Chapter 84: The Truth

Flora’s mouth opened.

For a moment no sound came out. The hall was a held breath around her—northern greens and territorial black, the old Alpha still on his feet, Kai frozen a step away from the throat he had been about to mark, Elvis standing with the papers raised like a blade. Every eye that had turned from the Eastridge Alpha was now fixed on her.

"It’s not true," she said.

The words were thin, and cracked on the second syllable. She swallowed and tried again, louder, as if volume could force the world back into the shape she needed.

"It’s not true. He’s lying. The child is Kai’s. I would never—"

Her voice broke completely on the last word. She looked at Kai, then at her father’s rigid face among the Bloodmoon representatives, then back at the papers in Elvis’s hand.

"It’s not true," she repeated, and this time it sounded like a plea.

The old Alpha’s roar cut across the hall.

"Remove him. Now."

Guards closed in. Elvis did not fight. He let them take his arms, let them pull the papers from his grip only after the old Alpha’s senior aide had already stepped forward to seize them. As they dragged him toward the side doors he kept his eyes on Flora, then on Kai, and the faint curve of his mouth said he had done exactly what he came to do. The doors shut on him with a heavy final sound.

The damage remained in the center of the floor. The old Alpha turned on the hall with the full force of the authority that had held the territory for decades.

"Clear the floor. Guests to the outer courtyards. No one speaks of this outside these walls until I have reviewed the documents. Move."

Servants and guards sprang into motion. Chairs scraped. Formal coats and northern gowns streamed toward the exits in a controlled panic that still threatened to tip into something uglier. A Bloodmoon aide shoved a territorial guard; someone snarled an insult about false alliances and polluted bloodlines. For a few seconds violence hovered at the edge of the crowd, scent spiking, shoulders setting, before the old Alpha’s enforcers pushed into the gaps and forced the flow outward.

The ceremony was suspended. No one said the words, no one needed to.

From the upper gallery Levi watched it all come apart in real time.

He saw Flora’s face when the second denial failed, and saw Kai’s expression when the papers changed hands. He honestly didn’t know what to do or what to believe, one thing he did know was that things weren’t looking good, especially for Flora. Levi knew Elvis more than all of these people, and he knew Elvis wouldn’t take the risk of walking into this place with a false claim.

He did not move until the gallery itself began to empty under a guard’s direction. Then he rose, kept to the screened path he had been assigned, and let the current of bodies carry him out of sight of the main floor.

***

They took Flora to a private receiving room off the eastern corridor, and Kai followed without words. He needed to get to the bottom of this, and he needed to do so quickly.

The door closed on the noise of the hall and left them in a silence that felt worse. Flora stood near the table with her arms wrapped around herself, the deep green gown suddenly looking like a costume she had been caught wearing at the wrong hour. Her usual composure was gone, what remained was a woman watching the last of her architecture collapse.

"It’s not true," she said the moment the latch settled. "Kai. You know me. You know I wouldn’t—"

"Don’t."

Kai’s voice was quiet and stripped of every public register. He had not put the formal calm back on. The crack that had started in the corridor when he first saw Aaron’s mark on Levi had widened into something that no longer had room for polite disbelief.

"Elvis was already gone from this territory when you stood in the receiving room and announced the pregnancy," he said. "He had been expelled. He had no access to our physicians, no access to the timing of our private nights. And yet he walked into that hall with papers sealed in Eastridge and timed to the week. How did he know, Flora, if there was nothing to know?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it. The second denial died before it reached the air.

Kai stepped closer.

"We will test it here tonight, with our own physicians. If the child is mine, the alliance can still be salvaged and Elvis can answer for the disruption. If the child is not mine—" He stopped. The rest of the sentence did not need to be spoken.

Flora’s face had gone gray. She nodded once, the motion stiff, as if her body were agreeing to something her mind still refused.

The physicians were summoned. The old Alpha’s authority cleared the path. Samples were taken in an adjoining chamber while the northern representatives waited under guard in a separate room and the rest of the house was held in a brittle, enforced quiet. The wait was not long. In a territory that had built its power on clean bloodlines and verifiable claims, the tests were designed to be decisive.

When the results returned, the senior physician handed the report to Kai without meeting his eyes for long.

Kai read it once, then he read it again. The child was not his.

The silence in the private room became absolute. Flora made a sound that was not quite a word. Kai stood with the report in his hand and felt the last of the future he had been willing to marry for turn to ash between his fingers.

He set the report on the table, took a deep breath, and did not look at Flora when he spoke.

"Get out of my sight."