Chapter 83: The Wedding

The three days collapsed into less than two hours faster than Levi could imagine.

He sat in the place the Alpha had assigned him—an upper gallery seat half-screened by a carved screen, far enough from the main floor that the three marks on his throat would not become the evening’s first scandal. From there he could see everything and be seen by almost no one.

The great hall had been transformed. Northern banners hung beside the territory’s own. Candles and low lamps turned the black-stone floor into a dark mirror. Guests from both packs filled the long tables and the side galleries in formal black and deep northern greens.

Everything was in order, everything except the omega’s mind.

He had not made a choice yet. Aaron or Dexter. The secondary mansion or the third option he had started to imagine in the servants’ corridor after leaving Merrick. The deadline the Alpha had given him was this night, after the ceremony, in whatever room they dragged him into to hear the answer. The days that should have been long enough to decide had slipped through his hands like water. He had walked the permitted routes, avoided public sightlines, stared at the same stretch of wall in his rooms, and arrived at the wedding with the same empty hands.

Below him the ceremony moved with the smoothness of something that had been planned for years.

Kai stood at the center of the open floor looking more handsome than Levi had ever seen him. The formal black of the first heir’s coat sat perfect across his shoulders. His expression was the controlled neutrality he wore for every public duty, but even from the gallery Levi could read the tension underneath it. Flora stood opposite him in a gown the color of deep winter pine, hair swept up, the northern alliance written in every line of her posture. She was stunning. Levi did not want to admit it and admitted it anyway. The two of them together looked like the future the old Alpha and Flora’s father had spent years building.

Levi was not sure what he felt about the union.

He was about to lose one of his mates to her in front of two packs, and there was nothing he could do. The bond with Kai still sat under his skin, muted and starved and stubborn. In a few minutes Kai would mark Flora in public, and whatever remained of that pull would have to live in the shadow of a political claiming. Levi kept his hands still on his thighs and watched.

The rites progressed.

Words were spoken in the old forms. Tokens were exchanged. The northern representatives looked satisfied. The old Alpha watched from his high seat with the same flat attention he brought to every decision that protected the territory’s alliances. Aaron stood among the family witnesses, jaw tight, eyes forward. Dexter occupied his place with the calm of someone who already believed the night would end in his favor. Merrick was nowhere visible from the gallery.

Everything went smoothly. Until the moment Kai was supposed to mark Flora.

He stepped forward. Flora tilted her head, offering the clean line of her throat. The hall held its breath the way halls did when a public claim was about to land and lock two packs together.

But just before the young Alpha’s fangs could touch flesh, the main doors at the far end of the hall swung open hard enough that the sound cracked through the silence.

Everyone immediately turned towards the sound, including the couples, and the sight of the person standing at the door made Levi’s heart drop to his stomach.

The Eastridge Alpha did not look like a man who had been expelled at dawn weeks ago. He wore formal dark clothes, his expression composed, and he moved down the central aisle as if the guards and the staring guests were only scenery. Levi’s first thought was simple and useless: He’s here for me. The second thought tumbled after it—how had he gotten in? Who had let him past the gate? What did he want?

Elvis did not look up at the gallery, even if he had seen the omega, he likely would have ignored him completely. He hadn’t come for Levi, he had come for something far more important.

He walked straight toward the couple standing in the center of the floor and stopped a few paces from them, close enough that Kai’s hand fell away from Flora’s shoulder and the northern guests began to murmur.

Elvis’s voice carried without effort.

"The child she is carrying is not yours."

The words landed in the middle of the hall like a stone through glass.

"It is mine."

For a single stretched second no one moved.

Flora’s face went white. Kai’s composure fractured into open shock. The old Alpha rose from his seat so fast the chair scraped. Northern representatives half-stood. Somewhere in the family line Aaron’s scent spiked with violence.

"Get him out." The Alpha’s roar shook the banners. "Guards—remove him. Now."

Guards started forward, but Elvis did not step back. He reached into his coat and held up a folded set of papers—test results, official markings visible even from a distance.

"I have proof," he said, still calm. "Blood and timing. Your own physicians can verify it if they doubt Eastridge seals. The child is mine."

The guards hesitated, the proof had stopped everything and everyone.

The old Alpha’s order hung unfinished in the air. Kai stared at the papers as if they might rearrange themselves into something else. Flora had not moved; the perfect posture of a northern Luna had become the stillness of someone standing on a surface that had just cracked.

And slowly, inevitably, the eyes of the hall began to turn. Away from Elvis, and onto her.

Levi sat frozen in the gallery, the three marks on his throat suddenly irrelevant, the choice between Aaron and Dexter suspended in the same held breath as the rest of the territory. The wedding that was supposed to lock the future into place had just been cut open in front of every witness who mattered.

Below him, Elvis stood in the center of the silence with the evidence still raised, and Flora looked like a woman watching her carefully built world begin to fall.