Chapter 9: The necklace.

Lyra POV

The door opened, and the man who walked through it was not what I expected.

He was taller than Asher, which was saying something, with broad shoulders and a build honed by years of combat training. His dark hair was cropped short, and his jaw was hard and angular, carved from the same stone as the walls around us. But it was his eyes that stopped me. They were grey, pale, striking grey, the color of a winter sky just before a storm.

I had seen those eyes before. Every morning, in the mirror.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment, staring at me with an expression I couldn't read. I had expected suspicion or curiosity, but what I saw on his face was deeper than both, almost like pain.

Dr Calloway hovered behind him, clipboard pressed to his chest, visibly nervous. "Alpha Dorian, this is the woman our patrol unit brought in last night. She was—"

"Leave us." Dorian's voice was quiet, but it carried the weight of his Alpha command that was not accustomed to being questioned.

The doctor hesitated, glanced at me, then bowed to the Alpha before stepping out of the room and closing the door behind him. 

Finally, we were alone.

The man—Alpha Dorian — didn't move from the doorway. His eyes traveled from my face to the necklace at my throat, then back to my face. His chest expanded with a breath he seemed to be holding by force.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Lyra." I kept my voice steady. My fingers curled around the edge of the examination table. I had spent my entire life being scrutinized by people who held power over me, and every instinct I had was telling me to be careful. "Lyra Hartley."

Something flickered across his face at the name, but he didn’t say anything.

"The necklace," he said. "Where did you get it?"

"I've had it since I was a child. I don't know its origin."

"May I see it?"

I hesitated. The necklace was the one thing I had never taken off, the one constant in a life that had been built on shifting ground. Handing it to a stranger felt like handing over the last piece of myself I had left.

But something in his eyes — the way he was looking at me, as though I was a wound that had never healed — made me reach behind my neck and unclasp it.

I held it out towards him, averting my gaze as he crossed the room in three strides and took it from my palm with hands that were not entirely steady. He turned it over slowly, his thumb tracing the tarnished surface. Then he pressed his nail into a groove along the edge — a groove I had never noticed — and the pendant split open like a locket.

Inside was a crest. It was small, etched into the metal so perfectly that it didn't match the worn exterior. A crescent moon cradled between two wolves, their heads bowed, an ancient symbol I had never seen before.

I heard his sharp intake of breath, like he had been struck.

He closed his eyes, his jaw tightened. For a long moment, he said nothing, and the silence in the room was so dense I could hear my own heartbeat echoing off the stone walls.

"Where did you grow up?" His voice was rough now and scraped raw.

“At Ashford Dominion Pack,” I said quietly. 

“And your parents? Is your Dad an Alpha or—” he paused, his eyes straying to my stomach. “Your husband. You’re married, right?”

“Yes, Alpha,” I nodded. “I don’t know my parents. All I know is that I was taken in by the Beta Family, the Hartleys and grew up under the care before I married my husband who’s the Alpha?”

"And before that? There’s no recollection of what happened?"

I shook my head, wondering where all this questioning was going. 

"There was no before that. I was told I was found wandering alone with no parents, no pack identity, or name. Beta Hartley and his wife had no child back then, so they thought me a gift from the Moon Goddess and took me in.”

His hand closed around the pendant so tightly that his knuckles went white.

"You weren't found," he said. "You were lost. There's a difference."

I stared at him. "What are you talking about?"

He opened his eyes and looked at me, and I saw raw pain in his eyes. They were filled with anguish, and for a moment, I felt my heart tighten too, as though my body was indirectly responding to it. 

"This crest," he said, holding the pendant between us, "belongs to the Moonshard bloodline. The ruling family of the Alpha King's pack. It was forged for one person, the youngest daughter of Alpha King Aldric Moonshard." He paused. "She disappeared twenty years ago. She was three years old."

The room spun. I stared at him, hoping he would say he was bluffing or something, but his expression was still serious.

"That's not—" I shook my head. "That's impossible. I'm an Omega. I have no bloodline, no lineage, no—"

"You have my mother's face." A small sob escaped his lips, and his voice trembled. "You have her exact face. I have looked at portraits of her every day of my life, and you are looking at me right now with her eyes."

I couldn't speak. My mouth opened, but nothing came out. The room was spinning slowly, the edges blurring, and I gripped the examination table to keep from falling.

"I'm Dorian Moonshard," he said. "Eldest son of Alpha King Aldric. And I believe you are my sister."

"No." The word came out before I could stop it, filled with terror. "No. I'm not — you have the wrong person. I'm nobody. I've always been nobody."

"You were never a nobody." His voice broke on the last word. "You were taken from us. And we have spent every single day since trying to find you.”

He tried to close the distance between us, but I raised my hand, stopping him. Was this a prank? Or was this a new method to lure people in and exploit them?

Stories of young women being exploited flitted into my memory. Was this it?

“Don’t come any closer,” I said, glaring at him and using the last reserve of my strength. “You must be mistaken; I am not your sister.”

He must have noticed that I was afraid because he moved back and, without a word, pulled a phone from his jacket. He scrolled through it for a few minutes and made two short but urgent calls. I was dazed. I couldn't process the words. My head was filled with white noise and the distant, impossible echo of what he had just said.

You were taken from us.

No, this was too easy. This is a scam, right? I have to stay awake and see this through. 

I had spent the last twenty years of my life believing I was unwanted. That I had been discarded, abandoned, thrown away by parents who didn't care enough to keep me.

Every time the Hartleys reminded me to be grateful, every time Asher looked through me with eyes filled with disdain, every time a pack member bowed to my title while their eyes said you don't belong here — I had swallowed it. Because I believed, at the deepest level of my being, that I was the kind of person the world had no place for.

And now a stranger with grief carved into his face was telling me that someone had been looking for me the entire time.

Within twenty minutes, two more men arrived. They came through the door shoulder to shoulder — one lean and sharp-featured with dark eyes that missed nothing, the other younger, softer around the edges, with ink staining his fingers and an expression caught somewhere between hope and devastation.

The lean one stopped three steps into the room, and our gazes locked onto each other. He didn’t move. His throat worked for a moment before he turned back, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. 

The last one, who was the youngest of three, didn’t stop at the door like his brothers. He crossed the room, dropped to his knees in front of the examination table, and looked up at me with a face that held nothing back.

"It's her," he whispered. He wasn't talking to me. He was talking to his brothers, but his eyes never left my face. "Dorian. It's her."

Dorian knelt beside him. The Alpha of this pack, on his knees on a clinic floor, looking up at me like I was the answer to a prayer he had never stopped saying.

“This is Cassian and Leith,” Dorian murmured. “I know this is overwhelming and strange, but if you know how much we’ve searched for you, all these years, never for once—” he trailed off, his eyes filling up with tears. “You’d understand our reaction and the rush of everything. We lost you once, but we are never losing you again.”