

“Does it.”

I thought about it. About the rage that had woken up in me in the dirt outside Silver Creek’s ceremony hall. About the way Callum had looked at me like recognition. About Diana’s fear.

“No,” I said. “It makes me want to find out what I am before they can use it.”

Luca looked at me for a long moment.

Then he took my face in his hand, one hand, thumb at my cheekbone, and he kissed me. Slow and deep and thorough, the kind of kiss that is not about urgency but about certainty, about staking something quiet and absolute.

I turned into him and his arm came around me and I kissed him back and for a few minutes the ward agreement and Callum Voss and thirty days of council processing receded to somewhere distant and manageable.

When we broke apart he pressed his lips to my forehead and held them there.

“My legal team will have an answer by morning,” he said against my hair.

“And if the document is valid.”

He pulled back and looked at me with black eyes that were completely certain.

“Then we find a way to break it,” he said. “Because I did not put my hand on your back in front of Cole Rivers to hand you to someone else a week later.”

I looked at him.

“Luca.”

“I know,” he said. “I know the timing. I know what you are still carrying. I am not asking you for anything tonight.” His thumb moved against my cheekbone. “I am just telling you where I stand.”

I covered his hand with mine.

“I know where you stand,” I said quietly.

He held my gaze for a moment longer.

Then his phone buzzed on the cushion beside him and he looked at it and his expression shifted.

He stood up.

“My legal team found something in the document,” he said. His voice had gone very quiet. “Aria. The ward agreement has a counter clause.”

I stood. “What kind of counter clause.”

He looked at me across the sitting room with an expression I could not read.

“If the ward is claimed by an Alpha of equal or greater standing than the Voss bloodline before the ward agreement is formally invoked,” he said carefully, “the ward agreement is void.”

The sitting room was completely silent.

I stared at him.

He held my gaze and said nothing and let me do the math myself and when I finished doing it the air went out of my lungs entirely.

“Luca,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

“That would mean you would have to”

“I know what it would mean.”

We stood on opposite sides of the sitting room looking at each other and the weight of what he was not quite saying filled all the space between us and I did not know whether to step toward it or away from it.

“Get some sleep,” he said finally. “We have until morning.”

He walked out.

And I stood alone in the sitting room with my heart doing something enormous and terrifying and completely without precedent.

Because Luca Thorne had just told me, in the most careful and controlled way possible, that he was considering claiming me.

And the most devastating part was that every single part of me wanted him to.