Alpha King Threw Away His Mate For Being Infertile—Then She Returned With Four Powerful Alpha Heirs

Chapter 6

For a long moment, Aldric said nothing.

He sat on his gilded throne with his hands gripping the arms so hard his knuckles were white, and he stared at the woman who stood before him — and he saw, in the space of a heartbeat, the ghost of the girl he had crushed, and the titan she had become, and he could not make the two images fit together in his mind.

“You actually came,” he said at last. His voice was wrong. It was supposed to be a sneer, but it came out thin, uncertain. “I thought you would be too ashamed to show your face at my son’s naming ceremony.”

Elena did not flinch. She simply adjusted the cuff of her emerald gown, and her serene smile never wavered.

“I wouldn’t know, Your Majesty,” she said softly. “I’ve never been ashamed of anything that happened to me. But I brought my family to celebrate. I hope you don’t mind.”

The silence that followed was so complete that Elena could hear her own heartbeat.

Then the shadows behind her shifted, and the hall drew its first ragged collective breath.

The four boys stepped forward out of the candlelight, and a gasp rippled through the crowd like a wave breaking on stones. Glasses slipped from trembling fingers. A crystal goblet shattered against the marble, and nobody turned to see who had dropped it, because every eye in the kingdom was fixed on the four identical children standing at the center of the hall.

They were small. They were impeccably dressed, in charcoal suits tailored to their frames. They looked no older than four or five. But they possessed none of the clumsy, fidgeting energy of children — they stood with the stillness of statues, their dark hair swept back, their hands folded, their silver-gray eyes sweeping over the gathered wolves with the detached, chilling calm of judges examining a case.

Aldric’s breath stopped.

The blood drained from his face.

Because the eyes — those impossible, silver-gray eyes — were his. They were the eyes of the Silverfall bloodline, the marker so rare it appeared only in the ruling monarch. And they were looking at him from four small faces, and he could feel something pressing down on the air of his own hall, something vast and cold and ancient.

Isolde’s hand flew to her mouth. The toddler in her lap, sensing the shift in the air, let out a thin, frightened wail.

“David—” Isolde whispered, using the name she only used when she was terrified. “Aldric. Who are they?”

Aldric could not answer. He could not breathe.

The air had gone heavy, thick as burial earth. The scent of ozone, of petricor, of freezing mountain air, was rolling over the crowd like an avalanche — and Aldric knew that scent. He knew it from the deepest parts of his wolf, the parts that had no words, the parts that had whined and cowered when he had stood over Elena and crushed her band.

It was the scent of apex predators.

It was not one alpha aura pressing down on the hall. It was four. Dense, ancient, and wildly unnatural for their age. Werewolf pups did not develop alpha auras until adolescence. It was a biological rule, an undisputed fact of their kind. And yet the air in the Silverfall hall had plummeted to something that crushed the breath from the lungs.

Aldric tried to push his own aura outward — a heavy wave of pine and smoke, the command of a king who had conquered rivals and expanded borders. It rolled over the crowd, driving several weaker wolves to their knees.

It hit Elena’s sons.

They did not growl. They did not bare their teeth. They simply stared at him — four pairs of silver eyes, utterly unmoved — and a wall of invisible, freezing ozone slammed into his aura and shattered it like glass.

Aldric gasped. The breath was driven from his body as if he had been struck in the chest.

His wolf, the beast that had made him a king, was not urging him to fight.

It was whining.

At the edge of the crowd, an old warrior rose from his seat. Elder Cormac — a grizzled wolf who had served Aldric’s father, a man whose instincts had been honed by decades of war — stepped forward, and his eyes were wet, and his hands were trembling, and without a word he lowered his head and exposed his neck in a deep, reverent bow.

The courters gasped. The elders only bowed to the reigning monarch.

“Elder Cormac,” Elena acknowledged, her voice a soothing melody cutting through the crushing tension. “It is a pleasure to see you in good health. Your left knee seems to trouble you less these days.”

Cormac blinked, looking up in astonishment.

“The herbs you recommended before you left us, my lady,” he said hoarsely. “They worked better than anything the royal physicians ever gave me.”

“I am glad,” Elena murmured, and she turned her gaze back to the dais.

She stopped at the base of the throne steps. Her sons halted exactly half a step behind her, their postures impeccable, their hands folded neatly behind their backs.

The contrast between them and the weeping, thrashing two-year-old in Isolde’s arms was a spectacle of devastating proportions.

“Your Majesty,” Elena said, her tone perfectly, agonizingly polite. “You extended an invitation to my person, requesting my presence to witness the strength of your legacy. I have come to offer my congratulations.”

Aldric’s jaw worked. He forced his hands to uncurl from the throne. He needed to assert dominance. He was the Alpha King. He needed to project power before his pack began to question the very fabric of his reality.

“Elena,” he managed, his voice dropping an octave, laced with an artificial rumble of authority. “You have returned, and you have brought guests. Do you care to explain the meaning of this theatrical display?”

Elena tilted her head, and for the first time, her smile reached her eyes.

“Theatrical display? I assure you, Aldric, there is no theater here. Only the truth you were too impatient to wait for.”