Rejected Pregnant Mate of the Alpha King

?? She ran pregnant and alone. He spent five years searching. Now his heir has a royal mark on his chest — and someone inside the palace wants the boy dead.
I didn’t plan on falling for him.
One night. One bond forming faster than either of us understood.
Three weeks with a man whose silver eyes made me forget that wanting something this much was dangerous.
I thought we had time.
I thought we were safe.
I was wrong.
The night before our mating ceremony, they came to my door.
Two men. Polished. Calm. The kind of calm that belonged to people who had done this before.
They showed me photographs.
Ryder Vale — my Alpha King, my fated mate — standing beside another woman. Chosen. Decided. Done.
Then they gave me a choice.
Disappear before sunrise.
Or watch your unborn child die with you.
So I ran.
No note. No goodbye. No last look at the palace that was supposed to be my home.
Just me. A full tank of petrol. And a secret I would spend five years protecting with everything I had.
His son.
A little boy with silver-grey eyes exactly like his father’s.
A little boy who asked questions about everything and collected stones from every park in every city we moved through.
A little boy with a crescent-moon mark on his chest that glowed gold whenever danger came close.
I told him it was a birthmark.
I told myself the same thing.
We were both wrong.
Five years.
New name. New city. New life built from scratch with nothing but a laptop and a forensic accountant’s brain and the absolute refusal to be invisible forever.
I was good at alone.
I told myself that was enough.
And then my aunt died.
And left me a house.
In the one town I swore I would never enter again.
I should have known.
Nothing about going back was an accident.
I just did not understand that yet.
Three days after arrival, parent-teacher night ruined everything.
The classroom was warm and ordinary and completely safe.
Until the room went quiet.
The kind of quiet that happened when something powerful walked in and every wolf present felt it before their brain caught up.
Ryder Vale walked through the door in a black suit with no tie.
Five years.
Five years of distance and new names and a life built to keep him from finding us.
And he walked into my son’s school like he owned the air in it.
The bond detonated.
I did not run.
My feet had decided, without asking me, that we were done running.
Then my son looked up at him with those silver eyes.
Tilted his head.
And said, in the clear and devastating voice of a five-year-old who had never been told some truths were secrets:
“Are you my dad?”
The room went completely silent.
Ryder says he never chose another woman.
He says he never rejected me.
He says the photographs were fabricated, the threat was hidden from him, and the people closest to his throne have been lying for years.
I want to believe him.
God help me, I do.
But wanting to believe something and trusting it are two different things.
And the people who sent two men to my door five years ago?
They are still in that palace.
Still watching.
Still moving pieces I cannot yet see.
My son’s mark is not a birthmark.
It is a royal heir mark — a supernatural claim that has not appeared in the Vale bloodline for three generations. It means Kai is not just Ryder’s son.
He is the most powerful heir this throne has produced in a century.
And someone has known this since before he was born.
Someone who decided, before he took his first breath, that he could not be allowed to exist.
Now Ryder wants us inside his palace.
He says it is the safest place.
He says the walls mean something.
What he does not say — what I have to figure out myself — is that the threat is not outside the walls.
It is sitting at his council table.
Smiling with its mouth.
Holding my son’s life in one polished hand.
And I am a forensic accountant.
I follow the money.
I find the numbers that were not meant to be found.
I build the case that nobody saw coming.
I have been doing it alone for five years.
This time, I do not have to.
This time, there is a silver-eyed Alpha King standing beside me who has spent five years learning, the hard way, the difference between protecting someone and trusting them.
One of us is going to have to go first.
I just did not expect it to be me.