Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 34: Identity

~LYRA’S POV~

He came to find me that night.

I was in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed with the lamp burning low, doing the thing I’d been doing for most of the day since I woke up, trying to take stock of what was left of me after everything the last forty-eight hours had taken. The shift. The ball. The cellar. The blue in my hair that I still hadn’t looked at directly in a mirror because I wasn’t ready to see it properly yet.

Ryland knocked once and came in when I answered. He pulled the chair from the desk and set it close to the bed and sat down, and the particular way he did it, not across from me, not at a distance, just close, told me before he opened his mouth that this wasn’t a routine check-in.

"There’s something you need to know," he said. "I found out today and I’m not going to wait to tell you."

I looked at him. "Alright."

He didn’t soften it. He just told me.

His father had been investigating her bloodline. The records Tyran had pulled, the markers he’d identified, the theory he’d built carefully and had been acting on for months. The lost Alpha, Damien, who had disappeared before an arranged marriage, who had run with a common girl, who had never been found. The timeframe. The bloodline match. The silver wolf, which hadn’t appeared in a generation, and the only descent that could explain it.

"Lyra," Ryland said, at the end of all of it. "The theory, and it’s a theory right now, until it can be proven, is that Damien was your father. Which would make you his rightful heir." He held my eye. "Which would make you the rightful heir to the Moonstone throne."

I sat with that.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t move. I just sat on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap and let the shape of it settle around me, turning it slowly the way you turn something in your hands to see all its surfaces.

Damien. My father was Damien. And my mother, whoever

she was, hidden from the world. And my uncle Aidan, raised me as his own for years, who was then arrested and sentenced on charges that had never made full sense to me.

Aidan had known.

All of it. The whole time. He had known exactly who I was and what I carried and he had kept it from me, which he’d done to protect me and which had also meant I’d spent eighteen years believing I was worthless when I was, in the most literal possible sense, the opposite of that.

"Is that’s why Meredith hated me," I said. Quietly, not to anyone in particular, just saying it out loud to hear how it sounded. "She knew."

"Possibly," Ryland said. "Or she had her reasons. Either way, someone knew what you were and made sure you didn’t."

They had suppressed it deliberately.

Someone had been afraid of what would happen if I came into my power, and they had spent eighteen years making sure I didn’t.

"They were afraid of me," I said.

Not angry when I said it. Just realising. The way you realise something that reorganises everything that came before it into a new shape. All that cruelty, all those years, not random, not simply the nature of people who were cruel. Deliberate. Because I was a threat someone needed kept small.

I heard Ryland move. He got up from the chair and came to sit beside me on the edge of the bed, close enough that his arm was against mine.

"They were right to be," he said.

I laughed.

It came out short and unexpected and a little broken, the kind of laugh that happens when something is too large to process any other way. I pressed my hand over my mouth for a moment and then let it go.

I leaned my head back and looked at the ceiling.

"What do I do with this," I said. Not a question exactly. More like saying the thing out loud because it needed to exist somewhere outside my own head.

"Whatever you want," Ryland said. "But I’m with you for all of it." He paused. "And right now, it’s a theory. A well-supported theory with pieces that connect, but we don’t have proof yet. We need proof before we take it anywhere."

I nodded slowly. "So I sit with it."

"For now."

"While someone else out there is still running their own operation and we don’t know who."

"Yes," he said. He didn’t make it easier than it was.

I kept looking at the ceiling. The lamp threw its amber light across the plaster and I watched it for a while, thinking about Damien, who I’d never known and never would. Thinking about my mum, thinking about Aidan, who had picked me, carried me home and loved me as much as he was able.

"My uncle," I said.

"I know," Ryland said. "We’ll look into it."

"He was arrested for selling supplies he was meant to deliver. He always said he didn’t. I believed him but I couldn’t..."

I stopped.

"If he was protecting my identity, then whoever put him there was either trying to remove him or trying to use it as leverage."

"Yes," Ryland said. "I think that’s likely. Because of whoever feared you," Ryland said. "Not because of you."

I thought about that. Let it sit.

I turned my head and looked at him. Really looked, not at the situation, not at what he represented, not at the Alpha beside me making correct strategic statements. Just at him. The line of his jaw. The steadiness in his eyes. The way he had sat down next to me instead of across from me, because that was the kind of thing Ryland did without announcing it.

He had carried me out of a dining hall when I collapsed. He had sat in my chair in the dark while I slept. He had lied to the council to buy me time, told me the truth his father was involved the same night he’d found it out, and come to sit beside me on the edge of a bed at the end of the worst forty-eight hours of my life.

He was good.

Not perfectly good, not uncomplicated good, good in the specific way that meant he showed up, he told the truth, and he stayed. Good in a way I hadn’t known how to recognise for most of my life because I’d never had a close enough example of it.

"Thank you," I said. It came out quietly, and I meant all of it.

He looked at me. "For what specifically?"

"All of it," I said. "Everything."

He didn’t say it was nothing, which I appreciated. He just held my gaze for a moment, and something in his expression was open in a way it didn’t usually let itself be.

"Whatever comes next," he said, "we figure it out."

I nodded. Then I looked back at the ceiling.

The heir to the Moonstone throne. Damien’s daughter. The Moonborn who spent eighteen years being told she was worthless in someone’s very deliberate effort to keep her that way.

It was a lot to be.

But for the first time in a long time, sitting in this room with the lamp burning low and Ryland beside me, I didn’t feel like nothing.

I felt like the beginning of something.