Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 58

I was done being defensive.

Malik doubled my guard after the garden attack. Damon insisted on security escorts for every movement outside the royal wing.

Theron offered his wolves as additional protection, and even Elara quietly suggested that perhaps the Queen should limit her public appearances until the Order threat was neutralized.

I refused all of it.

“I don’t need extra protection,” I told Malik that morning when he presented the revised security protocol—a document so thorough it accounted for which servants were permitted within ten feet of me at any given hour.

“I need a weapon. A real one—not swords or guards or walls between me and the world. The Order’s argument is simple, and as long as it stands unchallenged, no amount of security will keep us safe.” My voice came sharper than intended as I kept speaking.

“They believe the prophecy must be fulfilled or the realm suffers, and now that I’m carrying children, their rhetoric writes itself—the Silver Queen is not only defenceless but vulnerable, weakened by pregnancy, her unstable magic proof that the Covenant demands blood.”

I kept pouring what had been eating me alive. “Every day I hide behind guards instead of confronting that argument directly is a day they use to recruit more wolves who believe killing me is an act of mercy.”

Malik’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue. He’d learned that particular expression of mine—the one that meant I’d already decided and the conversation was informational rather than consultative.

I started with the High Priestess. Found her in the temple archives, surrounded by texts so ancient the parchment crumbled at the edges, and asked her directly whether the prophecy’s requirement of sacrifice necessarily meant death.

“The sacred texts are layered, Your Majesty,” she said carefully, her weathered hands resting on a manuscript that predated the current kingdom by centuries.

“The language of the original Covenant uses words that have been translated as ‘blood price’ and ‘final sacrifice,’ but the root terms in the old tongue are more nuanced than our modern interpretations suggest.” I paused just for a heartbeat.

And spoke again. “’Blood price’ derives from a word that means something closer to ‘blood willingly shared’—an offering made from choice rather than force. And ‘final sacrifice’ could equally be rendered as ‘ultimate cost,’ which implies something precious given rather than something violently taken.”

“So the blood trials—the death matches between twins that have been practiced for a thousand years—those were a corruption of the original meaning?”

The Priestess hesitated with the particular discomfort of a religious authority being asked to confirm that her institution had been wrong for a millennium.

“They were an interpretation, Your Majesty. The earliest texts speak of blood willingly shared, not blood forcibly taken. Whether the death matches represent a legitimate evolution of the Covenant’s requirements or a fundamental misunderstanding that was codified into law through repetition and fear—that distinction has been debated by scholars for centuries without resolution.”

I left the temple and found those scholars. Three of them, housed in the Royal Archives, men and women who’d spent their lives studying the ancient magic that governed the realm’s foundational laws.

I spread my questions across their collective expertise like seeds across fertile ground and waited to see what grew.

The most senior among them—a woman named Seris whose silver hair and sharp eyes reminded me uncomfortably of Morgath—provided the most useful analysis.

“The prophecy requires sacrifice, Your Majesty. On that point, every text agrees. But sacrifice is a broader concept than the blood trials acknowledge. It means giving something precious—” She paused.

“The original texts are incomplete here in the Archives, Your Majesty. But they weren’t always incomplete—they were damaged during the political upheavals of the fourth century, and there are scholars who believe that individuals outside the formal academic tradition may possess copies or fragments that survived the purges.”

She hesitated, but kept speaking still. “The witch Morgath, for instance, is known to have accumulated texts from the pre-trial era. Her knowledge of the foundational magic is—”

Seris paused, choosing her words with visible care. “—controversial but extensive. If anyone possesses the missing pieces of the original Covenant language, she would be the most likely candidate.”

Morgath. The witch who’d created the false bond that had stolen my identity for twenty-three years. The woman who owed me a debt so vast that no amount of scholarly knowledge could begin to repay it.

I thanked the scholars and left the Archives with my hand pressed against my stomach and hope burning in my chest alongside the fear that had taken up permanent residence since the garden attack.

The answers I needed existed—I could feel it, the way I could feel the magic humming beneath my skin, the way I could feel my children’s heartbeats pulsing in time with my own.

There was only one person who might have them.

And she owed me more than she could ever repay.