Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 103

Elara finds me in the library on a Tuesday afternoon, and her expression tells me everything before she opens her mouth.

She’s been in the archives for weeks, studying every historical reference on supernatural abilities in wolf bloodlines. As the twins’ godmother, she framed it as protection: the more we understand their gifts, the better we shield them.

Looking at her face now, I realize it was urgent.

“I need to show you something,” she says. “In private.”

We close the library doors. Elara sets old parchment on the reading table: some crumbling, pulled from archive sections uncatalogued for decades.

“I found these in the lower vaults,” she says. “Buried in a collection that was mislabeled as agricultural records from the pre-unification period. Someone hid them there deliberately — the filing is too precise to be an accident.”

“What am I looking at?”

“References to a ritual, pre-dating the current pack system by at least four centuries.” She opens the first document and smooths it flat.

The text is archaic, the script cramped and difficult to parse. “The language is dense, but the core concept is straightforward. It describes a method of transferring supernatural power from one wolf to another.”

The air in the library changes. I feel it settle against my skin like a temperature drop.

“How?”

“The ritual requires the power-holder to be living: the transfer can’t be performed on the dead. The power leaves one vessel and enters another, completely and without remainder. The original holder survives but is left without any trace of the ability they possessed.”

“That’s— ” I stop. The implications cascade through my mind faster than I can organize them. “The twins.”

“Yes,” Elara confirms, and her voice carries the controlled steadiness of a woman who has been sitting with this knowledge for hours and has already processed the fear that I’m only beginning to feel.

“Their power is unlike anything in living memory. If knowledge of this ritual still exists, then the twins aren’t just powerful children. They’re targets, and their abilities could be harvested.”

“You said the ritual was banned.”

“Centuries ago. The texts describe it as a violation of the natural order that corrupts both the giver and the receiver. The governing councils of the pre-pack era supposedly destroyed all knowledge of the procedure. Every copy burned, every practitioner executed.”

Elara pauses. “But these documents survived. If these did, others may have as well, in the hands of bloodlines that had reason to preserve what the councils tried to erase.”

“Who would have it?”

“That’s what I kept asking myself, so I kept digging.”

Elara opens a second document — newer parchment, perhaps a century old, a scholarly commentary on the older texts.

“This was filed in the same mislabeled collection. It’s an analysis of the ritual’s historical context, written by someone who clearly had access to more complete sources than what survived in our archives.”

“What does it say?”

“It names a specific bloodline associated with the ritual’s preservation across centuries. A family that maintained knowledge of the transfer process as part of their ancestral tradition — not as practitioners, supposedly, but as keepers.”

The pause before she speaks the name is long enough for my heart to begin hammering.

“The Ironridge line.”

The word lands in the silent library with the weight of a door slamming shut.

“Ironridge,” I repeat. “As in Magnus’s.”

Elara lays out the documents with the same methodical precision she showed me. She explains the ritual, the ban, the supposed destruction of knowledge, the survival of these texts in mislabeled files… And then she names the bloodline.

Damon listens without interruption. His face moves through attention, comprehension, resistance, and finally the stillness of a man fighting a conclusion his mind has already reached.

“These are centuries-old documents filed in an archive nobody’s touched in decades,” he says. “The connection to Magnus is ancestral, not personal. We don’t know that he has any knowledge of this ritual.”

“We don’t,” I agree. “But we can’t ignore the pattern, Damon. The proximity he’s built, and the access he’s earned. Malik warned us that Magnus never reveals what he wants. This might be what he wants.”

“Or it might be a coincidence that a modern Alpha happens to share that name,” his jaw tightens. “I need more than a genealogical connection and a defeated enemy’s accusations before I turn on a man who bled for us.”

“Nobody is asking you to turn on him. Just let Malik investigate — quietly, carefully, without changing anything visible. If Magnus is clean, the investigation finds nothing and we’ve lost nothing except time.”

“And if he’s not?”

Elara stands by the desk, holding the documents against her chest. Damon’s dark eyes hold mine, and I see the war behind them — the man who wants to trust fighting the father who can’t afford to be wrong.

“Let’s pray to Mother Moon that he is,” I say.

Damon nods. The resistance doesn’t leave his face, but it makes room for resolve — the determination of a father who would rather be wrong about a friend than right about a threat to his children.

The documents sit on his desk. Somewhere in my palace, Magnus Ironridge walks the corridors with the measured warmth of a man who has never once said what he wants.