Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 110

[Magnus’s POV]

I came here with clean hands.

I need to remember that: the man who rode through the Silver Throne’s gates eight months ago with genuine intentions.

That man was tired of isolation, tired of his father’s paranoid legacy. He wanted stability and partnership. He wanted to build something lasting.

That man didn’t know about the children.

The memory won’t release me. Hundreds of replays — the garden, the toddler’s hands on flagstone, the web of cracks radiating outward. Raw force rippling through the earth, felt through my boots, registering in my bones.

An eighteen months old child, cracking stone with his bare hands.

And the girl pushing a goblet with her mind while her gaze held mine with the terrifying clarity of a child who sees what adults conceal.

I sit at my desk in the dark and listen to the thought I’ve been trying to drown for weeks.

‘That power has no ceiling.’

My father told me stories. I was seven, sitting on the floor of his study while firelight made the shadows dance, and he spoke about our bloodline the way other fathers spoke about hunting legends, with the particular solemnity of a man passing down knowledge he considered sacred.

“The Ironridge line is older than the pack system, Magnus,” the voice in my head spoke, low enough that even my mother couldn’t hear from the next room.

“We go back to a time when power wasn’t inherited through blood alone. When it could be moved and transferred, given from one wolf to another through rituals that the modern world has forgotten.”

“Like magic?” I asked.

“Knowledge. The rituals weren’t supernatural — they were precise, methodical, developed over centuries by wolves who understood that power concentrated in a single line breeds stagnation, and power distributed across many lines breeds chaos. The Transfer was the solution. A way to ensure that the strongest power always resided in the hands best equipped to use it.”

“Why did it stop?”

“The councils decided that fixed bloodlines served their political interests better than fluid power. They banned the rituals, burned the texts, and executed the practitioners. They declared the Transfer an abomination because it threatened the hereditary power structures that kept the ruling families in control.”

“But we still know about it.”

“Every Ironridge Alpha passes the knowledge to the next. We don’t practice it, we don’t pursue it — but we remember, because knowledge destroyed is knowledge lost, and the Ironridge line has never believed in burning books.”

I treated these as folklore. Campfire stories from an ancestor-worshipping old man. I never pursued the rituals, never gave them weight.

The Transfer described power that didn’t exist anymore: hybrid, converged, impossible power that the modern world had bred out through centuries of separated bloodlines. Until I felt it pulse through the ground beneath a toddler’s fists.

I argue with myself. The debate has been running for weeks, and I am losing.

“These are the Queen’s children,” I say to the empty room. “Children you’ve held, whose laughter you’ve heard in the corridors of a palace that welcomed you when you had no claim to welcome.”

The rational voice and my inner, initial voice, the voice of the man who came here with clean hands. But I hear another one in my head: weak but confident, it whispers something to me that makes me feel uneasy:

“The power in those children could end every war this world has known! You saw that boy crack a stone. Didn’t you feel the possibility open like a door in a wall you’d never known existed?”

“United in one Alpha, it could make the territories unbreakable. No more Broken Crowns, no more territorial wars that grind generations to dust. One leader, strong enough that fighting becomes unnecessary, peace enforced by a power too absolute to challenge.”

“The world is broken, Magnus, and you’ve spent eight months watching the cracks. Kira holds it together through diplomacy and Malik’s intelligence network, but it’s fragile. One crisis away from fracture. The power in those children, properly directed and wielded — it could make the fragility permanent or end it forever.”

“They won’t always be, and the Transfer works best on the young. Every month that passes closes the window. If the knowledge still exists and the records survived, the opportunity has a timeline.”

“It’s about saving everyone, including them! A world united under absolute strength is a world where two extraordinary children don’t grow up as targets but prizes to be fought over by every ambitious Alpha who hears what they can do. I would be protecting them by removing the thing that makes them vulnerable.”

I write the letter before dawn. My hand is steady — I’ve always had steady hands, even in freefall. The words are addressed to the keeper of Ironridge’s family archive.

‘Harlan, the old stories Father told us about the Convergence and the Transfer. Are there written records? Find them but tell no one.’

I seal it with the Ironridge crest: dark green wax against cream parchment.

I stare at the letter. I could burn it — the candle is inches away, the flame tall enough to catch the edge and reduce the question to ash. One gesture, and the door closes, and I remain the man Kira believes me to be.

My hand moves toward the candle, then stops and returns to the desk.

I call for a runner. The letter goes south with the morning dispatch, buried among trade correspondence and diplomatic packets, carrying a question that will either confirm that the knowledge is lost forever or hand me the key to a power that could reshape the world.

I don’t pray for either outcome. I’m past the point where prayer applies.

The morning light fills my quarters, and I dress with the careful attention of a man assembling a version of himself the world expects. Warm, present, and, of course, generous.

Damon greets me at breakfast with a joke about last night’s card game. I laugh, and the laugh sounds real because part of it is: the part that still likes these people, that still wants to deserve their company.

The other part counts days until Harlan’s response arrives.