The Rejected Mate (Elaine and Michael) novel Chapter 109

The alpha suite felt like a breathing thing – old wood warmed by the late-afternoon sun, the heavy curtains drawn aside so light could pool golden over the rugs. Voices from the inner halls softened as if the house itself swallowed sound to protect what happened inside. In Nathan’s room, toys were scattered in a casual kingdom: a battered wooden horse, a cluster of carved soldiers, the faint chalk circle where Nathan insisted his imaginary wolves met.

Elaine sat on the edge of the bed, fingers threaded through the soft hair at the nape of her son’s neck. Nathan, small and earnest in a shirt that still smelled faintly of his afternoon milk, was perched on a stool, reliving the day in bright, staccato bursts.

“You did a good job today, love,” Elaine said, her voice low and proud. It wasn’t flattery. It was the measured praise of someone who watched a child step into the light and not blink.

Nathan’s grin split his face; pride sat in his shoulders. He always spoke of things as if he’d swallowed them whole and chewed them into new words. “Did you hear, Mommy? Some alpha said I’ll be a strong alpha when I grow up-like Daddy.” His eyes shone with the certainty of someone who believed the world would bend to his wish.

Elaine’s smile softened until it was all fondness. “You will be stronger than daddy, Nathan,” she told him, because honesty and hope could sit side by side. At that precise moment the door opened and Darius stepped in, still carrying the tail-end of a meeting – warriors’ boots scuffed with dirt, a strip of paper tucked into his hand.

Darius leaned against the frame briefly, rolling his shoulders as if shrugging off the weight of command. He regarded his son with the fierce, complicated devotion of a man who had been forged in struggle and gentled by the same.

You will be stronger than me, especially if you eat all your vegetables,” he said, and in the faintest curl of his mouth there was irony and love. He knew Nathan’s relationship with broccoli like an old argument – one the child always tried to win by sticking out his tongue.

Nathan screwed his face up and stuck his tongue out at Darius, the universal child’s retort. Then, with a sudden solemnity, he declared, “Then you can be the strongest, Daddy. I can be the second strongest.”

Darius laughed. The sound filled the room like a warmer wind. He came forward and ruffled Nathan’s hair imperiously, patting his head the way kings do when congratulating heirs. “You always know how to make me and your mother laugh. You are the happiness of our life.”

Nathan melted into his father’s arms and hugged him tight – a hug that seemed to chase away any weather that threatened the suite. For a few minutes the world contracted to that small, perfect geometry: two parents and a son, all the turbulence of pack politics shoved to the far edges.

But the day’s shadows had claws. Later that evening, after laughter and the ritual bath, the glow in the suite dimmed. Darius and Elaine sat across from each other in the soft lamplight of the main chamber. The walls, lined with trophies and old portraits of alphas who had slept here before them, watched like patient juries. Their conversation had the weight of a wolf’s growl: slow, inevitable, dangerous.

“Michael is trouble, Elaine,” Darius said, his fingers tightening around his drink until the porcelain threatened to creak. The anger in his voice was a low, steady drumbeat that betrayed years of dealing with men who thought will could trump law. “I hope he won’t do something stupid. For Roselyn’s sake now that she belongs to the Silverblade pack… I don’t want war. I don’t want blood spilled on our lands. But if Michael provokes me in front of my people, I will not hesitate to kill him.”

Elaine reached across the table. Her hand, warm and steady, found the side of his face, fingers splaying like a peace offering. She had learned the map of Darius’s moods – how to read the little ridges of tension, how to trace the hiding places of patience. “Love,” she said softly, “don’t let him get between our happiness. We knew he would be like this. We don’t know why he’s acting out, but we won’t-” She paused, gathering the stubborn confidence that had steadied them through lesser storms.

“We won’t let him stand between the light we’ve built.”

Darius’s jaw clenched. He had always been an alpha first and a man second; the lines of responsibility etched into his face had sharpened since Nathan’s birth. “I don’t care why he claims anything. He has no right to claim Nathan,” he snarled, teeth bared to the thought. “He chose to be with Kathy. Whether he was forced or not by his father’s manipulations – he chose. The moment he followed his father’s command, he lost any right to be Nathan’s father. Nathan is ours. My wolf accepts him. We will kill anyone who tries to take him.”

Outside, the sky went from bruised purple to the ink of early night. The suite’s torches guttered and flamed, small suns fighting the dark. Nathan, weary from the day’s small glories, lay curled under a heavy blanket, his breath a steady drum against the bed’s frame.

He slept like somebody who trusted the world was stitched right; his chest rose as if every small trouble would unravel before it touched him.

Elaine watched him for a long time, the lines of her face easing and hardening in the same minute. She thought of the future as both possibility and battlefield. She thought of Michael, a single storm-cloud between her family and a fragile peace. She thought of promises: to Nathan, to Darius, to herself, stitched like invisible stitches that would hold no matter the pressure.

“Whatever comes,” she whispered-not to Darius, not aloud, but into the dark, into the room that held all their secrets-“we face it together.”

Darius’s hand found hers in the dark, warm and unyielding. “Together,” he agreed, and the word wrapped the room like a shield. Outside, in the wider world, other packs slept, unknowing.

Inside, an alpha and a mother kept watch over the small, steady heart of their life, ready to defend it with every measure of their power.