Chapter 6 The Alpha Meets His Heir
POV: Seraphina Nyx Vale
I walked through the clubhouse door with my heart in my throat. Axel was already on his feet. So were six of his men, positioned between the entrance and the back of the room where Caelan sat at the corner table with a comic book open in front of him. Someone had told him to stay there and stay quiet. He was doing neither, because he was five and had already sensed that something in the room had changed.
Ragnar walked in behind me. The reaction was immediate. Chairs scraped back. Hands moved toward things on belts and tables. Axel stepped forward, shoulders squared, and put himself directly in the path between Ragnar and the rest of the room. He was not a small man, and he had never once backed down from anything in the time I had known him.
He took one full look at Ragnar and I watched the confidence in his face shift into something more careful.
"This is your place?" Ragnar asked him. His voice was completely level.
Axel held his ground. "It is."
"Then I'll ask you to step aside."
"I'll ask you to give me one good reason."
Ragnar said nothing. He did not need to. His wolf aura rolled outward through the room like a slow pressure change before a storm — invisible and total, the kind of thing that bypassed thinking and went straight to instinct. Several of Axel's men shifted their weight. One took a half step back without seeming to notice he had done it.
Axel stayed where he was. I respected him enormously for it.
"It's okay," I said quietly.
Axel turned his head toward me. "Sera."
"I mean it." I moved to stand beside him and lowered my voice. "This is between us. I need you to let me handle it."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then at Ragnar. Then back at me. I watched him make a calculation, not about danger, but about me. About whether I actually had this, or whether I was saying what people say when they don't want to be witnessed falling apart.
Whatever he found in my face was enough. He stepped aside.
Ragnar and I faced each other for the first time in five years.
Up close he was exactly what I remembered and completely different at the same time. Same height, same jaw, same grey eyes that had always made me feel seen in ways I could not fully explain. But there were lines around those eyes now that had not been there before, and something in the set of his mouth was harder. Five years had not been gentle to him either.
Good, said a voice inside me that I was not proud of.
The mate bond flared without warning. It moved through me like heat through glass, sudden and disorienting, and I saw by the slight tightening around his eyes that he felt it too. I hated that it still worked. I hated that after everything, after the white dress and the golden room and the woman's hand on her stomach, my body still recognised him as mine.
"Why did you run?" he asked.
The question came out quiet. Almost careful. Like he had been holding it for a long time and was not entirely sure he wanted the answer.
I laughed. The sound came out harder than I intended. "Ask the woman carrying your child."
His jaw tightened. "Seraphina."
"That is my answer, Ragnar. That is the whole answer. You want a longer version, you should have come with a better question."
"She was not my mate." His voice dropped lower. "What you saw was not what you think it was."
"I know what I saw."
"You saw one night. You did not stay long enough to hear anything."
"Because there was nothing left to hear." My voice stayed steady through sheer force of will. "You had been with her for seven months. Seven. While I was in your home, in your bed, planning a future you had already replaced."
"The council arranged it." His voice came out tight. "I was under.."
"I know about the council." The words landed like a stone between us, and I watched him absorb the fact that I had known, even then. "I know they pressured you. I know they told you an Alpha without an heir was a liability. I understood all of that. What I could not understand was why you said nothing to me. Why you let me keep trying, keep hoping — while you had already made another arrangement. That is what I cannot forgive. Not the pressure. The silence."
Something moved across his face. Not argument. Something that looked uncomfortably like recognition.
"I thought I could manage it," he said. "I thought I could keep it contained until.."
"Until what? Until she delivered? Until you had your heir and you could come home and pretend the last seven months hadn't happened?" I felt my voice rising and pulled it back. "What exactly was the plan, Ragnar?"
He had no answer. I had known he wouldn't.
"I'm sorry," he said finally. The same words he had said outside. "I know that isn't enough."
"It isn't," I agreed.
The room was absolutely silent. And then it stopped being silent, because Caelan had gotten up from his table.
He stood four feet behind me, comic book forgotten, small face tilted upward, looking at Ragnar with an expression of pure open curiosity. He was not afraid. That was the thing about my son. He had never learned to be afraid of large men, and right now he was studying Ragnar the way he studied engines, systematically, like he was taking something apart to see how it worked.
Ragnar looked at him and went completely still. The grey eyes. The jaw. The way he stood with his weight slightly forward, already holding himself like someone who expected to be listened to.
