Chapter 12
Knox
The collar sits wrong against my throat. Too stiff. Too formal. Twenty years of leather and road dust, and my body has forgotten how orc silk feels against my skin.
Sarah reaches up and adjusts the fold, her small fingers smoothing the dark fabric until it lies flat.
She's wearing a deep green dress that bares the claiming bite at the curve of her shoulder—silver-white against her skin, healed into a scar.
She chose the dress on purpose. I know this because the bond hums with quiet defiance, a frequency I've come to recognize as my mate preparing for war.
"Stop fidgeting." She straightens the collar one final time and steps back to assess her work. "You look..."
"Ridiculous."
"Regal." Her mouth curves. "Like a biker who's now playing dress-up as a king again."
A low rumble builds in my chest—half laugh, half growl.
The formal tunic arrived with the first letter months ago—packed alongside demands I burned without reading.
My father's. Bloodstone silk, stitched with the clan sigil at the collar.
I kept it for reasons I still can't explain.
Sarah helped me air it out, mend the seam along one shoulder where moths had eaten through the thread.
She didn't ask questions. Just handed me a needle and sat beside me while I stitched.
My queen. My mate. My everything.
"Ready?" she asks.
"No."
She takes my hand. "Good. Let's go."
The Cove Hotel sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, its dining room empty at my request. Neutral ground. Garrett and Finn wait outside, visible through the windows. The way brothers should be when their president walks into uncertain territory.
I smell him before I see him.
Cedar smoke and iron ore. The musk of high-altitude orc—thin air, cold stone, centuries of mountain living baked into blood and bone.
The scent reaches across the empty dining room and drags me backward through two decades, landing me in my father's war tent with bruises on my arms and the taste of blood on my tongue.
Gar'than steps through the hotel's side entrance and the years collapse between us.
He's older. The gray that touched his temples when I left now consumes his entire mane, braided in the formal style of clan elders, weighted with iron beads that click against each other when he moves.
His tusks bear the ceremonial caps of a diplomatic envoy—polished bronze, etched with the Bloodstone sigil.
But his eyes haven't changed. Dark and steady. The same eyes that watched me train with a war axe at twelve, that tracked my progress across battlefields, that stood witness in my father's war tent the night I refused to marry Korrath's daughter.
He stops ten feet from our table. His gaze moves from me to Sarah to the bite mark on her shoulder.
The silence stretches long enough to hear waves breaking against the bluff below.
"You claimed a human."
An accusation wrapped in disbelief, delivered in the old tongue—harsh consonants, guttural vowels, a language built for commands and curses.
I answer in English.
"I claimed my mate."
Gar'than's nostrils flare. His eyes cut to Sarah—her size, her species, the way she sits with her spine straight and her chin lifted. Measuring her the way orcs measure everything: by what she can endure.
Sarah holds his stare.
The rigid disapproval in his expression loosens by a fraction. But he lowers himself into the chair across from us with the grace of a man whose joints protest the movement but whose pride forbids acknowledging it.
"You wear your father's tunic to refuse his dying wish." He shakes his head. "Your mother would have laughed at that. She always did enjoy watching him lose."
My hand tightens on the edge of the table.
"Tell me why you're here, Gar'than."
"Your father is dying."
I know this. The letters told me months ago. But hearing it from Gar'than's mouth—in the old tongue's cadence, with the weight of a man who served my father for sixty years—turns knowledge into a blade. Sarah's hand finds my thigh beneath the table, fingers pressing into the muscle, grounding me.
"The lung rot took hold six months ago," Gar'than continues.
"The lung rot has taken his strength. He can no longer lead, can no longer command.
The healers cannot say how long—orc warlords are difficult to kill, even by disease.
But he will never rule again. And the clans.
.." He exhales through his nose, a sound weighted with decades of frustration.
"Three factions fight for the throne. Your cousin Torgan's death left a void no one can fill.
The eastern clans arm for civil war. The northern alliance threatens secession.
Thousands stand to die if no legitimate heir steps forward. "
He leans across the table. "You are the only heir all factions will accept."
I let the silence hold. Let it stretch until the waves fill it.
