✦ Chapter 12 ✦
Alpha Silvermoon's expression darkened at Lucien's words. His golden eyes flared with irritation before smoothing into practiced softness — far too quickly. To anyone else, the shift might have passed unnoticed, a flicker disguised beneath authority and charm.
But Lucien saw it.
Lucien always saw it.
Fakeness clung to his father like perfume.
Alpha Silvermoon rose from the throne, the omega still cradled in the crook of his left arm. He set her gently onto the second throne — the one that belonged to Lucien's mother. The sight struck something deep and molten inside him. His fists curled tight at his sides, nails digging crescents into his palms. But, as always, he swallowed the fury, locking it behind an expression carved from stone.
His father sighed as he descended the short steps, stopping only when two feet separated them.
"Lucas," he said — using the name Lucien had long grown to despise. "I'm an Alpha. You know I cannot simply stop having a partner because your mother died. Alphas need release during their ruts. It is our nature."
Lucien didn't move. Didn't flinch. Didn't blink.
Then a low, dark laugh slipped past his lips. His golden eyes lifted to his father's, cold enough to strip flesh from bone.
"Release," he repeated softly. "I'm a Superior Alpha… yet I don't require such release."
The words hit like a blow. Alpha Silvermoon's jaw tightened, rage flickering across his features. But — as he always did — he turned away before the anger could fracture his mask. Ten purposeful steps carried him to the table on the right. He poured a glass of wine with steady hands, though Lucien noticed the tremor beneath the surface.
Only when his father moved did Lucien finally see the omega clearly.
Her beauty struck like winter moonlight.
Long white hair cascaded down her back, whiter than snow at dawn. Her eyes — an impossible blue — gleamed with an ocean's depth, shimmering in the dim light of the hall. Skin pale and soft as fresh cream. She wasn't just lovely.
She was breathtaking.
A fragile, delicate sort of breathtaking.
Lucien's eyes narrowed. A familiar face rose unbidden behind his eyes — violet staring back at him, framed with the same snowy hair.
Elian.
For a moment, the two faces blurred. Overlapped. Echoed each other with unsettling precision.
And when the blue-eyed omega noticed his gaze on her, she immediately lowered her eyes, fingers tightening around the hem of her robes. A tremor ran through her shoulders — not the dramatic kind born of fear, but the small, instinctive recoil of someone who had learned to make themselves smaller in a room full of predators.
It was a gesture Lucien recognized intimately.
There was something in the way she retreated into herself… a fragile quietness that mirrored the boy with violet eyes waiting far away in a lonely window.
Lucien's breath caught in his throat. Then his gaze dropped — and froze entirely.
A necklace hung against her throat.
A symbol.
A shape.
Yin…
Before thought could settle, Alpha Silvermoon's voice sliced through the silence.
"She's beautiful, isn't she?" he asked, a smirk curling triumphantly on his lips. He stepped toward Lucien until they stood almost shoulder to shoulder.
"People have stopped following orders," his father continued, lifting his wine as though discussing a trivial matter. "Imagine — they found this omega in a tiny pack in the North. She had already been marked, but her partner died. The mark is fading."
His words washed over Lucien, but Lucien barely heard them.
Because something else — something forgotten — had clawed its way back to the surface.
A trembling voice.
A frightened boy.
A confession whispered in a cold room.
" I—I ran away from my pack."
" should I ask why? "
" My pack was burned. I have nowhere else to go...so I ran."
Lucien's chest tightened.
"Was their pack burned?" he asked quietly, lifting his head to look at his father.
Alpha Silvermoon frowned at the sudden question, but nodded. "There were many sinners. So yes — it was burned."
Lucien let out a dark, humorless exhale. Almost a laugh. Almost a curse. He dragged a hand down his face before looking back at the blue-eyed omega on the throne. She was older — her beauty heavy with maturity, perhaps in her late thirties. A tiny mole rested beneath her pink lips, trembling as she pressed them together.
In the quiet of his mind, a small voice whispered again — memory or intuition, he couldn't tell.
"What about...female omegas?"
The boy's voice had been so soft.
So afraid.
Lucien lowered his gaze, a slow realization curling coldly through him.
So that's why the boy had asked.
He had been afraid for his own mother.
Yet… Elian carried no omega scent. None at all. Classified as a beta. Invisible. Overlooked.
But if the guards had burned that pack…
If they had taken every omega…
Then how had Elian escaped?
With that face — that beauty — how had he slipped through their grasp?
How could someone have such impossible luck?
Or was it luck at all?
Lucien lifted his head again, the weight of a truth he could not yet name tightening around his spine.
"Father," he said quietly, voice sharpening. "Why did you really call me here?"
Because now Lucien's heart was no longer in this room.
It was back at a window in a distant mansion — where a white-haired, violet-eyed boy sat alone in the morning light.
Who was Elian, truly?
✦ End Of Chapter ✦