I Accepted My Alpha’s Rejection While Carrying His Pup Chapter 12

I Accepted My Alpha’s Rejection While Carrying His Pup Chapter 12

Six weeks before my due date, Victor Crane came for my daughter.

It was a Tuesday night. Caspian was three hundred miles away at an emergency Alpha council.

Later we’d learn the council was fake. Victor had called it himself.

I woke up to Nova screaming inside my head.

Wake up. WAKE UP. Rogues.

The smell hit me next. Rot and wet fur and blood. Dozens of therm

Downstairs, the diner windows exploded.

Grandma’s shotgun roared once. Twice. Then a yelp, and the sound of her body hitting the floor.

“Grandma!”

I ran down the stairs holding my belly. The diner was full of rogues-snarling, mangy, half-shifted wolves

with wild yellow eyes. The King’s guards were down in the street, fighting for their lives against twice their

number.

Grandma was on the floor by the counter, blood on her forehead. Breathing. Thank God, breathing.

And standing in the middle of the wreckage, calm as a man at a dinner party, was a silver-haired wolf in an

expensive gray suit.

Victor Crane.

“Your mother had the same eyes,” he said pleasantly. “I watched them close on a mountain road.”

Two rogues grabbed my arms.

Victor pulled a long blade from his coat. It glinted in the broken light. Pure silver.

“Nothing personal, Ivy. Moon-blood simply can’t be allowed to breed.”

He lifted the blade toward my stomach.

I screamed..

And a black wolf crashed through the diner door.

It hit Victor like a truck. The blade went sideways. The rogues holding me went flying.

Kane.

He’d been in the trees. He’d been there every night since I sent him away. Watching. Waiting. Guarding a

woman who wasn’t his anymore.

Victor rolled, came up snarling-and drove the silver blade straight into the black wolf’s side.

Kane howled. The sound tore through me.

He shifted back into a man as he fell, blood spreading across the floor, silver poison already turning the

veins around the wound black.

Victor stood over him and raised the blade again. This time toward me.

Something inside me snapped.

Not broke. Snapped awake.

Nova rose up through every cell in my body, and a light poured out of my eyes so bright it lit the whole diner silver.

“STOP”

My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded like the moon.

Every wolf in the room froze.

Every rogue. Every guard. Victor Crane himself-his arm locked mid-air, his face twisted in horror. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even blink.

Moon-blood. The power he’d spent twenty years trying to kill.

“Kneel,” I said.

They knelt. All of them.

Then the whole building shook with a roar that rattled the glass out of the last window frame.

Caspian came through the door in his full Lycan form-huge, black, terrifying-and he did not stop.

I won’t describe what happened to Victor Crane.

I’ll only say it was quick. And that Silverpine never saw a Redmoon wolf again.

When it was over, Caspian shifted back, blood on his hands, and came straight to me. His hands shook as he touched my face, my arms, my belly.

“Are you hurt? Is she-”

“We’re okay. Help Grandma.”

Then I turned around and knelt beside Kane.

He was gray. His breathing was shallow and wet. The black lines of silver poison were crawling toward his

heart.

“Healer’s coming,” I said. “Hold on.”

“Ivy.” His voice was barely a whisper. “You’re okay?”

“We’re okay.”

His eyes dropped to my stomach. “Is she?”

At that exact moment, my daughter kicked. Hard. So hard it pushed against his hand where it rested on

the floor beside me.

And I heard it. His heartbeat, which had been fading, suddenly stumbled-and caught. Got stronger.

“Does she have a name?” he whispered.

I hesitated. Then:

“Wren.”

His face crumpled. Wren. The little bird. The name of the lullaby his mother used to sing. The only thing

he’d ever told me about her.

“Wren,” he breathed, tears sliding into his hair.

Dr. Wells came running in with her bag. Two healers pushed past me.

Kane’s eyes found mine one more time.

“Thank you,” he whispered, “for letting me save you. Just once.”

They carried him out on a stretcher.

I stood up, shaking, surrounded by broken glass and kneeling rogues and blood.

And I walked straight into Caspian’s arms.

He held me without a word. No questions. No jealousy. No demands.

Just the steady, unbreakable warmth of a man who understood that strength was never about owning

someone.

It was about being there.