Chapter 4
Cedric's POV
The air in the Silver Moon Council Hall had been stagnant for nearly two hours.
I sat in the stone chair at the head of the table, elbows resting on the cold armrests, my amber eyes sweeping slowly over the fifteen elders arrayed around the semicircular stone table.
The agenda was identical to last time. And the time before that. They'd swapped out their phrasing, rearranged their sentences, even rotated which elder took the lead—but the core message remained the same: Cedric Lancaster, when will you produce an heir for the Silver Moon Kingdom?
I'd heard this refrain a hundred times over. I didn't need to explain why I refused to mark anyone. A Lycan King owes no one an explanation.
"Your Majesty, it has been five years since Princess Elara's passing. The Elder Council understands your grief and respects the depth of your devotion to your late mate. But the kingdom cannot wait forever." He paused, fingers laced together on the tabletop, his gaze sweeping to the elders on either side. "Should you continue to refuse to select a new mate and produce an heir, the Elder Council will have no choice but to consider invoking the Bloodline Continuity Clause—"
He bit down hard on those last words. Deliberately.
The Bloodline Continuity Clause. An ancient statute that permitted the Elder Council to nominate a collateral heir after seven years of a Lycan King's failure to produce offspring.
I didn't move. I didn't even blink.
The moment that elder uttered the words "new mate," Keal let out a low growl from the deepest recesses of my mind—almost yearning.
Her. Keal's voice echoed in the furthest depths of my consciousness. Find her.
I knew who he meant. The red-haired woman. That scent of tart green apples. He was urging me to find the woman carrying our bloodline.
But right now, Keal's restlessness only irritated me. I pressed him back down with sheer will, like shoving a caged beast back behind its bars. He snarled in protest.
"Five years. You've locked me away for five years." Keal said. "Elara is gone. But we're still alive."
Shut up.
Just then, my phone buzzed against the marble tabletop. I tapped the screen with a careless flick.
A message from Marcus, terse to the point of clinical: "Christine Hayes is awake. Brought to Lancaster Tower reception lounge. Condition poor—found unconscious in last night's blizzard, hypothermic, dehydrated. Morning sickness at breakfast."
I stared at the last two words for two seconds. Morning sickness.
Keal stirred again, like a wolf hearing its pup's first cry.
I flipped the phone face-down on the table, raised my head, and let my gaze sweep from left to right across the entire council hall. Not a single elder dared meet my eyes.
"This meeting is adjourned."
I didn't raise my voice. Alpha dominance rolled from the depths of my vocal cords across the entire council hall like an invisible wall pushing outward in all directions—grinding past every stone pillar, every wall engraved with the Lancaster family crest.
The fifteen elders around the stone table lowered their heads almost in unison. Even the most defiant among them couldn't keep their spines from curving forward.
This was instinct, not choice. Under a Lycan King's dominance, submission didn't require conscious thought. It was encoded in werewolf DNA—the supreme manifestation of Pack Hierarchy.
I rose to my feet, the hem of my coat trailing across the edge of the stone chair. No one made a sound.
At 10:12 a.m., I walked into the reception lounge at Lancaster Industries headquarters.
The lounge occupied the left side of the fifty-sixth-floor executive secretarial level, furnished with sofas, a coffee table, and a row of floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond the glass stretched Manhattan's midtown winter skyline—a low ceiling of ash-white clouds pressing down on the cluster of buildings, sunlight barely leaking through the gaps, casting the interior in a cold, sobering light.
The instant I pushed open the door, the scent hit me.
Tart green apples. Fresh, faintly sweet, but not pure—threaded through with a layer of icy tension and a subtle, milky sweetness that belonged to the earliest stages of new life. The scent surged from the far end of the room, flooding my nostrils, sinking down through my airways, settling in my chest with a faint but undeniable tremor.
Christine was curled into one corner of the sofa. Knees drawn up against her chest, her entire body folded small, as though she were trying to compress herself into the crevice between the cushions. Marcus must have found her a men's coat—it swallowed her frame, making her look even smaller.
That red hair blazed impossibly bright under the lounge's soft lighting, as if it were truly on fire. In the werewolf world, where dark hair was the aesthetic standard, that color was an anomaly—a variable that shouldn't exist.
Keal slammed forward.
His voice detonated in my mind, clear as if someone were growling directly into my ear: "She is our Mate."
"No." I said internally, my tone equally clear, equally absolute. "Our Mate died five years ago."
Elara had closed her eyes that night—in that ambush—in my arms. Her white wolf, that rare creature of pure snow whose fur shimmered silver under moonlight, never woke again.
Keal didn't yield. He crouched in the deepest reaches of my consciousness, black fur bristling on end, amber pupils contracted to twin vertical slits, watching the red-haired woman on the sofa with an intensity I knew too well—identical to the way he'd looked at Elara the very first time.
This one belongs to us.
I pressed him down again. It took more force this time.
As I suppressed him, I felt a brief flash of vertigo rising from somewhere deep within—Keal was fighting back.
In all these years, his resistance had never been this fierce.
I walked toward the sofa and lowered myself into the armchair opposite her, legs crossed, body leaning slightly back.
My gaze fell to her abdomen—no visible swell, still flat.
But my wolf's senses detected deeper changes: the distinctive warmth radiating from thickened uterine walls, and beneath that, another set of vital signs—the scent of a fetus carrying my Alpha bloodline. Unmistakable.
My eyes traveled upward. She looked terrible. The hollows beneath her eyes were two smudges of blue-gray, dark enough to pass for bruises. Lips cracked and dry. A patch of deep red across her left cheek, the outline sharp—struck by the palm of an adult werewolf.
But when I looked directly into her eyes, my breath caught.
She was looking at me. No flinching, no cowering. Green irises that showed the faintest shimmer of violet under the lounge lighting.
But the shape of those eyes, the arc of her brow bone, the lines between her brows—
I refused to let myself think further. I crushed the thought like stubbing out a cigarette in the corner of my mind.
Not Elara. Doesn't look like Elara. Elara has been dead for five years.
"Not Elara," Keal murmured from the darkness. "She is herself."
She coughed once—dry and brief.
I settled back against the chair. "Miss Hayes, do you know why I've asked you here?"
