All Chapters of The Rejected Luna’s Hidden Legacy : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

“Tell me something, Alpha…” I said before he could speak. “Did you come here to apologize… or to watch the woman you destroyed wear a crown?”Silence crashed between us.For the first time since rejecting me, Alpha Lucien Blackthorn had no answer.⸻Three days had passed since the blade meant for me had opened a wound in his shoulder instead … a wound my own guards had barely stopped from becoming a grave. He still favored that side, I noticed, a stiffness in the way he stood that no amount of composure could hide.I hadn’t thanked him for it. I wasn’t sure I owed him that, even now.The summit reconvened once the hall had been repaired, torches relit, glass swept from the marble. I walked in crowned in silver, flanked by Orion on one side and Cassian on the other, and watched every Alpha who’d once looked at me like a pitiable, wolfless embarrassment rise instead like the floor itself had commanded it.Lucien rose slowest of all. I felt his stillness more than I saw it … the particul

“Your Majesty…” the royal healer whispered, her hand frozen above my stomach. “When was the last time you shared a Moon Bond with your mate?”I felt every drop of blood leave my face.“…Before he rejected me.”The healer closed her eyes.“Oh… Moon Goddess.”⸻I’d slipped out of my chambers before sunrise, careful to avoid Cassian’s watchful eyes and Orion’s early rounds, my bare feet silent against cold stone, my heart hammering the entire way down those corridors like I was doing something wrong instead of something necessary. I told myself the pulses in the garden had been exhaustion, nothing more.I told the healer the same lie the moment I sat down across from her.She didn’t believe it for a second, her eyes narrowing slightly even as her hands stayed gentle.The moment she laid her silver crystals across my stomach, they lit up brighter than I’d ever seen them glow, throwing sudden light across the whole chamber, and her calm, professional expression cracked straight down the mi

“Your Majesty…” the captain said, dropping to one knee. “The spy didn’t escape.” He swallowed hard. “She was murdered before we could question her.”⸻The council chamber erupted the instant the words landed. I gripped the edge of the war table, still raw from the parchment we’d found clenched in a dead man’s fist the day before, and forced myself to listen through the noise instead of drowning in it.The servant had died in the most secure cell in Silvercrest’s dungeon. No visitors. No windows. No way in that hadn’t been sealed and guarded by our own hand-picked men.A black moon symbol had burned itself into the stone floor beneath her body, edges still smoking faintly when the guards found her … a signature no one in that room had seen in twenty years.⸻She’d lived long enough to say one thing before the poison finished its work, a guard told us, voice unsteady, hands still trembling around the report he clutched.The Queen carries… the Eclipse…Half the room looked at me, faces p

POV: Lucien“Four children?” I whispered, unable to breathe. “Tell me I heard that wrong…”No one answered.Because no one could.⸻The dates arranged themselves in my head before I could stop them, counting backward without my permission, landing exactly where I feared they would.Mine.Every child she carried was mine.The hall had gone utterly silent around me, every Alpha present watching to see what I’d do … deny it, celebrate it, break apart where they could all witness it. I gave them none of that.I bowed to Queen Felicia instead, spine straight, perfectly correct, every inch the disciplined commander I’d trained myself to be for exactly this kind of moment. Then I turned and walked out before my face could betray anything my body hadn’t already.I felt more than one rival Alpha’s gaze follow me out, something like grudging respect in it I hadn’t earned and didn’t want.⸻The corridor beyond the hall was empty, and that was the only reason I let myself fall apart in it, my bac

POV: Felicia“Don’t apologize,” I whispered before he could speak. “If you apologize again… I might remember the man I loved instead of the Alpha who destroyed me.”Lucien went completely still.⸻The silence after that confession hung heavier than anything I’d said in months, and I let it sit there rather than soften it, watching him absorb it without flinching.“I don’t know how to stand beside you without remembering who we used to be,” I said finally, my hand still resting over the small, steady warmth beneath my ribs, my voice steadier than I felt.Every strategy meeting, every glance we’d traded across a war table these past weeks, cost me more than he’d ever let himself realize … small wounds reopening every time our hands brushed reaching for the same map, every time I caught him watching me when he thought I wasn’t looking.This wasn’t an invitation. I needed him to understand that, needed the words to land as exactly what they were.It was a warning. If we kept working like