The Rejected Beast Mate: I Am The Royal Heiress

"Where is Lyra Vane's family?" a nurse's voice echoed through the sterile corridor. "Is there any next of kin present for Lyra Vane?"

The nurse called out twice more into the empty waiting lounge. No one answered. The heavy metal doors remained completely silent.

Inside the delivery pod, Nurse Vance checked her datapad without looking up.

"Do not waste your breath. She was matched by the Interstellar Marriage Bureau as an E-grade dependent. There was no ceremony, no registered kin, and no bride gift on record. She is merely an incubator."

On the narrow delivery bed, Lyra gripped the cold alloy rails. Her knuckles were translucent white. "No one is coming," she said, her voice flat and dry.

"Warning. Female vital signs unstable. Gene tearing pain exceeding level eight."

The mechanical alarm droned as the overhead holographic display flickered to life.

The galaxy's top trending headline flashed across the screen: Commander Kaelen Vane Bids Ten Million Star Coins for Spatial Ring on Capital Star for Swan Maiden Sylvia Nova!

In this interstellar beast era, a female in labor desperately required her bonded male's pheromones.

Without wolf soothing, every contraction ripped through genetic marrow like live dismemberment. Freezing sweat soaked the sterile sheets beneath Lyra's trembling body.

"Recommendation," the AI repeated through the sterile air. "Inject Commander Vane's stored pheromones immediately for bio-stabilization."

"Access denied," Nurse Vance said with a cold sneer. She adjusted the nutrient line with deliberate roughness. "Commander Vane never authorized pheromone quotas for E-grade dependents. Stop wasting high-tier resources on trash."

A second nurse stepped forward, offering a neural sedative to dull the shock. Lyra turned her face away, refusing the injection. She kept her trembling palm pressed firmly against her swollen belly instead.

A devastating spasm tore through Lyra's lower abdomen. The sharp, metallic taste of blood flooded her mouth. A cruel memory flashed behind her closed eyelids.

One year ago, Kaelen had dropped her genetic profile to the marble floor with pure disgust.

"An E-grade cripple?" he had scoffed. "The Interstellar Marriage Bureau is truly producing garbage to insult my rank."

On the holographic screen, the live broadcast continued. Kaelen's sharp, handsome profile softened with rare tenderness. He personally draped a luxury fur wrap over Sylvia Nova's pristine white swan wings.

"Look at how he dotes on Miss Nova," the second nurse whispered, smirking maliciously. "Meanwhile, this useless burden dying in here cannot even beg for a single drop of her husband's soothing scent."

"Commander Vane has not visited her in months," Vance replied, tapping the monitor with clinical indifference. "Once the cub is out, she will not even possess the right to breathe his air."

Another violent contraction struck like a hammer. Inside Lyra's womb, the infant thrashed in primal panic. The unborn child was shivering in agony, suffering from the complete absence of a father's calming aura.

Feeling that desperate, trembling struggle within her body, Lyra's heart broke into bleeding pieces. Don't be afraid, my baby, Lyra whispered in her soul.

Tears mixed with cold sweat on her pale cheeks. Mommy is here. Even if the whole world abandons us, you are my life. You are my only treasure.

Refusing to let her child suffer another second, Lyra gathered every remaining ember of her mental strength.

She wrapped her infant in a warm, protective cocoon. She bore down through the agony with the last ounce of life in her bones.

A sharp, fragile infant wail pierced the chaos of the delivery pod. The mechanical cradle gently lifted a newborn baby girl into the light.

The tiny cub had delicate silver wolf fuzz and wet, twitching ears. She shivered in the cold air, reaching her miniature fists into the empty space.

Lyra stared at the fragile little life, her chest tightening with an overwhelming ache.

She reached out with a trembling, bloody finger to brush the baby's soft cheek. A faint, mysterious golden shimmer flickered beneath the infant's skin before vanishing.

Nurse Vance glanced over and casually dimmed the surgical lamp overhead. "Just an optical glare from the lighting array," Vance muttered, wiping down the cradle console.

