He Stole My Children I Refused His Crown Chapter 04
From the sidelines, Maya recounted everything that had happened at the banquet.
When she finished, she asked, “Willa already told everyone she’s getting engaged. Where are we supposed to find a fiancé now?”
Her words jolted me back to the present, and I awkwardly pulled away from Elliot.
“The Ironvale army is full of single men. Pick one for me.”
I glanced at the deputy commander standing behind him.
“Damien Holt would be a good choice.”
Damien had just stepped out of a military SUV. At the sound of his name, the coffee in his hand slipped from his grasp and splattered on the ground.
He stumbled back a step.
“N-no. I just know how to fight. I’m not good enough for you.”
“Then who is?”
After I returned to the Alpha residence, Maya helped me to my room, sighing the entire time.
I reached up and tapped her on the forehead.
That night, Elliot appeared on the terrace and set a tube of healing spray on the table.
“Three times a day.”
He remained a man of few words.
After he left, Maya whispered, “Elliot’s always so distant. He won’t let anyone get close. I wonder who’ll ever be his mate.”
In my last life, Elliot never took a mate.
But my father once told me he loved someone he could never have.
At the time, I’d teased him about it.
It wasn’t until just before I died that a long-buried memory surfaced.
A month before I moved into Lucian’s estate, I had accidentally found my way into Elliot’s locked studio.
The walls were covered with my portraits.
I was so shocked I ran out. Later, I slipped and fell into the lake at Lucian’s estate, and Elliot was the one who pulled me out.
I accused him of crossing a line, told him his feelings for me were disgusting.
I even told him I would rather die than ever be with him.
After my fall into the lake, I’d burned with a fever for days.
When I woke, a large part of that night’s memory was gone. Everyone assumed it was temporary amnesia from the hypothermia and the blow to my head.
Now, watching Elliot stand in the courtyard below, I finally pieced the fragments together.
I quietly sent an encrypted email to my father, who was far away at the northern front, asking if he had ever formally adopted Elliot, and where Elliot had really come from.
Over the next few days, I stayed at the Alpha residence to recover. But two rumors were already spreading like wildfire across the capital’s pack news networks and social media.
The first claimed I’d been having a secret affair with a driver from Ironvale and was already pregnant. My refusal at the mating banquet, it said, was just a ploy to force the royal family to recognize a child that wasn’t Lucian’s.
The second claimed that Celeste, despondent after losing the betrothal, had become a laughingstock and thrown herself into the lake in the royal gardens. Lucian had personally rescued her and was planning to bring her into his estate for her own protection.