Chapter 17: The Middle Child

Aaron sat on the edge of the bed doing his best to not lose his temper.

Levi was still turned slightly away from him, jaw tight, refusing to give anything about Elvis. Aaron wanted to push. Every instinct he had screamed to demand answers, to drag the truth out, to make certain no other Alpha, especially one who had smiled while talking about killing Dexter, got to lay any kind of claim to what the Goddess had tied to them.

But Levi looked small against the pillows. Exhausted. Bruised in places that had nothing to do with hands. And Aaron, for once, forced the temper back down.

He had always been bad at being gentle.

He had never been given much practice.

***

He had been five the first time he understood he was the spare.

Kai was eight and already perfect—straight-backed, quick with lessons, the clear first heir. Their twin sister, Liora, had been the mirror of that perfection in softer form, bright, and destined to be a Luna who would strengthen alliances. Their father looked at the two of them the way a man looked at the future of his bloodline. When he looked at Aaron at all, it was with the mild distraction of someone remembering there was a third child who existed somewhere in the house.

Aaron had tried, at first. He followed Kai through the corridors, shorter legs working twice as hard to keep up. He wanted to be included in the training sessions, the strategy talks, the quiet conversations their father had with the eldest. Kai never pushed him away with cruelty. He simply never made space. There was always another lesson, another expectation, another responsibility waiting for the firstborn. Aaron learned to trail behind until his legs tired, then to stop trailing at all.

He grew quieter. Then he grew sharper. A grumpy child with too much energy and nowhere approved to put it. Servants learned to step carefully around him. Tutors called him difficult. His father called him nothing at all.

When Dexter arrived, silver-haired and strange and immediately remarkable, Aaron had a single, foolish hope that the attention might finally dilute enough for some of it to reach him. Instead the opposite happened. The newest prince was treated as a small marvel, gifted, unusual, and special. Dexter grew into that treatment with the same effortless competence Kai had always shown. Languages came easily. Combat forms settled into his limbs like they had been waiting for him. Even as a child he carried a stillness that made adults listen when he spoke.

Aaron remained the one in the middle. Not the heir, not the marvel, just the boy who got louder when he was overlooked, then angrier when the loudness earned him only the title of problem.

Their mother had been the exception.

She was the one who found him in the gardens when he disappeared for hours. The one who sat with him through storms when the thunder made the young wolf in him restless. She never asked him to be more like Kai or quieter like Dexter. She simply made space on the window seat and let him exist beside her. In the hierarchy of the house she was the only person who looked at him and saw Aaron instead of the gap between two more impressive sons.

Then she died.

It had been sudden. One season she was there, warm hands and quiet understanding; the next the rooms smelled of mourning incense and his father’s grief had turned the entire house to stone. Aaron had been twelve. He remembered standing in the doorway of her rooms after the burial, waiting for someone to notice he was still there. No one did. Kai was already being pulled into heavier duties. Dexter was being carefully shielded from grief. Their father had looked straight through him.

Something in Aaron folded inward that year and never fully unfolded again.

The grief had nowhere to go except down, and when it came back up it came as rage. He started fights in training yards. He broke things that could be replaced. He learned that anger made people look at him, even if the looking was full of disapproval. They began calling him the mad prince in the corridors, never loudly enough for the Alpha to have to address it, but often enough that it stuck. No one asked what the anger was covering. No one asked what it was like to be the son who only became visible when he was inconvenient.

He learned to live with the title, at least it meant that people were looking at him.

Things, although not perfect, seemed to be getting a lot better than before. Then Liora died.

The accident on the ridge road took the family’s golden daughter and left a silence that never really lifted. Their father changed in ways no one wanted to name out loud. He became harder, colder, less willing to tolerate weakness or complication. Kai became even more the perfect heir, absorbing duty like it could fill the empty space. Dexter grew quieter and more self-contained. And Aaron, still the middle, still the difficult one, felt the hierarchy calcify further around him. He was old enough by then to understand the shape of his place: useful when strength was needed, overlooked when futures were planned.

He fought for position the only way he knew how, by refusing to be ignored. He took on the hardest patrols. He won the ugliest matches in the training rings. He made certain that if the family would not offer him a clear role, he would carve one out of sheer presence and temper. It was exhausting. It was lonely. It was the only strategy that had ever worked.

When the full moon rose and Levi’s heat tore through the great hall, something unprecedented happened.

For the first time in Aaron’s life, the Goddess had pointed at him with the same clarity She pointed at his brothers. The mate pull had not ranked them. It had not placed Kai first and Dexter second and Aaron somewhere tolerated in the middle. It had simply been equal, undeniable, and shared. In that moment Aaron had felt a fierce, almost painful relief. Here was something that could not be taken from him by birth order or silver hair or their father’s preference. Here was a bond that belonged to him as much as it belonged to them.

He had wanted Levi for himself. Of course he had. The wolf in him still did. But he had also understood, faster than either of his brothers seemed to, that the pull was not a competition with a single winner. That understanding made Kai’s early attempt to claim priority sting harder. It made Dexter’s secret midnight claiming feel like a familiar kind of theft, the kind the special sons always got away with because the family expected less accountability from them.

Aaron was tired of being the one who was expected to accept it.

And now there was Elvis.

An outsider. An Alpha who had walked into their territory, called Levi his lover, and spoken casually about removing Dexter’s mark as if the youngest prince’s life were an inconvenience to be cleared. Aaron could barely tolerate the idea of sharing Levi with the two people who had grown up in the same fractured house. He would not tolerate being diminished by a stranger who thought he could take what the Goddess had given and rewrite it to suit himself.

That was why he had come to this room.

He had wanted information. He had tried, for once, to ask instead of demand. Levi had been through enough—cells, suppressants, threats from every direction. Aaron had not wanted to add another bruise to the collection. But the omega’s silence on the subject of Elvis was making things difficult for both of them.

Aaron looked at the pale, stubborn line of Levi’s profile and felt the old anger.

He did not want to be that man with this omega. So he was going to do his best to change.

***

"Levi," he said, quieter than before. The temper was still there, banked but present. "I’m not asking because I want to pick a fight with you. I’m asking because that man stood on our terrace and talked about killing my brother and taking you like you were already his. I need to know what I’m standing across from."

Levi’s throat moved as he swallowed. He would rather not talk about Elvis, not to himself and especially not to an Alpha who has little control over his emotions.

Aaron continued, the words coming harder now that he had started. "I understand that you probably hate us, but this isn’t just about you now. You belong to me and my brothers, and I’m not going to let an outsider walk in and decide he gets to erase that. Not for Dexter. Not for me. Not for any of us."

He exhaled, long and rough, and some of the fight drained out with it.

"I don’t want to push you. You’ve had enough people pushing. But I need something. Anything. Who is he to you? Why does he think he has a claim that overrides a completed mark and a Goddess-given pull?"

Levi remained still, now weighing his choices. Did he really want to be saved by Elvis, was that really better than staying here? He might not know the three princes well, but he knew Elvis down to the bone and knew exactly what he was capable of. Besides, telling one brother about his past relationship wouldn’t kill him.

Levi sighed, drew a deep breath, and then finally came to a conclusion, he would tell Aaron about his relationship to Elvis.