"Prince Kragnar died twenty years ago." My voice comes out even, controlled, the voice I use at the head of a church table when brothers need steadying. "I'm Knox Stone. President of the Feral Sons MC."
"Your people need you."
"My people are here."
Gar'than's jaw tightens. The iron beads in his braids click as he straightens. "You would let your homeland burn? Let children starve and warriors slaughter each other over a throne you abandoned?"
The guilt hits before I can stop it. A spike through the center of my ribs, sharp and familiar, the same guilt that surfaces every time one of those letters arrives with the Bloodstone seal.
Sarah's grip tightens on my leg. She feels the crack in my composure through the bond, and she shores it up the way she always does—steady, certain, unmovable.
"He won't be going alone if he does go."
Her voice carries across the table, clear and unhurried, and Gar'than's eyebrows climb toward his braided hairline.
"You would go to the orc territories?" he asks.
"Where my mate goes, I go." She meets his stare the same way she met mine the night I pulled her out of the rain. "That's how this works."
I cover her hand with mine. "I'm not going. Not now, maybe not ever. But when I make decisions about my former homeland, my mate will be part of them."
Gar'than studies her for a long moment. His nostrils flare—scenting, the way orcs do when they're trying to read a face that gives them nothing.
I stand. Sarah rises with me.
"Tell my father I wish him a peaceful death." The words taste like ash and obligation, like the last threads of a life I shed two decades ago. "Tell the clans I have claimed a mate, that she carries my heir, and that my loyalty belongs to them both."
"There will be consequences."
"Then let them come."
"You would start a war over a human?"
I look at Sarah. Her hand in mine, the bite mark pale at her throat, our child growing beneath the green fabric of her dress. Everything I built. Everything I chose.
"I would end one for her."
Gar'than's ancient eyes move between us, and the hard lines of his face rearrange. The look of a man who has lived long enough to know when stubbornness has roots too deep to pull.
"You've built a life here, Kragnar." He pauses. Corrects himself. "Knox. Your father would hate it."
"I know."
"But your mother would have loved it."
My throat closes. The grief hits fast and low, a sucker punch from a dead woman's memory, and I breathe through it because breaking down in front of a clan elder defeats every point I've made in the last ten minutes.
"Yes, she would have."
Gar'than pushes to his feet. The bronze caps on his tusks catch the light from the windows, flashing the Bloodstone sigil across the white tablecloth.
"I'll deliver your message. But this isn't over."
"I know." I extend my hand—a human gesture, deliberate. "It never is."
He looks at my hand. Takes it. His grip crushes bone against bone, and I squeeze back just as hard, and for one breath we're not an elder and a runaway prince. We're two orcs acknowledging a truth neither of us can name.
He releases me. Nods once to Sarah and walks out the way he came, cedar smoke trailing behind him until the salt air swallows the last trace.
Sarah lets out a breath that shakes on the way out. "That went well."
I pull her against my side and press my face into her hair. "That went terribly. He respected you, which means he'll tell the clans you're worth taking seriously, which means they'll probably escalate."
"Mmm." She tilts her face up, her eyes bright. "Then we'd better go celebrate while we can."
The clubhouse erupts.
Finn produces a bottle of dark whiskey from a hiding spot behind the bar.
Garrett puts his fist through the ceiling tile trying to hang a banner.
Rex builds a fire in the pit out back that violates at least three municipal codes, and Diesel acquires a cake from Betty's Diner with Congratulations, Prez spelled out in frosting that's already melting in the heat.
I stand at the center of it all with Sarah's hand in mine and make the announcement.
"For those of you who haven't figured it out yet—" A glance at Diesel, who has definitely not figured it out. "Sarah's pregnant. You're all uncles."
The roar shakes the rafters. Brothers slam tables, slam each other, slam their drinks. Rex lifts his glass and bellows a toast about legacy that Diesel drowns out with a whoop loud enough to scare seabirds off the bluff.
Finn catches my eye across the chaos. My brother. My VP. The cocky grin he's worn since childhood splits his face, but his eyes hold a depth I almost never see in him—pride, maybe. Relief. The recognition of a man who followed me out of the mountains and never once asked me to go back.