"Mama," Caelan said, without taking his eyes off Ragnar. "His eyes are the same colour as mine."
Nobody spoke.
Ragnar's expression broke open for just a second. One unguarded moment where everything he was holding together came apart at the seams. Then it closed again, but not before I saw it. Five years of missing a child he hadn't known existed, compressed into one unguarded breath.
"Caelan," I said carefully. "Come stand with me."
He walked forward and stopped at my side. Ragnar crouched down slowly, bringing himself to eye level, and looked at his son. Caelan looked back without blinking.
"What's your name?" Ragnar asked. His voice had changed completely. Stripped of everything hard.
"Caelan." A pause. "What's yours?"
"Ragnar."
Caelan considered this. "That's a big name."
Something shifted at the corner of Ragnar's mouth. "So is Caelan."
My son tilted his head. "Are you my dad?"
The question fell into the room like something dropped from a great height. I stopped breathing. Ragnar went very still.
"Yes," he said. Quiet. Absolute. No hesitation at all.
Caelan absorbed this the way he absorbed most information, seriously, without drama. Then: "Why didn't you come sooner?"
The silence that followed was one of the longest I had ever sat inside.
Ragnar looked up at me over the top of our son's head. Not asking for rescue. Not deflecting. Just looking. Taking the weight of the question the way it deserved to be taken.
"I should have found you sooner," he said to Caelan. "That's on me."
Then it happened. Caelan's hands changed first, fingers lengthening slightly, small claws emerging with a sound like whispered paper. Then his eyes shifted from grey to a deep, burning gold.
A partial shift. At five years old.
The air in the room became something else entirely. Heavy. Ancient. Like standing at the base of something enormous and looking up.
Axel made a low sound behind me. Several of his men stepped back. One knocked his chair over and did not stop to pick it up.
Ragnar stood up slowly. His face had gone pale beneath the hard set of his features.
"Seraphina," he said quietly.
"I know," I said.
"Does he do this often?"
"More often lately."
He turned to look at me, and for the first time since he had walked through that door, the anger between us was gone. What replaced it was something we were both feeling equally, the cold weight of understanding that your child is extraordinary in a way that will make the world dangerous for him.
"They will come for him," Ragnar said.
"I know that too."
"Enemies of the pack. Rival Alphas. Anyone who sees what he is and understands what it means." He looked at Caelan, who had gone calm, the gold fading slowly back to grey, completely unbothered by the reaction around him. "He cannot be hidden forever. You knew that."
"I knew I could keep him safe until he was old enough.."
"There is no old enough for this," Ragnar said. Not cruelly. Just plainly. "A born Alpha without a pack, without training, without protection, he will be a target before he can defend himself."
I did know. I had known for two years, watching Caelan's aura grow stronger, watching him struggle to contain what he was in the body of a small boy. I had told myself I had time.
"What are you asking?" I said.
"I'm asking you to let me help protect him." He paused. "Both of you."
"And everything else? Five years. The council. Isolde. What happens to all of that?"
"Isolde and I were never mated. The arrangement ended six months after you left. The council has no more say in who I.." He stopped. Started again. "I am not asking you to forgive me tonight. I am asking you to let me stand between my son and whatever is coming. You can be furious at me and let me do that at the same time."
I looked at him for a long moment.
I looked at Caelan, who was watching us both with those grey eyes that saw too much.
Outside, the desert night had been silent for hours. It stopped being silent. The thunder of engines came from every direction at once, growing until it filled the room and vibrated in the floorboards beneath our feet. Through the front window, headlights swept across the dark.
Axel moved to the window. He looked out for two seconds and turned back, his face set and serious.
"There are a lot of bikes out there," he said. "None of them are mine."
The engines cut off in sequence. Boots hit gravel.
Then a voice came through the door, unhurried and pleasantly conversational, carrying the ease of a man who already believed he had won.
"We'll take the Alpha child now."
Caelan's golden eyes found mine. I pulled him behind me and looked at Ragnar.
He was already moving to stand at my side.
For the first time in five years, we were on the same side of something.
I reached for my son's hand and held it tight.
"Stay behind us," I told him.
Caelan looked up at me, then at Ragnar. He squared his small shoulders in a way that was so purely his father that it hurt.
"Okay," he said. "But I want to help."
Ragnar looked down at him. Something moved across his face that I had not seen there in five years. Something warm.
"Next time," he said.
The door came open.