Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 33

[Kira’s POV]

I couldn’t see Damon this way. I could sense his feelings. Deeper than I thought I would. But that wasn’t the only thing that distracted me.

The first weeks of my reign tried to eat me alive.

Mornings bled into afternoons with no discernible boundary, just an endless procession of council meetings.

Trade disputes between territories I’d never visited. Requests for audiences from nobles whose names I memorized each night by candlelight, terrified I’d confuse one house with another.

Because they were searching. Every lord, every lady watched me with the same patient, predatory attention—waiting for the servant girl to slip.

Waiting for the crack in the Silver Queen’s composure that would confirm what they already believed: that I didn’t belong on that throne.

But I learned quickly because I had no other choice. I studied late into the night and rose before dawn.

And in council, I held my spine straight and my voice steady, even when Lord Ashworth questioned my understanding of military logistics with a smile that was all teeth and no warmth.

When Lady Prentiss suggested that perhaps the Queen might benefit from a more experienced advisor, her tone dripping with a courtesy so poisonous it could have stripped paint from the walls.

By the time I reached my chambers after the worst session yet—three hours of thinly veiled condescension—I was so drained I could barely feel my own legs beneath me.

I closed the door, pressed my back against it, and let my eyes fall shut, just breathing in the silence like water after a drought.

I’d barely settled onto the edge of the bed when the side door opened with a soft click, and Malik leaned against the frame, arms crossed, that quiet half-smile on his lips. “Exhausted already?”

“I passed exhausted somewhere around the second hour when Lord Mercer implied I couldn’t read a supply manifest,”

I said, not bothering to lift my head from my hands. “I’m somewhere in the territory beyond exhaustion now. I think they’ll need to invent a new word for it.”

He crossed the room and sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. I waited for him to strategize about how to handle Mercer or Ashworth. He always had a plan, always saw three moves ahead.

But tonight he didn’t ask about the council. Instead, he was quiet for a long moment, staring at the fire, and when he spoke, his voice was softer than I’d ever heard it.

“I’ve never told you what it was like growing up omega. Not really. Not the truth of it.” He paused, as if testing whether the words would hold his weight.

“You know the rank, you know the theory, but you don’t know what it does to a child to be told every single day—by actions, by silence, by the way people’s eyes slide right past you like you’re furniture—that you are fundamentally less.” He exhaled, but didn’t stop.

Malik’s hand found mine, and his fingers laced through mine with a certainty that made my eyes sting.

“We’ll get through this together, Kira. The councils, the lords, all of it. They look at us and see a servant and an omega who wandered into the wrong room. Let them. We know exactly what it costs to survive from the bottom, and that makes us harder to break than any noble who inherited their strength instead of earning it.”

The smile that crept onto my face was small but real—the first genuine one I’d managed all day.

I shifted closer, and he understood the way he always understood, pulling me against his chest so that my back pressed to his heartbeat, his arms wrapping around me like walls built to keep the world out instead of keeping me in.

The fire burned low. The chamber dimmed to amber shadows. I fell asleep to the sound of his breathing—not the restless, shallow sleep of a queen with enemies circling, but the deep, surrendering sleep of a woman held by someone who understood exactly what she’d survived, because he’d survived it too.

We were happy in our secret. In those stolen hours between duty and dawn, behind locked doors where rank and blood and politics couldn’t reach us, we were simply two people who had climbed out of the dark and found each other in the light.

Even knowing there will always be someone who wouldn’t want it to ever last.