Chapter 427 The Birds, The Bees, & The Blood Moon

Tiberon entered.

“Where is my Beta and Beta Luna?” he asked. “I am down a Gamma and now my Betas.”

Serena stopped, her body freezing mid-motion with a document suspended between two fingers at an angle that suggested the page had been in transit from one pile to another and had been halted in the air between them.

Her Alpha had asked a question and to answer, she needed to exit Alpha speed and engage at a human pace.

“Hale fainted last night,” she said. “And again a few times this morning.”

“Hale fainted,” Tiberon repeated.

The repetition was flat. Inflectionless. Carrying the specific disbelief of a man whose Beta was six foot seven, two hundred and forty pounds, had survived wars, dungeons, sieges, and Thor Crushturn, and had apparently lost consciousness in circumstances that Tiberon had yet to learn and was already suspicious of.

“Yes,” Serena replied.

“Serena, you failed to tell me this.” Dex set his report down.

“It didn’t come up.” Serena bit her lip. She returned to Alpha speed, pages blurring, clearly hoping the conversation would end if she appeared busy enough.

Tiberon and Dexmon exchanged a glance. The glance was brief, loaded, and carried the shared recognition of two men who had both identified the same evasion and were both going to pursue it.

“Why did Hale faint?” Tiberon asked.

Serena stopped from Alpha speed again.

“Oh, I am sworn to secrecy.”

Her tone was dead serious. Her face was dead serious. She had received classified information and had been instructed to protect it and intended to protect it with the same determination she brought to everything else, which was total.

“By whom?” Tiberon asked.

“Elara.”

Tiberon pinched the bridge of his nose. The gesture was identical to the one his son had performed two minutes ago, genetic proof that the Drakenfell response to exasperation was hereditary, and the heredity was thriving.

“I am the Alpha, Serena.”

“Have you met Elara?” Serena asked, and the question was genuine. She was comparing two authority figures and had already determined which one she feared more and the determination was unfavorable for the king. “Don’t worry. Alaric is looking at him. He is being cared for.”

Tiberon’s patience, which had been tested by a mural, a missing Beta, and a woman reading at Alpha speed who was withholding information under the authority of a Beta Luna whose jurisdiction did not extend to overruling the king, reached its threshold.

“I demand you tell me. Now.”

Alpha command. The words carried the frequency that Tiberon deployed when questions became orders, the specific register of an Alpha king whose bloodline had been issuing commands for thousands of years and whose current command was delivered with the surgical finality of a man who was finished asking.

The command hit Serena like a wall.

Her body tensed.

“She told him he is going to be a father, and he has taken the news rather poorly.”

The sentence left her mouth with the resignation of a woman whose oath had been broken by biology and whose face communicated the full devastation of the breach.

“WHAT?” Dexmon asked.

The word was louder than he meant. The reproductive news about his best friend outpaced his ability to modulate his vocal output.

Serena looked at him, brow furrowed, unable to untangle his emotions.

“Elara hasn’t announced it,” Serena said, and her voice was quiet and crushed because she had broken a confidence under Alpha command and was feeling the break in her chest like a physical wound. “It was her news to tell. I gave her my word.”

Dexmon did not register her distress. Dexmon was processing a different crisis entirely.

“They are going to be parents before we are.” His voice was flat. Declarative. Carrying the specific indignation of a Crown Prince who had been outpaced by his Beta.

Tiberon, whose emotional processing was faster than his son’s and whose ability to compartmentalize was three decades more refined, did not react to the news with surprise.

“They are fortunate it happened this quickly. Most Beta pairs require a few years for conception. A fated matebond accelerates compatibility, but the acceleration is variable.”

He clasped his hands behind his back. The clasping was the posture of a man delivering a briefing, and the briefing was about to become personal.

“Alpha pairs are more difficult. The conception window is narrower. Alpha-marked females are tied to Blood Moon cycles for their heats, and Blood Moons are lunar events that occur on a schedule the wolves have no control over. The next one is months away.”

Dexmon was listening to this as if he were receiving tactical intelligence about a mission objective he had categorized as important but distant and was now recategorizing as important and imminent.

“That is also assuming her heats function at all,” Tiberon continued, “given the silver damage. A year of silver poisoning before her first shift could have disrupted the heat cycle entirely. The cycle may require multiple Blood Moons to normalize. Alaric would need to assess her.”

“Can Alaric test for that?” Dex asked, leaning forward.

“He can. The testing is straightforward. Blood work, cycle tracking, a physical examination to evaluate the—”

Serena’s face had turned the color of a pomegranate.

She was sitting at the far end of the war room table, listening to her mate and his father discuss heats.

Was this happening? Yes. The King of Drakenfell discussing her heat cycle with his son using the same tone he used for troop deployments and supply chain logistics?

“—and the timing of the mark matters,” Tiberon was saying. “She was marked months ago by you. Did she have a heat during the last Blood Moon?”

“No, she hasn’t. I was in Orosia then, but she didn’t mention it.”

“Then the first heat will be the indicator. If the heat arrives on the Blood Moon and follows a standard Alpha cycle, conception is viable on the first attempt. If the silver has delayed the cycle—”

“What about Shadowclaw’s mark?” Dex asked. “She has two Alpha marks. Does that speed it up?”

“Two Alpha marks on a single female—”

Serena stood silently, fully committed to extracting herself from this conversation at all costs. She placed the completed reports on the table and moved towards the door.

Neither man noticed.

“—the heat pheromones with dual Alpha marks could theoretically trigger both males simultaneously,” Tiberon was saying, “which creates a logistical scenario I had not considered—”

Serena reached the door. She stepped through it. She pulled it closed behind her with a click so soft it registered as silence.

She stood in the corridor. Her face was still the color of a pomegranate. Her ears were still burning. Her brain was still processing the fact that Tiberon Drakenfell had used the phrase “heat pheromones with dual Alpha marks” and Dexmon was completely fine with that.

She walked down the corridor toward the healing wing.

She was going to check on Hale. She was going to check on Gav. Two unconscious men who could not discuss her reproductive cycle.

Behind her, in the war room, the conversation continued without her.

Neither man noticed she had left for another four minutes, at which point Dex looked at her empty chair, looked at the closed door, and pinched the bridge of his nose for the third time that hour.

“She left.”

Tiberon looked at the chair. Looked at the door. Looked at his son.

“When?”

“I have no idea.”

Both men stood in the silence of a war room that had contained three people and now contained two, and the third had escaped without either of them detecting the escape, which meant the woman they had been discussing was faster, quieter, and more tactically aware than both of them, and the irony of discussing her reproductive fitness while she demonstrated operational superiority was lost on neither of them.