Chapter 135 Bonus Chapter 1

Chapter 135 Bonus Chapter 1

Days After the Infertility News

Three days had passed since I told him.

Three days of silence so thick it felt like another body living in the house with us.

I moved through the estate like a ghost. I cooked food neither of us ate. I sat on the edge of the bed at night and stared at the wall until my eyes burned. Whenever Valdus entered a room, I found a reason to leave it. Not because I hated him. Because looking at him made the truth sit heavier on my chest.

We would never have a pup of our own.

The damage was permanent. Vivens’s words still echoed in my head every time I closed my eyes. The pack would have no blood heir from its Alpha. And the man I had chosen—the man who had once cut our dead child from my body—now had to live with the knowledge that the future he had imagined was gone.

I was sitting on the back steps of the estate when he finally found me.

The sun had already dropped behind the trees. The air carried the cool edge of evening. I heard the door open and close behind me, then the slow, heavy sound of his boots on the wood. He didn’t speak at first. He simply sat down beside me, leaving a careful foot of space between us.

I kept my eyes on the darkening training fields.

“You haven’t looked at me in three days,” he said. His voice was low, rough from disuse.

I swallowed. “I don’t know how.”

“Because of what I did.”

It wasn’t a question. I still couldn’t turn my head.

Valdus exhaled through his nose. I heard the soft scrape of his palm over his jaw. “I’ve been replaying it. Over and over. The moment I blanked out. The weight of the pup in my hands. The way you looked when you realized what I’d done. And now this. The fact that I didn’t just take one life that day—I took every life that might have come after.”

My fingers curled tightly against my knees. “Don’t.”

“Why not? It’s the truth.” He shifted, angling his body toward me even though I refused to face him. “I was raised to believe a bloodline was everything. That an Alpha without an heir of his own blood was already half-dead. My father drilled it into me until it lived in my bones. And now I’ve destroyed the only chance I had.”

The rawness in his voice finally forced me to look at him.

His face was drawn. Shadows sat under his eyes. The usual hard set of his mouth had softened into something closer to exhaustion. He wasn’t performing strength tonight. He looked like a man who had been quietly bleeding out for days.

“I’m afraid,” I said. The words came out thin. “I’m afraid that every time you look at me you’ll only see what you lost. That one day the silence will turn into resentment. That you’ll wake up and realize you tied yourself to a mate who can’t give you the future your father taught you to want.”

Valdus’s throat moved as he swallowed. “I’m afraid of the same thing. That you’ll never stop seeing the monster who cut you open. That the scars on your stomach will always be louder than anything I try to say. That you’ll stay out of duty or pity instead of choice.”

The honesty sat between us like a third presence.

I let out a shaking breath. “I don’t know how to stop carrying it. The guilt. The what-ifs. The knowledge that the pack’s future is smaller because of what happened in that room.”

“Neither do I.” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs, staring out at the same dark fields. “I’ve spent my whole life trying not to become him. Alcander. And the cruelest part is that in the moment it mattered most, I became exactly what he was—someone who destroyed what he claimed to protect.”

I finally turned my body toward him. Our knees almost touched. “You brought me back.”

“After I nearly killed you.”

“You still brought me back.”

His eyes met mine. In the fading light they looked almost black. “Does that balance the scale for you?”

“No,” I said quietly. “Nothing balances it. But I’m still here.”

A long silence stretched. Somewhere in the distance a patrol howled once, the sound thin and lonely.

Valdus’s voice dropped even lower. “I keep thinking about the bloodline. About the fact that when I die there will be no pup of mine to take the title. No one who carries both of us forward. It sits in my chest like a stone. And then I look at you and the stone gets heavier, because I know you’re carrying it too.”

I reached out before I could stop myself and rested my hand on his forearm. His skin was warm. The muscles beneath my palm were tight.

“I’m scared that loving you will never stop hurting,” I admitted. “That every quiet moment will turn into this—two people sitting in the dark, measuring what they destroyed.”

He turned his arm so that his hand covered mine. His fingers were rough, scarred, careful.

“I’m scared of the same thing,” he said. “But I’m more scared of what happens if we stop choosing each other. I’ve already lived the version of my life where I become my father. I don’t want to live the version where I lose you too.”

The words settled deep. I felt them in the place behind my ribs that had been hollow for days.

I shifted closer until my shoulder pressed against his. He didn’t pull away. After a moment his arm came around me, heavy and solid, and I let my head rest against the side of his neck. He smelled like forest and soap and the faint metallic edge that never quite left him.

We sat like that while the last of the light died.

“I can’t give you a pup,” I whispered into his skin.

“I know.”

“The damage is permanent.”

“I know.”

“And I’m still choosing you.”

His arm tightened. I felt him turn his face into my hair. When he spoke, the words were barely sound.

“I’m still choosing you too.”

There was no sudden passion. No desperate kiss that erased everything. Just the quiet weight of two people who had broken something irreversible and decided, again, not to walk away from the wreckage.

After a long time Valdus rose and held out his hand. I took it. He led me inside, up the stairs, into the bedroom that still smelled faintly of the nights we had tried and failed. We undressed without speaking. When we lay down he pulled me against his chest, one hand resting over the scars on my stomach as if he could somehow shield what was no longer there.

I listened to his heartbeat in the dark.

It was steady.

It was still here.

And for the first time in three days, I was able to close my eyes without feeling like the silence might swallow us both.