In that tender moment of skin-to-skin touch, looking at the precious daughter who now belonged solely to her, something deep within Lyra's soul snapped.

An unyielding maternal instinct surged forth. It violently severed the one-way psychic bond that tethered her heart to Kaelen, casting the cold connection into the void forever.

The phantom tug in her chest went utterly dead. A vast, glacial silence rushed into the hollow space where a year of desperate longing had once lived.

Drenched in sweat and blood, Lyra drew a deep, ragged breath. Her physical weakness transformed into an impenetrable shield of ice.

She was no longer a discarded dependent waiting for crumbs of mercy from a heartless mate. She was a mother.

She looked up at the holographic screen. Kaelen was smiling down at Sylvia Nova, sliding a diamond spatial ring onto her delicate finger before billions of cheering citizens.

Lyra's cracked lips curved into a cold, relieved smirk. Her hoarse voice cut through the alarms like a sharpened blade. "AI, connect directly to the Interstellar Tribunal."

The two attending nurses froze in absolute shock. The datapad in Vance's hand slipped, clattering loudly against the reinforced metal floor.

"Submit an emergency application," Lyra commanded, her dark eyes locked on her sleeping daughter with absolute, fearless devotion. "Mandatory Termination of the Matching Contract. Right now."

Her wrist terminal chimed with a crisp, electronic pulse. A stark notification flashed across the dark glass:

[Filing lodged. Tribunal liaison notified.]

Lyra woke slowly, her joints aching with deep genetic exhaustion as the sterile air burned in her lungs.

The white ceiling of the recovery room was featureless, while the temperature-controlled incubator hummed quietly beside her bed.

Baby Nora slept on her side, her tiny silver wolf ears giving a soft, rhythmic twitch in her dream.

Looking at the sleeping cub, the silence of the past year pressed down heavily on Lyra's chest.

She had grown up in an Outer Rim orphanage without a family name, and when she turned eighteen, the Interstellar Marriage Bureau simply assigned her the only registration number she had ever owned.

The Vane House had sent a junior legal proxy to sign the union. There was no ceremony, no bridal gift, and no registered next of kin on file, as she was told it was a clean arrangement.

Then came the day her genetic sheet was evaluated. Kaelen had dropped the parchment onto the marble floor with undisguised contempt.

"An E-grade cripple?" he had said. "The Interstellar Marriage Bureau is truly producing garbage to insult my rank."

After that, her life was reduced to this private medical pod where the door only opened from the outside.

Medical officers took weekly genetic samples, discussing her vital statistics across the bed as if she were a piece of malfunctioning equipment.

Months later, Sylvia Nova accompanied Kaelen on a public inspection of the medical sector.

The nurses whispered by the door, laughing about the Commander's devotion to his swan maiden while Lyra listened in the dark.

In that entire year, Kaelen had summoned her to his quarters only once.

His mental sea was violently unstable, and doctors demanded a pheromone compatibility assessment. That cold, clinical night was how Nora was conceived, though he never registered the pregnancy and never visited her again.

The heavy metal door slid open with a sharp hiss as the attending nurse walked in, her posture stiff with unease.

The nurse's previous arrogance was gone, replaced by a strange, fearful awe toward an E-grade female who had dared to demand a separation from an S-grade officer.

"You are awake," the nurse stammered, her trembling fingers fumbling with the IV line and nearly tearing the seal. "The Commander is forcing a priority comms link."

Lyra gave a single, slow nod, her face remaining entirely devoid of warmth.

The air beside the bed shimmered into light as Kaelen's holographic projection materialized in his crisp black naval uniform.

Behind his projection came the loud hum of the Iron Fang bridge. Officers barked routine navigation coordinates, while Sylvia's melodious laugh drifted past the audio receiver nearby.

Kaelen's thick brows pulled together in a hard, arrogant line. "Are you done throwing this ridiculous tantrum?"

Lyra kept her dark eyes fixed on the incubator, ignoring his towering image entirely.

