Chapter 15: Breeder
LYSANDER
Three weeks.
I felt Johann go still beside me.
Cormac read through the preamble in the flat, practiced cadence of someone who had read a hundred wills and buried whatever feelings the words might have stirred a long time ago. Small and big estate holdings were mentioned. Personal effects. Small bequests to members of the household staff who had served for decades. None of it mattered. We both knew what we were actually waiting for, and Cormac knew it too, because his voice slowed slightly as he reached the section that mattered.
"To the matter of succession," he read, "I, Cornelius De’Lune, name my nephew, Alpha Lysander Asker of Lily of the Valley, as sole heir to the throne of the Alpha King, effective immediately upon my death, superseding any prior designation, understanding, or expectation held by any other party."
The room did not breathe.
"All rights, titles, and responsibilities associated with the crown pass to Alpha Lysander in full. This includes command of the royal guard, authority over the Elder Circle’s convening power, and stewardship of the supreme pack treasury."
Cormac turned the page.
There was no mention of Johann anywhere in it. Not his name, not his claim, not so much as a bequest of personal effects that might have softened the blow. There was no mention of Queen Edelina either. Not a dowager’s allowance, not a residence, not a single line acknowledging thirty years of marriage.
It was as if my uncle had methodically erased them both from the page.
Johann came up out of his chair so fast it scraped hard against the floor.
"That is not possible," he said. His voice had lost every trace of the smooth control he’d been wearing all morning. "My mother is his wife. I am his son. There is no version of a will that should omit us entirely, none, not even if he hated us, and he did not hate us—"
"The document speaks for itself, my Prince," Cormac said carefully.
"When." Johann’s hands were flat on the desk now, and he leaned into them, into Cormac, close enough that the Gamma took an involuntary step back. "When was this amended. Three weeks ago, you said. Something happened three weeks ago. What happened three weeks ago?"
Cormac’s expression closed like a door. "Only the Beta who witnessed the amendment would know that, my Prince. I merely hold the document and read what is written."
Johann stared at him. Then at the will. Then, slowly, at me.
I let the silence sit there for a moment before I moved. I wanted him to feel every second of it, the way he’d made sure I felt every second of his contempt since the moment he’d walked into this room.
Then I crossed the floor, unhurried, and I took the chair he’d just vacated. I settled into it the way he had earlier, with the same deliberate ease, and I watched something in his face crack clean down the middle when he registered exactly what I was doing.
"With that resolved," I said, folding my hands on the desk the way my uncle used to, "I believe our priority should be finding the actual killers. Two masked men. One with a distinguishing scar. That seems like considerably more useful information than continuing to relitigate a will that has now been read aloud, notarized, and confirmed by the man who witnessed it."
Johann said nothing. He looked like a man standing in the wreckage of a house he’d been building his whole life, only just now understanding that the foundation had rotted out from under him weeks ago, without his knowledge, while he slept in a room down the hall.
One of the elders cleared his throat.
"There is a complication," he said.
I looked up. "Which is?"
"The people will not be pacified by an ongoing investigation, Alpha Lysander. Not tonight, not this week. Word has already spread through the estate and beyond it. Visiting Alphas and Lunas arrived this morning and will continue arriving enmasse to pay respects. They will expect resolution, not an open question hanging over the new King’s first days." He exchanged a glance with the elder beside him. "There must be a perpetrator. Even if the true culprits remain at large, the people require someone to hold accountable while the real investigation continues quietly beneath it."
I understood immediately what he meant, and it turned something cold in my stomach.
"You mean her."
"The evidence already points to her. The optics are, unfortunately, convenient."
"She is innocent."
"That may well be true. But truth and public necessity are not always the same animal, Alpha Lysander, and you will learn quickly that a King who cannot manage the second often loses the ability to pursue the first."
I stared at him. "That is cruel."
"It is," he agreed, without hesitation, without apology. "It is also how the world works, and has worked, long before either of us stood in this room."
I thought about her kneeling on that library floor with rope biting into raw skin, telling me she hadn’t done it, and I had believed her, had felt the truth of it through the bond like a struck note. I was not going to let her hang for a crime committed by some criminal.
"If we must give them something," I said slowly, "then give them something kinder than an execution. Whatever punishment satisfies the visiting packs without ending her life."
The elders exchanged another look, longer this time, weighted with something I did not like the shape of.
"There is precedent," the eldest of them finally said. "An old tradition, from before the current codes were written. Rogues who infiltrated packs to commit crimes against them were kept as breeders by the Alpha who caught them. A punishment, not a marriage. The offender was stripped of any virtue and standing they had entirely, and made into a caste beneath even the Omegas, bound to bear the Alpha’s line as penance for the crime against his house." He watched my face carefully as he spoke. "It would resolve the matter without bloodshed. And frankly, Alpha Lysander, it would serve you politically. You have effectively taken a beloved prince’s inheritance from him. The people will need something to soften that. Nostalgia for old tradition tends to do exactly that."
It disgusted me. Every syllable of it landed somewhere ugly in my chest, the casual cruelty of dressing up ownership as mercy, of calling degradation a kindness because the alternative was worse.
But it would keep her alive. It would keep her close, out of a cell, out of wolfsbane rope, within reach of whatever protection I could actually provide once I held real authority instead of a verbal claim contested by half the room.
"Fine," I said, before I could think better of it. "Do it."
The eldest elder nodded, satisfied, already moving on to logistics in his mind, I could tell.
"Good. Tonight, then. The visiting Alphas and Lunas are already gathered for the mourning rites. We will present her before them then, formally, with the title conferred in full view of witnesses, so there is no question of the arrangement later."
Something in his tone made my spine go rigid.
"Present her?" I repeated. "Tonight. In front of the visiting court?"
"Yes, Alpha Lysander. Is there a problem?"
I sat up straighter in my uncle’s chair.
"What do you mean is there a problem? There clearly is!"
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