A Royal Interrogation

(Alpha Vandrak)

I stood amid the opulent, over-decorated surroundings of the Azure-Crest packhouse, the clinking of crystal champagne flutes and the suffocatingly sweet scent of expensive perfumes doing absolutely nothing to distract me from the war raging inside my own head. The grand hall was packed wall-to-wall with the territory’s elite, all of them dressed in their finest ceremonial garments, buzzing with an electric, nervous energy. They were celebrating the ascension of their new Alpha and Luna, treating this backwater political transition like it was the event of the century. I honestly couldn’t have cared less about their local hierarchy. The only reason I had accepted the invitation to attend this incredibly insignificant, tedious event in a medium-sized pack that barely registered on the royal radar was entirely, infuriatingly selfish.

I was completely unable to shake the lingering memory of her from my mind.

Elara.

Even now, surrounded by hundreds of mingling wolves, my mind conjured the exact image of her from that birthday party months ago. I remembered the stark, arresting beauty of her features, but it was so much more than just a pretty face. It was her raven-black hair, dark as midnight, tumbling in loose, soft waves over her shoulder. I remembered the violent, irrational urge I’d had to reach out and wrap my fingers in those dark strands just to see if they were as impossibly soft as they looked. But more than anything, it was her eyes. Those striking, defiant, light green eyes. The exact moment her gaze had locked onto mine, even for a fraction of a second, I had felt the entire axis of my world violently shift. My wolf had practically clawed at the inside of my chest, demanding I close the distance between us.

Yet, what haunted me the most was her sheer, absolute indifference.

I was a Royal Alpha Prince. My mere presence commanded a room. Even when I deliberately reigned in my intense royal aura, the raw, dominant energy radiating from my bloodline was usually far too much for ordinary wolves to handle. People instinctively bowed their heads. Women, both unmated and mated alike, practically threw themselves at my feet, desperate for even a fraction of my attention. But not her. The raven-haired girl had boldly and completely ignored me. She hadn’t been affected by the suffocating weight of my dominance. No matter how many times I had positioned myself to initiate a conversation that night, she had simply looked right past me, her brow furrowing slightly as she chewed on her bottom lip—a nervous habit I had spent far too much time obsessively analyzing since.

When she had fiercely declared to me that she was the next Luna of Azure-Crest, I had logically assumed she was already permanently mated to the future Alpha, Kaelen. She had practically worn his invisible mark. Because of that undeniable fact, I had forced myself to step back. I wasn't in the business of chasing mated women, no matter how strongly my primal instincts screamed at me to take her.

So, I had come to this ceremony with one solitary goal: to see her face one last time. I was desperately hoping to convince my restless, pacing wolf that my intense, undeniable physical and spiritual draw to her was just a bizarre fluke. I needed to witness her standing beside her mate, accepting the Luna title, so the harsh reality of her unavailability would finally extinguish this ridiculous obsession. I needed to put her behind me.

“Alpha Vandrak.”

The gratingly cheerful voice snapped my attention back to the present. I schooled my features into a carefully maintained, stoic royal composure as the retiring Alpha Harkon and his mate, Luna Vespera, approached me.

“Alpha Harkon. Luna Vespera,” I replied smoothly, paying the necessary respects to the current leaders, even if they were about to hand over their titles in a matter of minutes. They both dipped their heads in a deep, respectful bow, clearly overly eager to please the royal guest in their midst.

“It is an absolute honor to have you here in our territory,” Luna Vespera gushed, her fingers gripping her mate's arm a little too tightly.

“I’m sorry I had to leave your son's birthday event so early last time; an urgent matter required my attention,” I lied effortlessly, my tone entirely devoid of genuine apology.

Alpha Harkon nodded vigorously, eager to smooth over any perceived slight. “Of course, of course, we completely understand the immense demands on a Prince. We deeply appreciate you returning for this momentous occasion. If you have the time later this evening, I’m absolutely certain my son would love to speak with you about strengthening future relations between our pack and the royal court.”

“I’ll see if I can fit it into my schedule,” I offered a perfectly polite, entirely noncommittal response.

“Excellent,” Harkon beamed, flashing a tight, heavily practiced smile.

I gave a curt nod and immediately turned my body away, deliberately cutting the conversation short. I genuinely didn't care if they thought I was being incredibly arrogant or dismissive. I was. I just wanted to get this suffocatingly boring formality over with. As I stood near the edge of the viewing floor, a war of intense anticipation and heavy dread waged constantly within my chest. I knew deep down that seeing Elara again might not miraculously cure my obsession. If anything, staring at her radiant green eyes while she officially bound herself to another male might only intensify the burning frustration twisting in my gut. But I had to know for certain.

