The Royal Guards Secret

My knees threatened to give out. Minutes ago, I had believed the worst pain I would ever know was hearing my husband reject me before the entire pack.

I had been wrong.

Now death had come looking for my unborn child.

and then the forest went silent. No wind. No birdsong. Just Evelyn’s own ragged breathing, loud in her ears, and the metallic scent of blood thick in the cold air.

She pressed her back against the nearest tree, legs trembling too badly to hold her weight without help. Around her, dark shapes moved between the trunks—warriors in black-and-silver armor, moving with a precision that told her they had done this before, many times.

Their commander, a tall man with silver hair pulled back from a hard, weathered face, walked a slow circle through the clearing, sword still drawn, eyes scanning the shadows for anything that still breathed and meant her harm. Only when he seemed satisfied did he lower the blade.

The other guards moved without needing to be told, closing ranks around her in a loose circle, faces watchful, weapons still ready.

Evelyn’s heart hammered. She didn’t know these faces. Didn’t know this crest stitched into their cloaks.

“Who are you?” Her voice cracked, barely more than a whisper. “What do you want with me?”

The commander turned toward her, and something shifted in his expression—something she couldn’t yet name.

He approached slowly, hands visible, the way one might approach a wounded animal. His gaze dropped to her throat, and he went still.

“That pendant,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

Evelyn’s fingers rose instinctively to the moonstone resting against her collarbone, warm from her skin. “It was my mother’s. She gave it to me when I was small. I’ve worn it every day since.”

“

Forgive my boldness, but may I examine your pendant?”

He extended a hand, palm up, waiting.

She hesitated—everything in her screamed not to let a stranger near her throat after what she’d just survived—but something in his eyes wasn’t threat. It was closer to disbelief.

She nodded once.

He lifted the pendant with a care that surprised her, turning it toward the moonlight. His thumb found a nearly invisible seam along its edge, and with a soft click, the stone split open like a locket.

Evelyn’s breath caught. Inside, engraved into silver so fine it looked like a whisper of metal, was a crest—a wolf crowned in stars.

“I’ve never seen that before,” she said, staring. “I didn’t even know it opened.”

The commander’s jaw tightened. “It still exists

Evelyn shook her head slowly. There had to be some mistake.

“Your mother,” the commander said, voice low and urgent. “What was her full name?”

Evelyn’s throat tightened. She hadn’t spoken it aloud in years—not since the funeral, not since she’d learned to bury the memory along with the grief. But something about the intensity in his eyes made refusal feel impossible.

“Seraphine,” she said quietly. “Seraphine Ashworth.”

The clearing went utterly still.

She watched the guards around her exchange glances—quick, disbelieving, electric with something like shock. Then, one by one, they began to kneel. Armor scraped against the forest floor as knee after knee sank into damp earth, heads bowed.

Evelyn’s stomach dropped. “What are you doing? Stand up. Please—this doesn’t make sense.”

The commander remained standing, but his composure had cracked, just slightly, at the edges. “We have searched for that name,” he said, “for twenty-two years.”

“You’re wrong.” Evelyn’s voice rose, panic threading through it. “You have to be wrong. I’m nobody. I was cast out of my own pack three days ago. Whoever you’re looking for, it isn’t me.”

But even as she said it, the pendant sat open in the commander’s palm, its crest catching the moonlight, and no one around her looked like they believed her denial.

The Royal Physician knelt beside her a few minutes later, his hands glowing faintly with healing magic as he assessed the gash along her ribs and the bruising down her arm. Evelyn winced, but the pain was already dulling under his touch.

Then his hands paused over her abdomen, and his expression changed.

He went very quiet, his fingers hovering, brow furrowing in concentration. Evelyn felt a strange pulse of warmth beneath his palms, something she hadn’t noticed before—an awareness, faint but unmistakable, of the life growing inside her.

The physician

His hands froze.

His eyes widened.

“Commander…”

His voice had become almost reverent.

“This child…”

and drew the commander several paces away, speaking in a hushed voice Evelyn wasn’t meant to hear. But she caught fragments—ancient bloodline, unmistakable, far older than mine or yours.

The commander’s face hardened into something grim and resolved. He glanced back at her, and this time when he looked at her, it wasn’t confusion in his eyes. It was understanding.

The assassins hadn’t come only for Evelyn.

They had come to end a bloodline before it could ever draw breath.

Evelyn pressed a hand to her stomach, and for the first time since the attack began, her fear wasn’t for herself at all. It was for the small, fragile life she hadn’t even had time to fully accept as real.

Whatever was hunting her, she understood now—it wanted her child dead.

“You cannot go back to Blackwood,” the commander said, kneeling now so he was level with her. “Whoever sent those assassins knows exactly who you are, and they will send more.”

“Blackwood isn’t my home anymore anyway,” Evelyn said bitterly. “They made that clear enough.”

“Then there’s nothing pulling you back there.” It wasn’t cruelty in his voice—it was fact, offered gently. “Come with us, and I promise you answers. About your mother. About the crest. About everything you were never told.”

Evelyn looked past him, toward the direction of the pack lands she’d walked away from only hours before. The rejection still burned raw in her chest, a wound as real as any the assassins had given her. There was no home waiting there. No pack. No mate. Nothing but the memory of doors closing behind her.

She thought of the child inside her—innocent of everything, and already a target.

“If I go with you,” she said slowly, “I want the truth. All of it. Not fragments.”

“You’ll have it,” the commander said. “I swear it on my blade.”

Evelyn closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the last threads of her old life slip away. When she opened them again, something in her had steadied, hardened.

She had nothing left to lose. And everything left to protect.

The sound of hooves broke the stillness before Evelyn saw it—a black carriage emerging from the tree line, its lacquered doors emblazoned with a crest of a crowned wolf, wreathed in silver stars. The same crest hidden inside her pendant.

Every guard in the clearing dropped to one knee at once, heads bowed, the movement so unified it looked rehearsed a thousand times over.

The commander turned to her, and for the first time, he knelt too.

“Your Highness,” he said, “the Lycan King has ordered us to bring you home.”

Evelyn stared at him, at the bowed heads surrounding her, at the carriage gleaming black and silver in the moonlight. A short, disbelieving laugh escaped her.

“You’ve made a mistake,” she whispered. “I’m just a rejected Luna. I’m no one.”

The commander lifted his eyes to hers, and there was no doubt left in them at all.

“No, Your Highness.”

The words echoed through the clearing.

Princess.

Me?

My fingers tightened around the moonstone pendant as the world tilted beneath my feet.

Everything I thought I knew about my life had just shattered.

Blackwood Pack had rejected a Luna…

But fate had chosen a queen.