Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 70

[Theron’s POV]

I found Celeste in a corridor on the estate’s second floor, trapped between my position and the barricaded stairwell behind her.

She was armed—a short blade in her right hand, held with the grip of someone who’d been taught the basics but never mastered them. Her hair was loose, wild, her clothing disheveled from what I assumed was a failed attempt to flee before my wolves sealed the exits.

Her back pressed against the stone wall, her breathing ragged, her eyes darting between me and the corridor behind me with the frantic calculation of a cornered animal searching for an opening that didn’t exist.

Then her eyes found mine, and something flickered across her face—complex, layered, gone before I could name it with certainty. Regret, maybe. Or just the recognition of defeat by someone she’d once shared a bed with.

“It didn’t have to be this way, Celeste.” I kept my voice level, my sword lowered but ready. “None of this had to happen. You had choices—after Shadowpine, after everything fell apart. You could have walked away, started over, built something new. Instead you chose this.”

Her laugh was bitter enough to taste from across the corridor. “Chose this? You threw me away, Theron. Looked me in the eye and told me everything we had was nothing—that I was a convenience you used to avoid dealing with a bond you didn’t want.”

Her voice began to break. “And then your precious Kira took what was left. Both of you made me nothing. You stripped me of my position, my dignity, my future, and then you were surprised when I found someone who offered me a way to take it back.”

“You made yourself nothing by choosing revenge over moving on.”

The words were harder than I intended, but I couldn’t soften truth into comfort—not here, not now, not with Kira’s blood still drying on the dungeon floor below us.

“What I did to you was wrong. I’ve said that, and I’ll carry it for the rest of my life. But what you’ve done here—helping kidnap a pregnant woman, helping poison her, watching while Seraphine tried to murder her and her children—that’s not justice, Celeste. That’s not reclaiming what was taken from you. That’s becoming something worse than anything I ever was.”

Celeste raised the knife. Her hand trembled, but her eyes were steady—bright with tears she refused to shed, burning with a fury that had been building for months and had nowhere left to go except through me.

“You got your redemption, didn’t you?” Her voice cracked on the word, bitter and raw.

“Your heroic rescue. Your chance to prove you’re not the monster who rejected his mate and destroyed everyone around him. You get to walk out of here a changed man, redeemed, forgiven.”

She was screaming now. “And I get nothing, Theron. Nothing. No redemption arc, no second chance, no kingdom waiting to welcome me back. Just this corridor, and this knife, and the knowledge that everything I ever wanted was given to someone else while I watched.”

“You still have a choice.” I took a step closer, keeping my movements slow and visible. “Even now. Surrender. Face justice. Live. The courts will hear your testimony, the circumstances that brought you here—Seraphine’s manipulation, the grief, the isolation. It won’t erase what you’ve done, but you’ll be alive. You’ll have time to become something other than this.”

“Live as what?” The tears finally fell—two tracks cutting through the grime on her face, the only clean thing about her.

“A cautionary tale? The scorned Luna who went mad and helped a murderer kidnap the Silver Queen? They’ll parade me through the courts and the gossip halls and every pack gathering for the rest of my life.”

The shallow amusement in her face spoke it all. “I’ll be the lesson mothers tell their daughters about what happens when you let a man break you.”

She shifted her grip on the knife, her stance hardening from desperate to resolved. “I won’t live as a laughingstock, Theron. I’d rather die fighting than live begging.”

She lunged.

I didn’t want to kill her. The thought was clear and present in the fraction of a second between her movement and mine—a conscious awareness that the woman launching herself at me with a blade had once laughed in my chambers and planned a future beside me.

I didn’t want to end her life. But she was between me and Kira’s escape route, between my wolves and the secured perimeter, between redemption and failure.

“When I came through the door, she didn’t run. Didn’t fight. Just looked at me and called me son, like the word still meant something after everything she’d done.”

I didn’t speak. This wasn’t mine to fill with words.

“I told her she wasn’t my mother. She killed my mother. And she said she raised me, loved me, made me into the king I am—as though creation and destruction were the same thing, as though thirty years of manipulation was indistinguishable from care.”

His jaw tightened, silver flickering in his eyes. “She said someone had to pay for the destruction of everything she built. I told her I agreed. She said I wouldn’t do it—that she knew me, that I wasn’t a killer.”

His hands unclenched slowly, the magic dissipating like smoke.

“She was wrong. I’m exactly what she made me. Ruthless when necessary. Willing to do what must be done. She just didn’t expect to be on the receiving end of her own lessons.”

He turned from the doorway and walked past me without meeting my eyes.

“It’s over,” he said.

I looked at the room one final time—the silk-dressed body, the locked cabinet standing open, the remnants of a network that had terrorized a kingdom—and followed Damon toward the light.

It didn’t feel better. But it felt finished.