Pregnant And Rejected Mate
I asked, though some cold, sinking part of me had already begun to guess.
Kael's eyes found mine, and the grief in them had deepened into something rawer, something that looked almost like fear of what he was about to say out loud for the first time in his life.
"They said my grandmother was rejected too," he said. "By my grandfather. Publicly, the same way I rejected you. And that the falling out with my father wasn't about disapproval at all. It was about her warning him, decades before either of us were born, that rejecting a mate without cause carries a cost that follows a bloodline for generations. That she tried to tell him the pattern would repeat itself if the family didn't break it