Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 54

[Malik’s POV]

I sat through the council sessions and said nothing.

Lord Ashworth called me unworthy—not to my face, naturally, but in the third person, as though I were a piece of furniture being discussed for removal.

Lord Mercer questioned my fitness to stand beside the Queen–a younger lord whose name I hadn’t bothered learning suggested that my ambition had always been suspect, that a man who rises from omega to Commander doesn’t do so without calculating each step toward a throne he was never meant to occupy.

Manipulative. That was the word they kept circling back to. The omega who manipulated his way into the Queen’s bed. The common-born climber who exploited an unstable woman’s vulnerability.

I said nothing. Stood at my post with my face arranged into the expressionless mask I’d spent a lifetime perfecting, because every word I spoke in that chamber would be weaponized.

Every flash of anger would confirm their narrative. So I swallowed it and let the rage build behind walls I’d been constructing since I was old enough to understand that an omega’s anger was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

The walls held in public. In private, they crumbled.

Kira found me pacing her chambers that evening. She closed the door and leaned against it, watching me.

“Talk to me,” she said quietly. “You’ve been silent for three days.”

“They want me to step aside. That’s what all the rhetoric amounts to, Kira. The bloodline arguments, the tradition speeches—they want me to disappear. To slip back into the shadows like a good omega and let them find you a proper mate, while I watch from whatever corner they decide to put me in and pretend I don’t exist.”

“You won’t,” Kira said, and the certainty was absolute.

“And I won’t let them make you feel like you should. Do you hear me, Malik? Every lord in that chamber owes his seat to an accident of birth. You earned yours through blood and sacrifice and a loyalty that none of them could match on their best day.”

Her voice hardened. “They don’t get to make you small. Not while I’m breathing.”

“Of course I won’t. But the things they say—not just about me. Mercer called the pregnancy a strategic miscalculation in open session yesterday. Ashworth referred to our children as a complication to be managed.”

I paused as the words hung in the air. “A complication. They talk about our children like they’re a problem to be solved, and I sit there and take it because that’s what serves you best, but every day it gets harder to remember why silence is the right choice.”

“Because you’re protecting me.”

“And it’s killing me, Kira.”

She crossed the room and pulled me close. “Their opinions don’t matter. I chose you and I would choose you again in front of every lord in this realm without a second’s hesitation.”

She took my face in her hands. “It will be soon, Malik. I promise you that. When the Order is dealt with and the court has been forced to accept reality—not asked, not persuaded, forced—we will mark each other properly, publicly, and every wolf alive will know what we are. You have my word.”

“Say that again.”

“Which part?”

“The part where I’m yours.”

Her eyes softened, fierce silver giving way to something unbearably tender. “You’re mine, Malik. You’ve been mine since the night you pulled a bleeding, half-feral woman away from a barrier that was trying to kill her, and you will be mine until the last star burns out. No council. No vote. No force in this realm or any other.”

I kissed her. Desperate, consuming, a collision of mouth and breath and the raw, aching need of a man who’d been told his entire life that he wasn’t enough and had finally found the one person who made him believe otherwise.

She kissed me back with equal ferocity, her fingers fisting in my shirt, pulling me closer with a hunger that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the simple, primal refusal to let go.

We didn’t discuss politics again that night. We didn’t discuss anything. We just held each other in the firelit dark and let the silence say what words couldn’t—that this was real, this was permanent, and no force in the realm was strong enough to take it from us.

Not while we were both still breathing.