Rejected While Pregnant Returned As The Silver Queen

Chapter 12

Chapter 12 — The Window (Kade)

Pack law says a traitor's belongings burn.

Kade Sinclair had broken exactly one law in his life, and he had broken it every day for five years.

The room was on the third floor of the packhouse, at the end of the east hall, and no one entered it but him. Her mending basket sat where she'd left it, a shirt of his still folded over the rim, needle parked mid-seam. Her second cloak hung on the door peg. On the sill, a jar of flowers from the north ridge had dried five years ago into brown paper ghosts, and he had never once been able to throw them out, because she had picked them the last morning of the world, laughing, telling him they were weeds and she was going to make him like them anyway.

The elders had come with torches the week after the exile. Law is law, Alpha. The traitor's things burn.

He had stood in the doorway and told them to start the fire with him, then. They'd looked at his face and gone back downstairs.

That was the first year — the room, and the rage, and the search parties.

He'd sent them out before the frost even broke. Trackers to the border. Riders to every market town. Coin he didn't have to informants who smelled his desperation and milked it. He told the council it was justice — a traitor escaped custody; the rogues on the road proved conspiracy; find her. He told himself the same lie in the same words, because the truth underneath it had teeth: find her, find her, she was pregnant and screaming that she was innocent, find her.

The second year, he dragged the river.

Every thaw, every low-water month, he was down at the ravine with ropes and hooks and grim volunteers, walking the banks until his boots rotted. The pack whispered. The Alpha's gone mad. The Alpha talks to the water. He burned out three rogue dens that year on rumors of a dark-haired captive, and found only strangers, and paid for the raids in wounded men and political capital he never got back. The blight came. He barely noticed it arrive. That was the year the whispering changed from mad to cursed, and the year he stopped correcting either.

And in the autumn of that second year, on a gravel bar eleven miles downstream, a tracker's shout brought him running, and he knelt in the cold shallows and pulled her gray cloak off a snag with his own hands.

Torn at the shoulder. Stiff and dark down one side with old blood. The wound she'd taken from the rogues, soaked into wool, preserved in river cold like an accusation.

He didn't remember the walk home. Cole told him later he'd carried the cloak the whole eleven miles like something asleep.

That was the night his wolf stopped speaking.

Not died — he could still shift, still fight, still lead. But the voice that had lived alongside his since he was thirteen, the one that had howled mate the first time she'd brushed past him with a supper tray and howled wrong, wrong, WRONG on the night of the blood moon while he was too grief-blind to listen — it went silent as the bottom of a well. Grief, said the healers. Mourning bond, said the old wolves. A silence you earned, said the only voice he had left, which was his own, which never once let him sleep past dawn again.

He kept searching anyway. Third year. Fourth. Smaller parties, quieter, farther. Cole thought it was penance. The elders thought it was obsession. It was arithmetic: they had never found a body, and he could not stop doing the terrible sum of that, could not stop carrying the remainder, and he never — not once in five years — let himself finish the equation out loud, because hope had started to feel like something he was stealing from her.

Vanessa waited through all of it with the patience of a spider.

He'd let the betrothal stand because the council pushed and he was hollow and it cost him nothing to ignore. But every time she came close — every dinner she engineered, every grieving-widow touch on his arm — his skin crawled with a wrongness he had no name for, and his silent wolf turned its back in the dark of him, and he found somewhere else to be. Five years, and he had never once touched her. He used to think that was numbness.

He knew better now. The wolf had known. The wolf had always known. The wolf just wasn't speaking to him.

Now it never shut up.

MATE, it howled, every hour of every day since the gates. MATE — ALIVE — THERE — hurling itself against his ribs whenever her scent crossed a courtyard, whenever her voice carried down a corridor of the house she now ruled. Five years of silence, and the thing that came back wasn't the companion of his youth. It was raw and howling and it did not forgive him either.

So Kade stood where he stood every night since the royal column arrived: in the frozen courtyard below the east wing, in the dark, outside the reach of the door guards, looking up at one lit window.

The twins' room.

Knox slept the way he did everything — flung sideways across the bed, one arm hanging, conquering the mattress. Ash was awake at the desk again, small and straight-backed in the lamplight, reading with a pencil in his hand. Sons. His sons. Four years old and strangers, with his father's eyes and their mother's frost and a bedtime story where he was the monster.

That's the man who tried to poison us before we were born.

He hadn't. He knew that now with the whole of himself. It changed nothing about the shape of their fear, and their fear was his bill to pay, and so he stood in the cold and memorized them through glass — the only distance he was permitted, the only distance he'd earned.

"You'll freeze," Cole said, from the dark behind him. His Beta had stopped being surprised by the courtyard on the second night. Now he just brought two coats and wore both.

"I'm fine."

"You could ask her, you know. She's ice, not stone. An hour with them. Supervised. Guarded. You're their—"

"Don't." The word came out low. "Don't finish it. I rejected their mother in front of three hundred wolves, Cole. Whatever that word means, I unsaid my claim to it the same night." He watched Ash turn a page. "I don't get to ask. I get to earn."

"And if earning takes twenty years?"

"Then I'll stand here for twenty years."

Above them, the small figure at the desk went still. Then Ash set down his pencil, slid off his chair, and came to the window. He looked down into the courtyard — directly down, unerring, as if he'd known the whole time exactly where his father stood in the dark.

For a long moment, across the cold air and the lamplight and every unpaid debt between them, the Alpha of Ironridge and his four-year-old son looked at each other.

Then Ash reached up, and pulled the curtain shut.