A Hundred Nights in Her Bed and I'm the Alpha King's Hidden Daughter

Mira

Cayden's breathing had gone deep and even. I counted to sixty, then counted again. His fingers loosened around the wooden wolf, and his mouth fell open the way only children's mouths do — completely slack, completely trusting.

I eased off the mattress one inch at a time. The bedframe didn't creak. I'd memorized its pressure points months ago.

The hallway was mine.

Downstairs, the study door had a lock that stuck unless you lifted the handle while turning the key. I did both in one motion, stepped inside, and pressed my back against the wood until the bolt caught.

The room smelled like old paper and cold tobacco. Caleb's desk sat in the center, but I moved past it to the far wall where the bookshelves climbed floor to ceiling. My fingers walked along the top shelf — too high for anyone to reach without the stepladder I'd hidden behind the curtain three years ago.

The book was wedged between a water-stained atlas and a volume on territorial law nobody had opened since the 1980s. A children's picture book. *The Moon Who Forgot Her Name.* My mother had read it to me every night until I was six.

I cracked the spine. The pages fell open to the center, where the binding was thickest, and there it was — folded seven times into a square no bigger than a postage stamp. Sheepskin parchment, yellowed at the creases, soft as cloth from years of being pressed flat.

My father had pushed it into my palm the night I left Moonveil. His hand had been shaking. Mine hadn't. I'd been too certain to shake.

I unfolded it now, one crease at a time. The parchment resisted, then gave, like something waking from a long sleep.

Blank. Both sides. Just the faint grain of the skin and a watermark I could only see when I tilted it toward the desk lamp.

I pressed the parchment against the back of my neck.

The crescent mark flared — not with heat this time, but with recognition. The same vibration from the hallway upstairs, the tuning-fork hum that lived in my spine. The parchment drank it in.

When I pulled it away, the surface had changed.

Three words, written in ink that shifted between silver and black depending on the angle. Moonveil script. A language I hadn't read aloud in seven years but could never forget, the same way you never forget how to breathe.

*The path is open.*

My throat closed. I pressed my knuckles against my mouth and held them there until the urge to make a sound passed.

The back door opened without noise. I'd oiled the hinges myself last autumn, telling Caleb it was because the squeak woke Cayden during naps. He'd nodded and gone back to his phone.

The yard ended at a low stone wall. Beyond it, the tree line began — birch and pine, dense enough to swallow sound. I climbed the wall, dropped to the other side, and kept walking until the house was a smudge of light behind me.

The moon hung low and fat through the branches. Three-quarters full. Close enough.

I opened my mouth and spoke my mother's name in the old tongue.

"Lysara Sovereign."

The syllables left my lips and the forest reacted. Every bird in the canopy launched at once — a violent upward rush of wings and panic, branches snapping, feathers catching moonlight as they scattered. The noise was enormous for three seconds, then absolute silence.

I waited.

Wind moved through the pines. It carried nothing at first — just cold air and the smell of wet bark. Then, underneath, threaded so finely into the breeze that a non-Moonveil ear would have mistaken it for rustling leaves, a voice.

It was crying.

"Mira."

My mother's voice. Older than I remembered. Rougher at the edges, like fabric worn thin from too much handling.

"Mira, is it you?"

"It's me."

A sound came through the wind — half gasp, half sob. The kind of sound a woman makes when she's been holding her breath for seven years and someone finally tells her she can stop.

"Your father said — he said you'd never —"

"I know what he said." My voice cracked on the last word. I pressed my palm flat against the nearest tree trunk to steady myself. "He was almost right."

Silence. Then, carefully: "Are you safe?"

"For now."

"And the child?" Her voice dropped. "There is a child. Your father's seers told him years ago, but he wouldn't — he refused to speak of it."

"A boy." I swallowed. "His name is Cayden."

The wind stopped. Completely. As if the air itself had frozen around that name.

"Cayden Sovereign," my mother whispered.

"Yes."

Nothing for five heartbeats. Six. Seven.

Then a sound I'd never heard my mother make — a raw, broken noise that came from somewhere deeper than grief. She was trying to say something and the words kept collapsing before they reached her mouth.

"He has my hair," I said, because she needed something to hold onto. "Dark. Thick. And he sleeps with his arm over the pillow, the way you told me I used to."

"Mira." Her voice steadied, the way a blade steadies when it finds its edge. "Your father has had a convoy ready since the autumn equinox. Three days. We can be at the Ironclaw border in three days."

"Make it two."

"Two is — that's tight. The mountain pass —"

"Two days. The day after tomorrow is his birthday. He turns five." I closed my eyes. "I want him to blow out candles in this house one last time. I want him to have that memory before I take everything else away from him."

My mother was quiet for a long moment.

"Two days," she said. "We'll be there."

"Don't let Father send scouts ahead. Ironclaw patrols run a six-mile perimeter. If they pick up Moonveil scent before I'm ready —"

"I'll handle your father." A pause. "I've had seven years of practice."

Something that might have been a laugh escaped me. It tasted like rust.

"Mira." Her voice shifted again — softer now, almost fragile. "Come home."

The wind picked up. The connection thinned, her voice fraying at the edges like smoke pulled apart by a draft. I pressed my hand harder against the tree.

"Two days," I said.

Then she was gone. The wind was just wind again. The birds didn't return.

I stood in the dark for a while, my palm still flat against the bark, feeling my own pulse knock against the wood. Then I turned and walked back toward the house.

The stone wall. The yard. The back door, still unlocked.

The study light was on.

I stopped in the doorway.

I'd turned that lamp off. I was certain of it — the click of the switch was still fresh in my muscle memory, the small decisive sound of it.

The room looked the same. Bookshelves, desk, curtains drawn. But on the desk, next to the brass ashtray Caleb kept for show because he claimed he'd quit smoking two years ago, a cigarette sat in the tray.

Still lit.

A thin ribbon of smoke curled upward from the tip, undisturbed by any breeze. The ash was long — five minutes of burning, maybe six. He'd been here. Sat in this chair. Lit a cigarette. And left again before I came back through the door.

My eyes dropped to the desk surface.

A note. Small, cream-colored, torn from expensive stationery. The handwriting was looped and feminine — not mine.

Three words.

*I need you.*

No signature. None needed. I knew that handwriting. I'd seen it on gift tags at pack gatherings, on the card attached to the flowers Selene had sent when Cayden was born. Tasteful. Elegant. The penmanship of a woman who practiced her cursive the way other people practiced smiling.

The cigarette burned on, patient and thin, filling the room with smoke that had no right to exist in a house where my son slept.

I picked up the note between two fingers. Held it over the cigarette's glowing tip.

The paper caught. A small bright flame ate through the words — *I need you* — turning them to black curl and ash.

I set what was left in the tray beside the cigarette and watched them both burn down to nothing.

Two days.