Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 67

[Malik’s POV]

Something inside me broke the moment I realized she was gone.

Not cracked. Not strained. Broke—the way a blade snaps under force it was never designed to withstand.

The controlled Commander, the man who’d built his existence on discipline and the careful suppression of every exploitable emotion, simply ceased to exist.

What replaced him was something feral, operating on instincts that predated strategy and didn’t care about composure.

My mate was gone. My children were gone. And the thing wearing my face in the war room that night made seasoned warriors step back when I entered.

“Every scout returns to active deployment within the hour.” My voice carried a flatness worse than shouting—a void where feeling should have been.

“Every spy embedded in any territory reports immediately with anything connected to the Order of the Broken Crown. Every ally who owes this crown a debt is called in tonight. Not tomorrow. Not at their convenience. Tonight.”

Lieutenant Voss hesitated—barely perceptible, but I saw it. “Commander, the scope of what you’re describing would require pulling resources from border security, from territorial patrols, from—”

“I don’t care. Pull them. Pull everything. Every wolf not actively preventing an invasion of this palace is reassigned to the search. If the borders suffer, we’ll deal with consequences after I’ve found my mate. Am I understood?”

No one argued further. The war room erupted into organized chaos—officers dispatching riders, analysts pulling every Order file, communication networks activated across territories.

Theron arrived before dawn on the second day.

He came with thirty Shadowpine warriors and Marcus at his side. They’d ridden through the night—horses lathered, wolves hollow-eyed—and the look on Theron’s face when he entered the war room was something I recognized because I was wearing it myself. The look of a man who understood exactly what he owed and had come to pay it.

But it was Marcus who stopped me cold.

He crossed the war room without hesitation, without greeting, without the careful political courtesies that usually preceded a beta entering a sovereign’s command center. He walked straight to the intelligence table, scanned the maps with eyes that had spent decades reading military strategy in a royal court, and then looked at me.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Every report, every lead, every dead end. Don’t soften it and don’t summarize. I need it all.”

There was something in his face I hadn’t seen before—or perhaps hadn’t recognized. Not the composed advisor. Not the guilt-driven beta trying to earn redemption through usefulness. Something rawer. Something that looked like a wound ripped open after years of careful scarring.

“You rode through the night for this?” I asked, and the question carried more than its words.

“I couldn’t save her mother.” Marcus’s voice was level, but his hands were not—they gripped the edge of the table with a force that whitened his knuckles. “I stood in a palace full of guards and advisors and wolves who swore oaths of protection, and I watched Lyra die because I was too slow, too careful, too convinced that the system would hold. I have carried that failure for twenty-three years, Commander.”

His eyes met mine, and what I saw there was a mirror. The same terror. The same desperate, suffocating helplessness of a man whose entire purpose was protection and who had failed the person who mattered most.

“I will not carry her daughter too,” he said. “So tell me everything. And then point me at whoever took her.”

I told him everything.

Within forty-eight hours, my network had captured eleven Order members across six territories. They were interrogated with a thoroughness I supervised personally—not because I enjoyed it, but because the alternative was standing still, and standing still meant imagining what was happening to Kira in whatever dark room they’d taken her to.

The intelligence was gathered, analyzed, cross-referenced. Cell structures mapped. Communication patterns dissected. Every scrap fed into the analytical machinery I’d built over months.

Marcus worked the intelligence alongside my analysts with a precision that reminded me he’d spent decades navigating networks of exactly this kind. He knew how compartmentalized organizations hid their assets, knew how to read the gaps in information as loudly as the information itself. More than once, his experience with the old court’s political architecture identified connections my younger officers missed—patterns of patronage, family alliances, debts owed from Seraphine’s era that pointed toward who might shelter the Order’s operations.

It wasn’t enough. The kidnappers had been professional—their trail expertly hidden, their extraction designed by someone who understood intelligence operations and had built countermeasures into every layer.

No witnesses. No scent trail beyond the garden walls. No communication intercepts, because whoever coordinated the operation had gone silent the moment Kira was taken, cutting every traceable thread with surgical precision.

“Here.” His finger trembled against the map, pointing to a region in the northern territories where our intelligence showed conspicuous silence.

“They’re not absent from this area, Commander. They’re protecting it. The gap in activity isn’t random—it’s a perimeter. Whatever they’re hiding is inside it.”

The observation was brilliant. And it came from a king who had to grip the table with both hands to keep from collapsing, whose healers whispered about organ failure in the corridors, whose body was being consumed by something his medical staff couldn’t identify and he refused to let them investigate.

I respected him for that—the old wolf’s refusal to yield to whatever was destroying him from the inside, his absolute insistence on being present and useful and engaged while the Silver Queen he’d nearly lost twice was missing again.

He lowered himself into a chair with a grimace he tried to hide, and I pretended not to see it, because dignity was the only thing he had left that the illness hadn’t touched, and I wouldn’t be the one to take it from him.

“We’ll concentrate reconnaissance on the northern corridor,” I said, already dispatching orders. “If there’s a perimeter, we’ll find its edges. And then we’ll find what’s inside.”

Maelric nodded, his trembling hands folded in his lap, his eyes never leaving the map.

We were getting closer. I could feel it the way I felt Kira’s absence—a constant, aching pull in my chest that oriented me toward her like a compass needle toward north.

I would find her. Whatever it took. Whatever it cost. Whatever was left of me when this was over.

I would find her.