When My Rejection Revealed I Was Lycan Royalty

By the third morning, my body had stopped shaking, but the hollow place where the bond used to be still ached like a pulled tooth. I woke before dawn from habit—three years of grinding wolfsbane before sunrise doesn't leave a person easily—and found Maren already at the window, arms crossed, watching the tree line like it owed her something.

"You feel that?" she asked.

I did. It wasn't a scent. It was a pressure, faint and deliberate, like someone standing just outside a door and choosing not to knock.

Selene stirred low in my chest. *Not a threat,* she said. *Familiar.*

*Familiar how?*

She didn't answer. She rarely did when the answer would have cost her something.

The knock came at midmorning—three measured raps, not the frantic pounding Ironridge messengers used. Maren had her hand on the fire poker before I'd even stood up. When she cracked the door, a tall man stood on the porch in a plain gray coat, hands visible, posture too controlled to be anything but trained.

"Jade Ashford." He said my name like he already knew it wasn't the whole of it. "My name is Silas Vance. I mean you no harm. I'd like five minutes."

Maren didn't move from the doorway. "And if we say no?"

"Then I walk back into those trees and you never see me again." His eyes—gray, steady, too old for the rest of his face—found mine over her shoulder. "But I don't think that's what you want, Jade. I think you have questions, and I have answers I've been waiting twenty years to give you."

Something in my chest went very still. Selene didn't growl. She listened.

I let him in.

He didn't sit until I did, and even then he perched at the very edge of the bench like a man unused to comfort. "I've watched you since you were four years old," he said, no preamble, no softening. "I was there the week you were placed in Ironridge. I've reported on you every season since."

"Reported to who."

"Someone who couldn't come himself. Not yet." He held my gaze. "Someone who is, right now, receiving word of a silver wolf that dropped an entire pack hall to its knees, and who has not slept since he heard it."

The fire cracked. I said nothing, because my throat had closed around every question I had at once.

"He's furious," Silas said quietly, "but not at you. Never at you. At the mate who was supposed to prove himself worthy of what he didn't know he was holding—and failed in front of three hundred witnesses." A muscle worked in his jaw. "That's not a story I can finish today. I owe you more than a doorstep version of it. But I need you to understand something before tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"There's a summit. Alliance packs, hosted on Ironridge ground. A Lycan Prince is attending—officially for politics." His eyes didn't blink. "Unofficially, he's been sent to find you."

Maren's chair scraped back an inch. I didn't move.

"Ashley Voss has already had a security order drafted," Silas went on, flat, factual, a man delivering weather. "You're named a rogue-blooded Omega. Trespass charge if you're seen within a half-mile of the summit grounds. Gamma Voss is telling every visiting Alpha personally that Tripp's rejection of you was—his word—discernment."

I thought of the Quartermaster clapping along with his ledgers open on his desk. I thought of Ashley in ivory silk watching Tripp like a snare springing shut. Some small, tired part of me almost laughed.

"Let them post the order," I said. "I have no interest in her summit."

"You may not have to seek it out." Something almost like sympathy crossed his face. "Word travels faster than paper, Jade. What happened in that hall didn't stay in that hall."

He stood, buttoned his coat, and paused at the door. "I'll come back when I can tell you the rest properly. All of it. You deserve better than a doorstep, and so does he—the man I answer to." A beat. "He is not a good man, exactly. But he never stopped watching. That has to count for something, even if you decide later that it doesn't."

Then he was gone, folding back into the tree line as quietly as he'd come.

Maren rounded on me the second the door shut. "A Prince. Jade. A *Lycan* Prince, coming here, looking for—"

"I heard him."

She went quiet, watching me with an expression I didn't have a name for. Selene hummed low, unbothered, patient as stone.

That night, long after Maren's breathing evened into sleep, I stood at the window and let the cold air move against my face. Far off, past the tree line, past the border markers I could no longer see, something shifted on the wind. Not jasmine. Not Tripp's scent, dead and grey to me now. Something else—pine, cold rain, the electric hush before a storm breaks.

Selene lifted her head inside me, sharp and suddenly, entirely awake.

*There,* she said, and said nothing more.