Chapter 88 BROTHER

Chapter 88 BROTHER
Keira did not move at first. She stood there with her hand still resting against Dion’s arm, feeling the steady heat of him beneath her palm.
She drew in a breath and let it out slowly.
“So what you’re telling me,” she said, her voice cutting clean through the weight of the moment, “is that Valen and Dion are brothers.”
Aeden looked at her for a long moment, measuring not just her words but the way she held herself as she said them.
“Exactly.”
“So when the witches chained my beast,” he said after a moment, his voice lower than she had heard it before, roughened by something deeper than anger, “they didn’t just take my strength. They took everything I might have known.”
He turned to Sable then.
“What was your reasoning,” he demanded, “for abandoning me as a child?”
Sable did not flinch.
“I didn’t abandon you.”
She stepped forward, her arms folded.
“I left the pack,” she continued, “because I knew what would happen if I stayed. I knew what they would say, what they would do. I was not going to give them the satisfaction of watching me break or be made a fool of.”
She turned briefly to Aeden.
“I lived alone,” she said. “Away from all of them. I prepared to give birth by myself, without anyone deciding my child was a bastard.”
Dion’s jaw tightened.
“And yet I wasn’t with you.”
Sable held his gaze.
“I went into labor alone,” she said. “It was harder than I had expected, more than I could manage.”
She did not look away.
“It nearly killed me.”
Silence pressed in around them as they all listened to what Sable had been through.
“The rogues found me and saved me,” she said. “I was on the edge of death. By the time I was strong enough to think clearly again… you were gone.”
Her words did not waver, yet Keira saw the pain they carried.
“I never knew where you ended up,” Sable continued. “I felt that you lived, but my sight would not show me. Not until I started hearing stories recently. A man who felled my rogues without shifting.”
Her eyes were hard but held no lie.
“I knew it had to be you.”
Then she looked back at Aeden, and whatever had threatened to surface in her expression hardened again.
“I would not have had to do any of it alone,” she said, her voice sharpening, “if promises had been kept.”
Aeden’s expression did not change, yet a cloud passed over his face.
“Quinn intended to come back,” he said quietly.
Sable sneered; there was nothing sweet in her stance.
“Intentions are useless when they are not followed with action.”
“He did not know,” Aeden continued, his voice still calm, though there was something under it now, guilt perhaps? “If he had known about the child, things would have been different.”
Sable’s eyes flashed.
“Would they?”
“He met his fated mate,” he said. “You know what that means for our kind. You know what it does to us. He did not forget you, Sable. But with no knowledge of the child, what reason would he have had to return and break you all over again?”
Sable did not answer immediately.
When she did, her voice was quieter, tinged with bitterness.
“My heart,” she said. “It broke the moment I lost my child.”
She let out a long breath.
“That kind of loss changes a person. It strips away whatever softness might have been there and leaves something else behind.”
Her gaze swept over them.
“I am not a gentle woman,” she said. “Whatever maternal instinct I might have had died with the life I thought I was going to have.”
Then her eyes settled on Aeden again.
“And now you stand here as though you are going to fix it. As though you can step in after all this time and set things right.”
Her voice sharpened.
“You lycans always think you can do that.”
“No one is trying to hurt you,” Aeden said.
Sable’s laugh was short and without humor.
“That has already been done.”
Keira shifted, her attention returning to Dion.
He had gone quiet. Then he let out a low growl.
“Dion,” she said quietly.
He turned to her, and for a moment, the rest of the world seemed to fall away.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this,” he said, and there was anger in it, stripped down and honest. “The only family I have ever known was at the House of Midnight Pleasures. Flora is a monster; she used me, but that was where I belonged. That was where I understood who I was.”
His hand flexed slightly at his side.
“And now I am expected to accept that everything I thought I knew was wrong.”
His gaze held hers.
“And all I care about now is that you are my mate.”
The words settled between them, heavier than anything that had come before it.
Keira did not step back.
“I have wolf in me,” she said, her voice steady, “but it does not rule me. The warcat side of me overrides everything else.”
Hurt showed plainly on his face then.
“I feel a pull,” she admitted. “But not in the way you do.”
His expression did not change, but she felt the shift in him again, the way the words landed.
“A cat chooses,” she said.
Sable’s gaze flicked between them.
Dion’s jaw tightened.
“If you reject me,” he said, his voice low now, carrying something far less controlled, “it will send me mad.”
Keira did not flinch.
“I am not rejecting anything,” she said. “I am saying I am not ready for it. Not now. Not with everything else that is already in motion.”
Her gaze flicked briefly toward the ruins behind them, toward where Faye and Maren waited.
“I still have to get them to Blacktown. That hasn’t changed.”
Sable stepped forward slightly.
“He can reject the bond,” she said.
Aeden’s head turned sharply.
“No, he cannot.”
Sable’s eyes narrowed.
“You would deny him that choice?”
“I would tell him the truth,” Aeden replied. “A lycan cannot reject a bond without consequence. Not without losing something essential in the process.”
The tension between them sharpened again, but Aeden did not linger on it.
Instead, he turned and stepped away, Gwynn moving with him without needing to be told.
Dion turned and stalked off. As he turned back, Keira felt it then. Raw strength radiating from him.
Aeden and Gwynn spoke quietly, far enough that it should have been private. Cairo lay lounging now, close to where they spoke.
Keira did not move, but her attention shifted.
They overlooked Cairo, not believing he understood all.
Keira caught the thread of their conversation as easily as if she had stepped closer.
Gwynn’s voice came first.
“You know what this means.”
Aeden did not answer immediately.
“I know exactly what it means,” he said at last.
Keira walked towards Faye and Maren, giving them distance, while listening through Cairo.
“Valen is no longer the rightful heir,” Gwynn continued.
“Half-breed or not,” Aeden said, his voice certain, “Dion is Quinn’s eldest son.”
Keira did not breathe.
“The rightful heir to the Valeris throne.”
Silence stretched.
Cairo yawned, his ears flicking forward.
Gwynn spoke again.
“The only way for Valen to challenge that…”
Aeden did not hesitate.
“…is a blood match. A fight to the death.”