She Pulled a Pregnant Wolf From the River—Then the Alpha King Brought Her to His Throne

Chapter 6

A thin gray mist slipped beneath the door.

Ronan heard it too. His body went still. I sat up, cold breaking through the last warmth of sleep. The mist had no smell I could read — only a faint shimmer where the morning light touched it.

Ronan’s reaction was immediate. His pupils narrowed. His breath caught low in his throat, and the hand braced against the bed half-shifted, claws scoring the wood. “Wren,” he said, his voice rough. “Do not breathe deeply.”

He rose. His knees struck the floor before he reached the door.

The sound tore through me. “Ronan!”

He caught himself on one hand. Black veins of strain rose beneath the skin at his throat. His muscles locked as if invisible chains had wrapped around every limb. From the corridor came a muffled crash, then another. Guards falling. Wolves choking on a poison their bodies knew too well.

Ronan dragged in one harsh breath. “This killed my father.”

The sacred sense. The queen’s warning. The poison that had killed a king.

I did not fall.

The mist touched my skin like cold air and passed over me as if it could find no door into my blood — because I was scentless. Whatever had been released did not poison flesh first. It hunted the pheromone pathways of wolves who could receive dominance, mating, fear, command. It turned their most sacred instinct into a cage.

Ronan’s eyes found mine from the floor. “Go to my brother.”

I ran.

The corridor outside was a nightmare of silence. Royal guards lay against the walls, conscious but rigid, while the mist curled through the stones like pale thread. The nursery door stood open. The little prince was crying.

I swept him from the cradle and wrapped him against my chest. He was flushed and frightened, but breathing. His sacred sense had not fully opened yet — the poison brushed him, but it could not bind him as it bound grown wolves.

Master Tolan lay near the hearth, one hand locked around the leg of a table. “The mist,” he rasped. “Old royal poison.”

I looked at the porcelain pot still sitting high near the window, its pale blossoms closed against the morning cold. The torn linen beside it. The cut stem. The pale smear dried on my skin.

Only then did I understand.

Snowbind leaves could soothe a wolf when dried properly. But fresh sap was another thing entirely — absorbed through the skin, it could heat the blood, blur judgment, and turn desire into something difficult to resist. Varen had not brought me a harmless southern herb. He had brought me a trap.

Whatever the sap had done to me in the night had already spent itself. Then I saw the true source of the morning poison.

Beneath the nursery vent, a black glass vial had cracked open. Its stopper was etched with a silver crest I had seen only yesterday on a blue-robed sleeve.

Varen.

For one heartbeat my mind refused it. The books. The careful bow. The harmless smile. The snowbind he had sealed with his own hands.

A thin gray mist leaked from the vial in steady breaths, sliding into the stones and through the palace airways. The palace bells began to ring — not morning. Alarm.

A scout stumbled through the nursery doorway, bloodless and shaking, fighting the poison with every breath. “Duke Varen’s estate is empty,” he gasped. “His private guard has vanished. The outer gates — rebels at the lower walls.”

Master Tolan closed his eyes. “Moon preserve us.”

I laid the prince in a closed inner alcove where the stone was thick and the air still clear. Then I seized the cracked black vial with wrapped hands and carried it to the empty hearth, where the embers still smoldered.

Somewhere below, the rebels were coming through the gates. Somewhere below, the only wolf who could stop them lay frozen on a chamber floor, held prisoner by the same poison that had killed his father.

And I — who could not scent my own mate, who had never been able to feel the sacred bonds every wolf wore like second skin — was the only one in all of Ashkeep the poison could not touch.