The grand, heavy wooden doors at the front of the hall swung open, signaling the beginning of the ceremony. The tedious, long-winded formalities dragged on exactly as I expected. I suffered through the endless, self-important speeches, keeping my face locked in a bored, impassive mask. Finally, the newly instated Alpha Kaelen proudly took the grand stage alongside his father.

The heavy thumping of my own heartbeat echoed in my ears. The anticipation was thick, suffocating. The announcer raised his voice, calling the new Luna to come forward and join her Alpha.

My eyes instantly locked onto the side of the stage. Every single muscle in my massive frame went entirely rigid. I waited for the reflection of midnight-black hair under the chandelier lights. I braced myself for the impact of those vibrant green eyes.

But the moment the figure stepped out from the velvet curtains, everything derailed.

A sharp, violent spike of pure confusion hit me squarely in the chest. The woman confidently walking up the steps to Kaelen’s side was not Elara. It was Lysandra. She was a leggy blonde I vaguely remembered seeing hovering around the edges of the birthday party. She wore a skin-tight, floor-length white dress that left absolutely nothing to the imagination, specifically designed to proudly and overtly display a significantly swollen pregnant belly. She placed a highly manicured hand over her protruding stomach, her face glowing with smug, triumphant satisfaction as she reached Kaelen.

What the hell was this?

My eyes narrowed into dangerous slits as I analyzed the scene unfolding in front of me. She was officially announced to the wildly cheering pack as Kaelen’s formally chosen mate and their new Luna. The crowd erupted into deafening applause, utterly thrilled by the blatant display of the pregnant blonde on the stage. Luna Vespera stepped forward to the microphone, her eyes misting over with what looked like genuine, nauseating emotion.

“Lysandra has been in Kaelen’s life for longer than anyone,” Vespera announced to the crowd, her voice carrying over the speakers. “They are not fated mates, but they are mates nonetheless. We are honored and elated to have Lysandra follow in my footsteps as Luna, and to have her and my son's heir carry on the royal Azure-Crest line.”

A heavy, dark silence fell over my internal thoughts. Had Elara lied directly to my face that night? She had stared at me with absolute, unwavering conviction when she claimed she was the next Luna. It made zero logical sense. Had she just been a delusional, discarded ex-girlfriend clinging to a fantasy? No. My wolf violently rejected that theory. The sheer brilliance and grounded intelligence I had sensed rolling off her didn't fit the profile of a pathetic, clinging ex.

The rest of the ceremony faded into a blur of meaningless white noise. I didn't pay attention to the handshakes, the vows, or the cheering. My full, predatory attention was entirely fixated on Kaelen and the pregnant blonde who absolutely could not stop deliberately rubbing her swollen stomach for the audience.

As soon as the formal ceremony concluded and the heavy music shifted into the reception phase, the crowd began to mingle. The pack members immediately gave me a wide, terrified berth as I stalked across the ballroom floor. My royal aura, laced with an aggressive, calculated frustration, was leaking out, pushing the weaker wolves out of my path. I wasted no time playing politics. I aggressively cornered Kaelen near the edge of the stage before he could even attempt to slip away to a private table.

“Alpha Kaelen. Congratulations,” I stated, my voice dangerously flat. I extended my hand.

Kaelen turned, a brief flash of surprise crossing his features before he reached out to accept the gesture. “Prince Alpha Vandrak.”

He used the entirely wrong form of my royal title, a glaring indicator of a lesser, uneducated Alpha. But worse than his stupidity was his grip. His handshake was pathetically weak, his palm slightly clammy. It was the physical touch of a coward. I immediately removed my hand from his grasp, wiping away the sensation of his pathetic weakness.

“Where is Elara?” I strictly demanded, having absolutely zero patience for his political pleasantries. I didn't care about his new title or his pregnant chosen mate. I cut straight to the bone.

Kaelen immediately stepped back, his physical reaction entirely involuntary. The blood noticeably drained from his face. His eyes darted nervously around the crowded room, desperately looking for an exit as the heavy, suffocating realization of my anger settled over him.

“Oh,” realization dawned on his pale face. “You... you were here on my birthday.”

I gave him a single, rigid nod. I fixed him with a cold, dead stare, waiting for him to fill the heavy silence. I had learned long ago that terrified men would always hang themselves if you just gave them enough rope.

