My informant delivered the news in the same careful, clinical tone he used for every report, as though he understood exactly how much damage the words might do and had decided the only way to survive delivering them was to strip away anything that might make them land harder.
“There’s a rumor circulating among the border patrols,” he said.
“About what happened in Ashford. About the Alpha’s reaction to two children he encountered during the rogue attack there.”
“What reaction?”
“He announced, in front of witnesses, that they were his sons.”
I kept my expression perfectly composed, the same discipline I’d spent five years perfecting, though something underneath the surface had gone entirely cold, a fear I recognized instantly because I’d been circling its edges for months already, ever since the accord had first put Maeve in a room powerful enough to make my own position feel suddenly, catastrophically fragile.
“Boys,” I repeated, keeping my voice light.
“How many, exactly.”
“Two. Twins, from what the patrol reported. Roughly five years old.”
Five years old.
The math arrived instantly, unbidden, a calculation I’d been avoiding making for exactly the length of time it took to complete.
Five years since the rejection.
Five years since Maeve had walked out of Hellfang bleeding and pregnant with a child I’d made sure everyone believed had died with her in the rogue attack that followed.
She hadn’t died.
And apparently, neither had the pregnancy.
“Dismiss him,” I said, and waited until the informant had left before I allowed myself even a fraction of the fear currently threatening to overwhelm every careful calculation I’d built my entire position on.
I found myself in Elara’s nursery an hour later, watching my daughter sleep, her dark hair fanned across the pillow, her chest rising and falling in the peaceful, unaware rhythm of a child who had no idea her entire existence rested on a foundation about to collapse beneath her.
If Darius’s paternity claim about Maeve’s sons was ever confirmed — if word spread that he had two legitimate heirs, born of his true mate, both of them presumably already displaying wolf traits five years ahead of my own daughter’s complete, damning absence of them — the comparison alone would be catastrophic.
Someone, eventually, would ask the obvious question my entire position depended on nobody ever asking out loud: why did the Alpha’s confirmed son show nothing, while two boys born to the woman he’d rejected showed everything a proper heir should show by that age?
I’d built five years of careful management around a story that was already fraying at the edges.
Maeve’s return with confirmed sons didn’t just threaten my position.
It threatened to expose every single lie underneath it, one after another, in an order I had no ability to control once the unraveling actually started.
I left Elara sleeping and found Darius in his study, exactly where I expected him, the same posture he’d carried for weeks now, staring at something on his desk that I already knew, without needing to check, was the healer’s log he thought he’d hidden well enough that I’d never find it.
“I heard about Ashford,” I said, keeping my voice carefully neutral.
Something flickered across his face, quick and unguarded, before he composed himself back into the distant mask he’d worn around me for years.
“I don’t want to discuss it.”
“I think we need to discuss it.” I sat across from him, arranging myself with the same careful precision I brought to every interaction that actually mattered.
“If there’s truth to what happened, Darius, it changes things. Significantly. For both of us.”
“For you?” Something sharp entered his voice.
“How does it change anything for you?”
I hadn’t meant to say it, not so plainly, and I recovered quickly, smoothing the slip into something that sounded like simple concern instead of the calculated fear it actually was.
“Our son’s position, obviously. If you have other children — legitimate ones, confirmed ones — questions will arise about succession. About which line the pack considers primary.”
“He’s my son. That’s not in question.”
“Isn’t it?” I let the words sit there, deliberately vague, watching him closely enough to see whether the seed I’d just planted might grow into something I could use later, some doubt about his own child’s legitimacy that could serve as cover if my larger deception ever came apart.
He didn’t take the bait, too consumed by his own obsession with Maeve’s sons to spare any suspicion for the one he already believed was his.
I left him to his healer’s log and his guilt, and I retreated to my own rooms to think, properly, without an audience, about exactly how much time I actually had left.
That conclusion arrived the same way it always did lately, inevitable and unwelcome no matter how many times I turned the problem over looking for an angle I’d missed.
If Maeve’s sons were confirmed, the comparison alone would eventually surface.
If Elder Marrow kept pushing his quiet questions, someone competent enough would eventually connect the absence of any wolf sign in my own child to a pattern too damning to explain away with platitudes about children developing at different rates.
I needed something more permanent than platitudes.
I needed a solution that didn’t depend on nobody ever asking the right question at the right time, because five years of careful management had taught me that eventually, someone always did.
I sat with the problem long into the night, turning over options I’d have dismissed as unthinkable a year ago, back when my position had still felt secure enough to afford patience.
Patience was a luxury I no longer had.
Maeve’s return, powerful and protected and apparently in possession of exactly the kind of proof my own fraud couldn’t survive standing beside, had erased whatever margin for slow, careful maneuvering I used to believe I had.
I thought of Elara sleeping peacefully, unaware that her entire life had been built on a lie that was rapidly running out of road to run on.
I thought of Maeve’s sons, whoever they actually were, confirmed heirs of the true bloodline, secure in a family that had chosen to protect them fiercely from the moment they were born.
An idea began to form, slow and cold, the kind of idea I would have recoiled from a year ago and now found myself circling with something closer to grim, desperate calculation than horror.
If the pack ever needed to see a confirmed heir with Alpha blood and legitimate standing — a boy who could stand beside Darius’s throne with no question of his parentage — perhaps the exact shape of that heir didn’t need to be the child I currently had.
Perhaps, if my own daughter’s position became truly untenable, there was another child available who already carried exactly the bloodline everyone would eventually demand proof of.
I didn’t let the thought fully form that night.
I told myself I was simply cataloging options, the way I always did when cornered, weighing possibilities I had no actual intention of pursuing.
But I understood, lying awake long after the house had gone silent around me, that I’d just crossed some quiet, internal threshold I wasn’t going to be able to walk back from easily.
Whatever it eventually took to protect what I’d built, I was no longer willing to rule anything out.
Not even the unthinkable.