22. Milo #2
“She’s mine.” I rise from my chair, and my power floods the room, the full weight of my position, my bloodline, my authority.
“She’s my mate. The goddess herself confirmed it.
And if you think you can separate us with political maneuvering, you’ve badly underestimated what I’m willing to do to keep her. ”
Silence.
Then Elder Gray speaks.
“Milo.” His voice is quiet, careful. “We’re not trying to separate you. We’re trying to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“How a human fits into our future.” He glances at the other elders. “The ritual is in three days. You need a willing human woman - you have one. But after that? When the sacred duty is fulfilled? What happens then?”
“I claim her.”
“And if she refuses?”
“She won’t.”
“You sound very sure.”
Because I feel it in my bones. Because the bond sings every time she touches me. Because when she looks at me, nothing else in the room seems to reach her.
“I know.”
“But you haven’t told her.” Elder Vasquez, speaking for the first time. “Have you? You haven’t told her what she is.”
“I was going to-”
“After the ritual.” Vasquez nods slowly. “You were going to tell her after she’d already participated, already been bound to us through sacred rite. You were going to make her pack and then tell her she was your mate.”
“I was trying to protect her from-”
“From choice.” Thorne’s voice cuts through mine. “You were protecting her from the choice to walk away. You were trapping her.”
“That’s not-”
“Isn’t it?”
The accusation hangs in the air.
And the worst part, the absolute worst part, is that I can’t refute it completely.
I wanted her to experience the pack first. To see what we are, who we are, before she had to decide if she wanted to be mine forever. I wanted her to fall in love with us naturally.
But was that really about her? Or was it about my own fear that she’d run?
“The motion on the table,” Elder Thorne says, “is to bar the human from the ritual until proper disclosure has been made.”
“You don’t have the authority-”
“We have seven votes. That’s all the authority we need.” He looks around the table. “All in favor?”
Four hands rise. Thorne, Whitmore, Barrett, Ashby.
Not enough. They need five to pass a motion against the king.
Elder Gray keeps his hand down. Elder Vasquez keeps her hand down. Elder Winslow keeps her hand down.
“Motion fails,” I say. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes.” Thorne doesn’t back down. “The secondary motion. Review of succession criteria.”
My blood freezes.
“You’re questioning my crown.”
“I’m questioning your judgment.” He meets my eyes, and what’s there isn’t what I expected. Not hatred, not ambition.
Fear.
“Your father led this pack for forty years. He was old when he died, old and tired, and when the accident took him, we all grieved. But we accepted you because you were his son. Because the bloodline demanded it. Because we believed you would grow into the role.”
“I have grown into it.”
“Have you?” He shakes his head slowly. “You’ve brought a human into our midst. You’ve hidden her nature from her.
You’ve made decisions that put your personal desires above pack security.
And now you’re standing here, telling us the goddess herself chose a human woman to be queen of the lycans, and we’re supposed to just… accept that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m your king.” I let the words carry the weight of everything I am.
“Because my father trusted me with this pack. Because I have done nothing but serve our people since the moment that crown fell to me. And because-” I pause, steadying myself.
“Because I love her. And that’s not a weakness.
It’s the only thing that’s ever made me strong enough to stand in this room and face you. ”
Silence.
Then Elder Gray laughs. Actually laughs, a soft, wondering sound.
“Goddess above,” he says. “You sound exactly like your father.”
“My father?”
“When he was your age. When he chose your mother.” Gray looks around the table.
“Some of you are too young to remember, but the council objected to that match too. Different reasons - bloodline disputes, political alliances we wanted him to make instead. He stood in this room, not much older than Milo is now, and he said almost the same words.”
“What happened?” Elder Winslow asks.
“The council backed down. And your father married your mother. And he led this pack for forty years.” Gray meets my eyes. “The boy-king is his father’s son. I’m not voting to review the succession.”
“Neither am I,” Vasquez says.
“Nor I,” Winslow adds.
Thorne’s face goes dark. “This isn’t over.”
“It is for tonight.” I gather my power, letting it fill the room one last time. “The ritual proceeds in three days. The human stays. And if any of you have concerns about my fitness to rule, you’re welcome to challenge me directly.”
No one speaks.
“I thought not.”
I turn and walk out of the chamber, my heart pounding, my mind racing.
I held the room. Barely.
But Thorne is right about one thing.
Lynn doesn’t know she’s my mate. She doesn’t know any of this, the politics, the stakes, the fact that her entire future is being debated in rooms she’s never seen.
And if I’d lost tonight, if three more hands had risen-
She would never have known.
The thought loops through my mind as I walk back to my chambers:
She doesn’t even know she’s my mate. If this goes wrong, she’ll never know.
I have to tell her. Soon. Before the ritual. Before anything else goes wrong.
But first, I have to survive the next three days.
My phone buzzes. Cassius.
The council’s called a continuance. They want daily sessions until the ritual.
They’re keeping me here.
I stare at the message, my blood going cold.
Three days. That’s all that’s left before the moon. Three days, and they’re going to spend every one of them tying me up in procedure, keeping me in this chamber under my father’s empty chair, keeping me away from her while she sits in my quarters wondering why I vanished in the dark like a coward.
That’s the strategy. It was always the strategy.
They can’t beat me in a straight fight and they know it, so they’ll win the slow way: run out my clock, keep me from her long enough that the doubt does their work for them.
Let her decide I used her, let her leave on her own, and then there’s no ritual to bar, no mate to annul, no fight left to have.
Just a boy-king who couldn’t hold on to the one thing the goddess handed him.
And the worst of it, the thing that sits in my chest and won’t move: they might be right. I left her a note. I’ve given her every reason to believe exactly what they need her to believe.
I left her a note.
A note.
And now I can’t even go back to explain.
The goddess was right.
I’ve made a terrible mistake.