I yank my hand back so hard my shoulder screams when the door swings open… Ashton stands in the frame and River is behind him, one fist wrapped in his shirt.
He's done this his whole life—positioned himself in front of her without being asked, without being taught. Just a little boy and already built like a wall between his sister and whatever's coming.
His eyes sweep the room. Shirtless Alpha. His mother's flushed face. The charged gap between us that anyone with a functioning nose could read in under a second.
"You were gone too long." He says it to me, but his eyes haven't moved from Leon.
There's something territorial in the way he widens his stance, shielding his sister with his body.
Leon goes completely still. Not the stillness of surprise, but something older than that, more animal. His gaze has locked onto Ashton's face and is moving across it with the focused precision of a man doing arithmetic he didn't know he'd be asked to do today.
The dark hair. The jaw. The amber eyes—his eyes, his exact shade—staring back at him from a six-year-old's face with open suspicion.
Then his gaze shifts to River, peering around her brother's shoulder. Silver-blonde hair. Blue eyes. My face, miniaturized, watching him with the careful uncertainty of a child who has learned that new adults require a period of assessment.
The math isn't complicated. There are literally two little versions of both of us standing in the doorway.
I watch him do it in real time and I can't breathe.
"Mama." River's fingers curl around my sleeve. "Can we go now?"
The word ‘mama’ detonates in the silence, and Leon's eyes snap to mine. His voice comes out rough, stripped of every Alpha pleasantry.
"How old are they?"
My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Because the truth is a grenade and I'm not pulling the pin in front of my children, in his guest room, with the familiar sound of my sister's heels clicking closer down the corridor.
"Skyler." Kailani materializes behind the children, her smile bright enough to cut glass. "Where were you? I waited for you for twenty minutes, sister dear."
I move before she can say anything else—gathering the children, head down, the servant returning to her natural state. Invisible. Peripheral. Gone.
Her gaze flicks between me and Leon.
"Take children somewhere appropriate. You all need to get ready, the meeting is soon to start," she says, steering Ashton aside like furniture.
I go without another word and don't look back, because looking back is how you turn to salt, and I've already been ground into enough raw materials for one day.
Our room is eight feet of mercy. I press my back against the door while Ashton watches me with those amber eyes, and River hums on the bed, unaware that the man down the hall is her father.
He did the math—I watched it happen behind his face, the dates clicking into place.
And some vicious part of me thinks: good, let him choke on it. Let him picture me scrubbing floors with a belly so swollen I couldn't see my knees while the pack called me the wolfless whore.
He doesn't get to discover fatherhood like a gift.
Not from me, not after seven years of doing it all alone.
I’m supposed to serve during negotiations—invisible hands refilling glasses, existing in peripheral vision.
The table is all pleasantries and careful language—territory clauses wrapped in silk, financial terms delivered with smiles. Alpha Thomas glows at the head of it. Kailani sits at his right, performing future Luna.
Alpha Leon sits opposite, Beta Dylan at his shoulder, his expression smooth and unreadable and giving nothing away.
I have been watching that face for the past twenty minutes trying to read it and getting nowhere.
"...the northern border provisions, as discussed…" I pour. "...transfer of assets to be completed prior to the ceremony…" I continue to pour, anything only not to look at his face.
"Shall we move to the wedding arrangements?" Alpha Thomas spreads his hands with the satisfaction of a man closing the deal of his life. "Finalize the treaty, set the date—"
"One additional condition." Leon's voice doesn't rise, but every conversation in the room stops.
Papers still mid-shuffle and Alpha Thomas's smile holds, but his eyes sharpen. Leon doesn't look at him. His gaze travels the room with unhurried slowness and then it finds me where I stand against the wall, pitcher in hand, and it stops.
He looks directly at me. Every head in the room turns to follow the line of his gaze.
The heat that floods my face is immediate and total as I go completely still.
"Skyler Gray." His voice is even and utterly calm. "I want her and her children in my pack."
The silence that follows is the kind that has weight. Then Alpha Thomas laughs—a short, flat sound, more reflex than amusement. "I'm sorry?"
"You heard me."
"I heard you ask for my wolfless stepdaughter as a treaty condition." He sets down his pen, explaining something to someone much slower. "The disgraced one. The one who came back from a festival pregnant with some unknown wolf's litter."
Every bone in my body turns to wire and I stare at the wall.
Litter. My children—reduced to a breeding term by the man who's supposed to be my father.
He leans back in his chair, and something shifts in his expression—the slow, oily recalculation of a man who thinks he's just understood something. His mouth curves.
"Although. The wedding is political, of course. An heir expected within two years, nothing more required of either party. A man has needs that a political arrangement doesn't always can be satisfied." He gestures vaguely, diplomatic about what he finds entirely unremarkable. "I understand the logic."
He spreads his hands toward Leon in something almost like appeal.
"But if you want a personal whore, I can do better. I'll find you a proper Omega, no baggage, anyone with actual value. Why would the Alpha of Shadowcrest want—"
"Then we're done here."
Leon rises. Simply unfolds to his full height. Beta Dylan is on his feet a half-second later, already gathering the folders on his side of the table.
"My men can be packed within the hour." Leon straightens his jacket cuffs. "Your northern border situation is your own again. The financial arrangements—dissolved. The alliance…" A slight pause. "Unfortunate."
The word lands like a stone dropped into still water.
Kailani's face has gone simultaneously white with horror and red with rage from her plans falling apart. Her eyes move between Leon and me with a dawning arithmetic.
Alpha Thomas's jaw has tightened to the point of audibility. "You would walk away from years of peace negotiations… Over her?"
"I would walk away from this table," Leon says, without inflection or heat, "if my conditions aren't met. And she’s my condition."
"Fine. She goes with the delegation. The children too, if you insist." Thomas shrugs, already bored. "Your problem, then."
And yes—that's what I am. Surplus stock, a burden to be passed along or written off.
But the alternative is the labor outpost Thomas keeps muttering about, where there's no school for the twins, no protection, no way out. Shadowcrest means watching Leon marry my sister, but at least my children might have a chance.
After the meeting, I settled the twins with our one picture book. When I turn around, Leon fills the doorway.
I guide him into the corridor and pull the door shut, putting my back against it. "You can't be here."
"I'm trying to fix something I broke seven years ago." His voice is low, his eyes on the door behind me—the one with my children on the other side. "For you."
"For me." The wire ring bites into my palm where my fist has closed. "You don't get to negotiate my life in a boardroom and call it a favor."
"It’s not like that." His jaw tightens. "Skyler…"
"Don't." The word comes out sharper than I intended, but I don't take it back. "Don't say my name like you have any right to it. You gave me a fake one, remember?"
“I do. I do and I did, and I’m wrong for that, but please, Skyler… I know what I did. I'm not asking you to forgive it. I'm asking you…" He stops and then starts again. "Are those my children?"