His Rejected Luna, His Hidden Son
It was the safe thing, the armored thing — the thing the girl on the porch five years ago would have done without blinking.
"I'll take it," I said. "For now. For him."
"For now," he agreed. And something in the way he said it told me he meant to earn the rest, one impossible day at a time.
There was no marking. No bite, no royal mark, no glow for the cameras to feast on. A king does not give the mate-mark to a wife he was extorted into, and the Council watched for it, and did not get it, and the whole ring of alphas noted its absence and filed it away — a queen unmarked is a queen who can still be set aside. I told myself I was glad of it.