THE LAST LYCAN HEIR SYSTEM

CHAPTER 6: KILL THE UNKNOWN HEIR

Three hundred miles from the alley where Noah Kane had just clawed his way back from death, in a chamber lit by nothing but candlelight and old fear, the Council of Twelve Alpha Lords convened in an emergency session that had not been called in over a decade.

Alpha Cassian Ashbourne, First among the Twelve, stood at the head of the table with a report in his hand that he had read four times already, hoping each time that the words might change. They never did. The parchment held the same three lines it had held the first time, and no amount of rereading softened what they meant for the fragile peace his generation had spent four decades building on top of a grave.

"The arch registered a bloodline resonance eight hours ago," he said, and the chamber went silent in the particular way rooms go silent when everyone in them has just been handed the same fear. "Royal signature. Lycan line."

"Impossible," said Alpha Renfrew, oldest of the Twelve, his voice thin with disbelief. "The royal bloodline was ended. We ended it ourselves, four hundred years ago. There is no heir."

"There wasn't," Cassian said. "There is now."

The chamber erupted, a dozen voices at once, fear dressed up as outrage the way it always was among men who had built their power on the ashes of a throne they'd helped burn. Cassian let them shout themselves quiet before he continued, because he understood something the others in this room, in their fear, had not yet let themselves fully consider.

"If the bloodline has resurfaced," he said, "it means the boy is a threat to every seat at this table. The old laws are still binding, whether we like them or not. A confirmed Lycan heir has legal claim to unify every pack in this territory under a single crown. Our crown. Our authority. Gone, the moment his bloodline is publicly verified."

"Then we verify nothing," said Alpha Voss, a cold woman with a colder reputation. "We find him first."

"And do what," Renfrew snapped. "Slaughter a child in the street? The old laws protect confirmed heirs from assassination once verified. If word spreads that the royal line survives before we've acted, killing him becomes an act of treason against every pack bound by the ancient compact."

"Then we act before word spreads," Voss said, and the room's silence this time was its own kind of answer.

A third voice broke it, younger than the others, belonging to Alpha Draven, the newest of the Twelve and the least trusted by the rest. "And if we're wrong," he said quietly. "If this boy has no interest in a throne none of us have ever let him see. We'd be murdering a child over a fear four hundred years old."

"Fear kept this territory alive for four hundred years," Renfrew said, sharper than he'd intended. "I won't apologize for respecting it."

Cassian said nothing for a long moment, turning the report over in his hands, though he already knew every word of it by heart. He had built his own daughter's entire life around the belief that the Lycan royal line was extinct and rightly so, that its return would mean nothing but war between packs who had spent four centuries learning to survive without a king to kneel to. He had told Lyra that story so many times it had become the foundation stone of who she was, and some quiet, unwelcome part of him wondered now what it would cost her to learn the foundation had cracks in it.

He was not eager to discover it might be a lie, and he was even less eager to imagine what it would do to a daughter raised on certainty to learn that the ground beneath her convictions had never been as solid as he'd promised her it was.

"There's another option," he said finally. "One that doesn't require open assassination and the political disaster that follows it."

Every eye in the chamber turned to him.

"We send someone the boy won't see coming. Someone with the training to eliminate a threat before it becomes one, and the discretion to do it quietly enough that no compact is broken because no one outside this room ever learns the boy existed at all."

"You have someone in mind," Voss said.

Cassian's jaw tightened, because he did, and because the name that came to him was the one name in the world he had least wanted to attach to this task.

"My daughter," he said. "She's the most capable hunter this Academy has produced in a generation. She believes exactly what I raised her to believe, that the Lycan line is a threat that must never be allowed to rise again. She won't hesitate. And she won't ask questions I'm not prepared to answer."

Renfrew studied him for a long moment. "You'd send your own child to kill a boy her own age." Renfrew let the silence after that sit heavy, watching Cassian's face for whatever it might give away.

"I'd send my own child," Cassian said, "to protect everything our world has built since the crown fell. She'll understand, when it's done, why it had to be her."

He did not say the other thing sitting cold in his chest, the thing he wasn't ready to examine too closely. That some old, buried part of him did not want this task to be simple at all, and feared, without knowing why, that it wouldn't be.