Chapter 4

PRINCE KANE’S POV

I felt her reject me before I even opened my mouth.

That's the part nobody in that ceremony hall saw or understood. My wolf Ronin smelled her from across the room and went down on his knees inside my chest, for about 3 seconds before the rest of me caught up to what was happening. Mine, he growled. And that was the clearest thought he'd given me in twenty-six years of sharing this body.

Then I looked at my father. Magnus Ashford, who had that exact one expression of threat plastered across his face the very minute her scent hit the room. I had just a little time to figure out what happened next, and every single one of those moments, Ronin was screaming at me not to do what I already knew I had to do.

‘Don't!, he snarled. Don't you dare, Kane’!

But I did it anyway.

"I reject you," I said, and I made myself say it as cold and carelessly as I could. I made myself say it cruel, because a soft rejection would have made my father curious, and curious was the one thing I couldn't afford him to be.

I told myself it would keep her safe. I told myself the whole drive home, past the valet, past my mother calling my name in the hallway, past my own reflection in the elevator mirror that I couldn't stand to look at. I was still telling myself that hours later, curled up on the floor of my own bathroom, unable to stand, unable to breathe right, because it turns out a rejected true mate bond doesn't care one bit about your good intentions. It just eats you alive from the inside, one hour at a time, whether you meant well or not.

My mother found me there at 2 a:m in the morning. She didn't ask what happened. She'd been an Alpha's wife for thirty years; she already knew. She just sat down on the cold tile beside me in her silk robe and put a hand on my back, the way she used to when I was small enough to still let her.

"Your father will use this to his advantage," she said quietly. "Whatever this is. You know that."

"I know."

"Then why-"

"Because if he finds out what she is before I do, it won't matter what I did tonight to protect her." I never meant to say it out aloud. It came out anyway. "It'll already be too late."

She didn't ask what I meant. I think somehow she already suspected. She just stayed on that floor with me for a while, and then she left without another word.

Ronin wouldn't speak to me. Not one word, the entire night. He just paced, furious and silent, somewhere behind my ribs, and I lay there on the cold tile floor and understood, for the first time, exactly what I'd traded to keep her out of my father's sight.

By morning I could barely walk. And I had forced myself upright enough to sit across from my father at breakfast without him noticing anything was wrong, because if he noticed, he'd ask why, and I couldn't afford that either.

"Marco Reyes's daughter left the pack last night," Magnus said, not even looking up from his tablet. "She went with the Everglades Alpha, Alpha Diego Salazar, apparently."

"That’s goood," I said, because that was what he expects me to say. And I couldn’t give myself away.

"Good," he agreed, and finally looked up. "One less loose end to worry about."

Ronin went so still inside me I and thought, for one second, that I'd actually lost him for good.

"Loose end," I repeated slowly.

"Her grandmother died twenty years ago refusing to tell us where that bloodline went." He said it casually as if he just reported a random news he saw on the newspaper. "I always suspected it landed close to someone around, quite the contrary of what Marco Reyes wants us to believe. You did the smartest thing tonight, rejecting her that publicly. Nobody looks twice at a girl the Alpha Prince just humiliated. This will buy us time to confirm things quietly, before she knows enough to run properly." He went back to his tablet like we were discussing the weather. "I've already got people watching the Everglades border. They should have eyes on her by tonight."

The floor of my own house tilted sideways under me.

"Confirm what?" I clenched my fists.

He didn't answer, and he actually didn't need to. I already knew, the second the words left his mouth, exactly what he was talking about, and exactly what I'd done by rejecting her in front of two hundred witnesses instead of just quietly walking her out of that room myself.

I never protected her at all.

I had only foolishly bought my father time.

"You've known this whole time," I said. "About the bloodline. About her?."

"I've suspected," Magnus uttered, setting the tablet down for the first time, giving me his full attention in a way that always made my skin crawl. "The obsidian Circle reached out to me years ago. There have me Information for advantages neither of us could have ever gotten onn our own. I never thought it would land in my own pack, sitting in the back office of a ceremony hall.” He almost smiled. "The Moon Goddess has a sense of humor, apparently."

I stood up so fast my chair scraped hard against the marble floor. "You knew about this arrangement, and you let me bond to her without one single warning?"

"I didn't know it was her until I watched your face last night, son. Now, I do." He picked the tablet back up, already done with the conversation. "Sit down. Finish your breakfast. We have a summit to plan."

I didn't sit down. One second I was staring at my father with Ronin howling ‘get to her, get to her now’ right inside my skull, and the next I was driving as fast as I could down Le Jeune Road with no plan beyond one single thing, I had to reach her before his people did, before she disappeared forever.

I got to her parents' house forty minutes later. My chest still heaving from every mile I'd driven. And there she was, three steps from a car with an Everglades crest on the door and a duffel bag over her shoulder.

She was already leaving.

Leaving me, walking straight towards her doom probably.

"Going somewhere?"

She turned around with a furious look, as if she already knew who it was from my voice. Ronin, my wolf surged so hard against me I nearly lost my balance standing right there on her parents' front lawn.

I don't remember deciding to grab her wrist, I only knew not to let go.

"You don't understand. I had to. You don't know what they would've—" I tried explaining when suddenly her hands started to glow.

Silver light climbing up from her knuckles like the moonlight had been poured straight under her skin, and Ronin, my wolf went utterly silent inside me.

‘Moonblood’, he breathed. ‘She's real, Kane.’ Ronin said. I was still staring at her glowing hand, still trying to find the words for the single worst mistake of my entire life, when a man stepped out of the mangroves trees behind her.

With a black mask and no single crest to identify him. His eyes moved over her like a predator looking at something he'd been saving up his whole life to finally pounce on.

"Hello, little Moonblood," he said. "We've been looking for you."

Every single plan I had made to protect her by staying silent collapsed in the exact same breath.

I was already too late.