Chapter 2: The Devil

KAEL

"It's a boy! You are warmly invited—"

I dropped it into the fire.

Gary stood three steps back. He always kept exactly three steps back when I was reading correspondence, close enough to answer, far enough to run. After six years as my beta, he had developed an excellent instinct for distances.

"Alpha Darius extends a formal invitation," he said. "A naming ceremony for the newborn. He specifically requests your presence."

I watched the paper curl and blacken. A naming ceremony. The man had finally managed to produce a child and he wanted me to stand in a hall and applaud.

"Small man," I said. "Large occasion."

Gary said nothing. That was the correct response.

My throne had been built on the bodies of my father and my brothers, taken in the year I turned twenty-four, held through five years of war that hadn't fully ended. I had killed more men than I could name.

The packs called me The Reaper and stayed out of my borders and prayed their treaties held. The elders said Moon Godness herself had cursed me, no fated mate, no heir, no future beyond the violence I was good at.

I had never found that particularly troubling. Until lately.

"He also mentions," Gary said carefully, "a gift. Several she-wolves. Strong constitution. High fertility ratings. His physicians ran assessments." He said it the way he said everything about women. Like inventory. Breeding stock with paperwork.

"How generous."

"He thought you might—"

"If any of them are spies," I said, "or women playing games for their home packs, I'll use it as grounds to end the treaty early and take his territory while his people are still celebrating."

Gary's expression did the thing it did when he was deciding whether to speak.

"The treaty has a hundred days remaining," he said finally.

"I'm aware."

"The other packs would view an unprovoked—"

"Let them view it however they like." I turned the empty glass in my hand. "I haven't lost a war yet. I don't plan to start."

“Please be joking. I implore you to extend a bit of grace befitting of your station.”

I sighed, leaning further into my chair. “Fine. Let’s say he has decided to celebrate what little he can, but maybe his Luna wishes to celebrate never having to suffer him in bed again.”

Gary fell quiet again. Then, because he had never once in his life learned when to stop, he said:

"My king. The matter of an heir. The elders have asked me to raise it again — if you would consider, even briefly, the possibility of—"

"Gary."

"Yes."

"If you finish that sentence," I said, "I will sew your mouth shut myself."

He closed his mouth.

I set the glass down.

"Tell Holt I'll attend." I looked at what remained of the invitation — gray ash, edges still glowing. "And tell him he'd better hope this ceremony gives me something worth the journey. Otherwise, he'll spend the rest of his life wishing he hadn't invited me."

---

LYRA

I woke to cold stone and dried blood.

The cell was small and damp. My body had been remade wrong overnight, everything below my hips a single continuous bruise, my shoulder seized where I had fallen. A guard stood over me, already holding shackles.

"You're conscious," he said, like it was an inconvenience. "Pack custom. Rejected mates get classified as rogue. Alpha Holt's given the order, you're being escorted to the border at dawn."

Rogue. No pack, no protection, no wolf. In the current state of the territories — war, plague, Alphas taking what they wanted from anyone traveling alone, it was a death sentence delivered politely.

I wasn't listening to him properly. Something was pulling at me from the inside, a tugging beneath my sternum that had nothing to do with the rejection wound. Something was wrong. I couldn't name it. I just knew, the way I had known things about my body for nine months, the way a mother knows, that my son was not all right.

Then Darius's voice hit like a wall.

Lyra. Get here. Now.

Alpha Voice, full force. It hit every instinct I had. My ears rang. The guard grabbed his own head and swore.

They half-dragged me down the hall. I smelled it before I saw it, something sweet and wrong, thin and metallic, the particular quality of a body fighting hard.

The door opened onto disaster.

A row of physicians kneeled on the floor, heads down, instruments laid out and useless. Serena stood near the window, very still, her face controlled in the way of someone who was frightened and didn't want to show it.

She was holding my son.

He was the color of a bruise. His mouth was open but the sound coming out barely qualified as crying — a hoarse, broken pulling of air, interrupted by small convulsions. His lips were turning blue. His hands weren't making fists anymore.

That's my child.

Darius hit me before I could take a step.

The slap sent me sideways into the doorframe. My ear went white with noise. He was already shouting, something about my body, my blood, my defective genetics producing a sickly child. Serena's voice joined his from across the room, sharper, more precise, the kind of blame that had been prepared in advance.

I didn't hear any of it.

I only saw my son's chest barely moving.

One of the physicians spoke from the floor, forehead still touching stone: "We believe — with respect — that the infant may require contact with his birth mother. In the first days, the scent bond—"

"What if she poisons him further?" Serena said.

I was already moving.

I crossed the room and held out my arms.

Serena looked at me the way she might look at something that had tracked mud across clean floors. But the baby was dying, and everyone present knew it, and she loosened her grip.

He was lighter than I expected.

I pulled him against my chest and felt the exact moment he registered my scent — a full-body stillness, like something long-held finally releasing. He turned his head. He found what he was looking for. He latched on and fed with the urgency of someone who had been waiting too long for something they needed.

The room was quiet.

I looked down at his face. I had heard his voice twice. I had carried him for nine months. And this was the first time I had seen him — really seen him, his eyes shut, his forehead creased, his fist curled tight against my skin like he was holding on.

The blue was fading from his lips.

Pink came up through his cheeks. Down to his fingers. Into the soles of his feet.

For right now, in this room, with his weight in my arms and his heartbeat against mine, he was going to be all right.