Kaelen swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing nervously. “You didn't hear. We... well, we decided to go separate ways.” He began to wring his hands together—an incredibly pathetic, submissive gesture for a man who had been an Alpha for barely twenty minutes. “We rejected each other,” he finally stammered out.

My carefully maintained, stoic royal composure nearly cracked violently down the middle.

Fated mates mutually rejecting each other? It was virtually unheard of in our entire documented history. The mate bond was a sacred, fundamental law of our biology. To willingly sever that divine connection required an agonizing, soul-tearing process that left both wolves completely hollowed out. Knowing Elara's goddess-like brilliance, her undeniable strength, and now witnessing Kaelen's aloof, pathetic weakness firsthand, I could completely understand exactly why a woman of her caliber would choose to walk away from a sniveling coward like him. He absolutely did not deserve her. But the sudden revelation violently shifted my entire perspective.

She wasn't his. She was free.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I lied, my voice dripping with icy detachment. I didn't feel an ounce of sorrow for him. “Where is she now?” I pressed him, my tone darkening significantly as the predatory instinct inside me flared to life. I was fully prepared to walk out of this monotonous, suffocating party right this second, track her down, and see once and for all if what my wolf felt for her was real.

“I don’t know,” Kaelen deflected weakly. He shook his head and attempted to casually nod to an older pack member standing behind me, desperately trying to escape the heavy gravity of my interrogation.

“I’m still speaking to you,” I warned him. The words came out as a lethal whisper, laced with a heavy dose of pure Alpha command.

The command violently snapped his terrified attention back to my face. His shoulders hitched, and he instinctively bowed his head, properly cowed by my overwhelming dominance. “Yes, sir,” he choked out, his voice trembling under the weight of my aura. “She... she left a few months ago. She and her parents completely left the pack. But I swear I don't know where she went. They left absolutely no trace behind.”

Before I had the opportunity to step fully into his personal space, grab him by his tailored lapels, and violently extract more details about her departure, a sickeningly sweet scent of vanilla and hormonal pregnant wolf assaulted my senses.

Lysandra slithers up right beside him. She immediately wrapped her thin arms possessively around Kaelen’s waist and deliberately rubbed her swollen stomach flush against his side. She looked up at him, entirely ignoring the lethal tension radiating from my body.

“Oops, I don’t want to poke you with my bump,” Lysandra simpered, her voice dripping with a fake, cloying sweetness that made my wolf bare its teeth in disgust. She stroked her own stomach with exaggerated care. “That wouldn’t be good for the baby.”

I stared at the two of them. I looked at Kaelen’s pale, cowardly face, and then down at Lysandra’s overtly displayed pregnancy. The sheer audacity of the display was nauseating.

“It would be tragic,” I replied flatly, my voice utterly deadpan and entirely devoid of any warmth or congratulations.

Without waiting for another word of their pathetic, fabricated drivel, I turned my back on both of them in blatant disgust. The crowd instinctively parted for me as I carved a direct path toward the heavy grand exit doors of the hall. I didn't look back.

As I walked away, the cool night air hitting my face, my highly analytical mind raced, tearing their story apart piece by piece. Absolutely nothing about their narrative added up. Kaelen had claimed it was a mutual rejection just a few months ago. But the immense, heavily documented physical and psychological pain of a true fated mate rejection simply didn't align with reality. A rejection of that magnitude destroyed a wolf for months. It required immense healing. It simply wasn't biologically or psychologically possible for Kaelen to recover from a shattered soul bond and immediately take a brand new Luna who was already heavily pregnant.

The math was painfully obvious. For Lysandra's belly to be that significantly swollen, Kaelen had to have been intimately involved with her, actively sleeping with her, long before any formal rejection with Elara ever took place. He hadn't just separated from Elara; he had fundamentally betrayed her. He had humiliated her.

A low growl rumbled deep in my chest at the thought of her enduring that kind of disrespect. But as I reached the gravel driveway where my private transport was waiting, I forcefully stopped my spiraling thoughts. I realized with absolute clarity that I didn't care enough about their sordid, pathetic pack drama to dig into the dirty details of Kaelen's infidelity. Let them rot in their own fabricated lies.

The only person I actually cared about in the entirety of this damn territory was Elara Balfour. The fire of my restless anticipation hadn't been extinguished by Kaelen's ceremony; it had just been violently redirected. She was no longer bound to a lesser man. She was out there somewhere in the world, unattached, hiding from the humiliation they had forced upon her.

And apparently, she wasn't here anymore. But I was going to find her.