Chapter 5: The Price Of Being Born Without Blood Rights

He found me by the eastern wall.

Not because he had been looking for long. I had not gone far, just to the stone bench at the edge of the old garden where my mother used to grow herbs in the summer, the one place in this entire estate that still smelled faintly like her. Lavender and something warmer underneath it. I had sat down there after walking away from the square and I had not moved, because I had nowhere else to go and my legs had simply stopped cooperating.

I heard him before I saw him. His footsteps, his scent, the specific weight of his presence that my wolf had memorized so completely that she recognized him before my eyes did.

She did not reach for him this time.

That was new.

He stopped a few feet away and looked at me, and I looked back at him, and for a moment neither of us said anything. His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing that thing they did when he was managing something, when the Alpha in him was working harder than the man.

"You should not have done that," he said. "At the square."

I laughed.

It came out wrong, thin and hollow, but it was a laugh. "That is what you came to say."

"Laila."

"My parents have been in the ground for days, Jason." My voice was steady. I was proud of how steady it was, considering the fact that there were tears sitting right behind my eyes that had been there since yesterday and were becoming genuinely difficult to hold. " days. And the first thing you say to me is that I should not have tried to speak."

He exhaled. Looked away. Looked back. "The pack is unstable right now. Emotions are high and people are looking for someone to—"

"To blame." I finished it for him. "Say it."

His jaw tightened. "There are accusations, Laila. I am not saying I believe them. But there are people in this pack who are asking questions about that night and I cannot—"

"Cannot what." The tears were closer now. I could feel them, hot and insistent, pressing at the backs of my eyes. "Cannot stand beside your mate? Cannot look at the pack and say you know who I am? You have known me for years, Jason. Years. And you cannot stand in front of them and say one sentence."

"It is not that simple."

"It is exactly that simple."

He went quiet.

And in that quiet I looked at his face, really looked at it, searching for the man who had taken my hand in the pack square two years ago and made sure everyone saw. The man who had kissed my forehead in front of his warriors because he wanted them to know I was his. The man whose heartbeat I had fallen asleep to more nights than I could count.

He was in there somewhere. I could almost see him, behind all the Alpha control and the careful management and the distance he had been maintaining since the moment he stepped through those gates with Selena on his arm.

Almost.

"I need you to step back," he said quietly. "From the pack. From public appearances. Just for a while. Let things settle. Let people—"

"Let people what." My voice cracked on the last word. Just slightly. Just enough. "Let people finish deciding I killed my own parents? Let Selena finish whatever she is doing? Is that what stepping back means?"

He did not answer.

That was its own answer.

"Jason." I stood up from the bench. My hands were shaking and I pressed them flat against my thighs to stop it. The tears were right there now, right at the edge, and I blinked hard and refused, I absolutely refused to let them fall in front of him before I had finished saying what I needed to say. "Look at me. Please. Just look at me like you know who I am."

He looked at me.

And his eyes were tired. Not cold, not cruel, just exhausted in a way that went bone deep, and somehow that was worse than anger would have been. Anger would have meant he still felt something strong enough to be angry. This just looked like a man who had already finished grieving something and was now dealing with the administrative aftermath.

"Whatever we had," he said, and his voice was low and careful and each word landed like something being set down very deliberately, "I think you know it cannot continue. Not now. Not like this. The pack needs stability. They need to see a clear future."

The tears fell.

I did not mean them to. My body simply gave up the fight without consulting me, one tracking down my left cheek before I could stop it, then another, and I saw the moment Jason noticed them because something moved across his face that looked almost like pain.

Almost.

He did not reach for me.

"The bond," I said. The words tasted like ash. "What happens to the bond."

"It will be severed at the next moon ritual."

The next moon ritual.

Said like a diary entry. Like a meeting to be scheduled. Like the thing that had lived between us for years, the thread that had connected us through the bond and made my wolf reach for him in the dark and made his heartbeat feel like mine, was simply a formality to be handled at the next available opportunity.

I turned away from him.

Faced the garden. My mother's garden. The frost-dead herbs in their beds, waiting for a spring they would grow through without her.

The baby.

The thought arrived the way it had been arriving for days, quiet and persistent, underneath everything else. Tell him. You have to tell him. He is the father and whatever he is doing right now he deserves to know that the child he does not know about is going to come into this world in seven months whether or not this pack is stable.

I opened my mouth.

He was looking at his hands. Not at me.

Standing three feet away from the woman carrying his child, in the garden where her mother used to grow lavender, with her tears still drying on her face, and he was looking at his hands.

I closed my mouth.

The decision arrived not with fury or drama but with the quiet finality of a door swinging shut. He did not deserve to know. Not today. Not like this. Not from a man who could stand this close and feel nothing strong enough to move him.

My child was not going to be a reason for someone to tolerate me.

My child was going to be mine.

"Okay," I said. My voice was completely steady. I did not know how. "Okay, Jason."

He looked up.

"I understand," I said. And I turned and looked at him one last time, at this man who had been my whole future a week ago, and I let myself feel it, the full weight of it, the grief and the fury and the love that had not yet finished dying even though everything else had. I let myself feel all of it for exactly three seconds.

Then I put it somewhere deep and locked the door.

"Goodbye," I said.

He opened his mouth.

I walked away before he could use it.

Behind me, my mother's garden sat frost-dead and silent, and the bond in my chest gave one last, faint, barely-there pull.

I kept walking.