"Terminating our matching contract?" Kaelen scoffed, adjusting his silver cuffs.

"Lyra, put away these cheap, manipulative games. I had my adjutant transfer one million star coins to your account as compensation for the cub. Now, withdraw the application."

Lyra finally turned her head toward the projection, her gaze as cold as deep space. "Kaelen Vane, I am not negotiating with you. The contract will be terminated."

Kaelen's expression darkened into an ugly sneer. "Who do you think you are? Without my name, taking that half-beast mutt into the galaxy, do you think you will survive three days?"

"That is my concern," Lyra replied, her tone flat and unwavering. "Tomorrow morning at ten o'clock, the Interstellar Tribunal. Whether you attend or not, this union is dead."

She reached out and pressed the red disconnect button, instantly severing the frequency and vanishing his image into darkness.

Deep beneath the hospital in the subterranean research sector, Chief Geneticist Quentin Starfall held a sealed vial of Nora's umbilical blood.

Assuming it was a routine low-tier baseline test, Quentin slotted the sample into the massive multi-million-coin genetic analyzer and turned toward his desk.

A sharp electronic chime rang out as the analyzer's steady blue light suddenly flashed into a violent, blinding crimson.

Sirens shrieked as internal energy readouts spiked exponentially, tearing past the S-grade ceiling in a fraction of a second.

"Impossible," Quentin whispered, lunging forward to engage the manual coolant override.

His fingers never reached the switch before a brilliant pillar of celestial gold erupted from the core casing.

The multi-million analyzer violently detonated, sending a concussive shockwave that shattered every monitor and glass display into glittering dust across the floor.

Thrown backward against the reinforced blast door, Quentin scrambled through the smoking rubble on bleeding palms. Glass dug into his knees, but he felt no pain.

Through the thick haze, the cracked main display burned with three immutable golden letters before going black: SSS.

Quentin's hands shook with manic realization, knowing the sovereign machine could never produce a false reading.

He slammed his bloody fingers onto the emergency quantum transmitter. The encrypted line opened, and Quentin screamed through his tears:

"It's not a machine glitch! The universe's only god-tier pacifier... the Imperial Princess lost for twenty years has returned!"

The command center of the Starfall Imperial Empire was a vast fortress of black steel and glowing data streams.

The air turned heavy as lead, and every hardened general and technician froze in place.

On the central warp-comms display, Quentin Starfall's bloodied face flickered across the light-years.

Empress Eleanor Starfall gripped the edge of the console until the metal groaned under her fingers.

Beside her, Richard Starfall placed a heavy, grounding hand on her shoulder. His dark gaze never left the trembling scientist on the screen.

"Repeat that," Eleanor whispered, her voice shaking with twenty years of unshed grief.

"The genetic map is a one-hundred-percent match!" Quentin sobbed across the stars, his tears streaking the grime on his cheeks. "It is the Princess! She is alive!"

Eleanor's knees buckled as twenty years of frozen grief shattered into burning tears. Her lost baby was alive, breathing beneath an alien sky.

She caught herself on the console with a trembling hand, stepping closer to the screen. "Quentin, look at me. How much does she weigh? What have they been feeding her in that place?"

Quentin hesitated, his voice choking with rage.

"She... she is severely malnourished, Your Majesty. Her charts classify her as an E-grade dependent. They restricted her rations to standard bio-slurry."

"Who signed those charts?" Eleanor demanded, her breath hitching in raw fury. "Where are the medical logs? How many days was she left alone in that room?"

"She gave birth entirely alone, Your Majesty," Quentin replied, his fist slamming into his console.

"Her partner, Commander Vane, was absent on Capital Star with another female. He left her to rot and offered money to suppress her divorce petition."

A suffocating psychic pressure detonated from Eleanor's body, forcing veteran fleet commanders to their knees under her imperial wrath. "He. Dares."

Richard stood motionless, his heavy ring slipping from his numb fingers and clattering against the deck. He turned to his adjutant, his voice dropping to a terrifying whisper.

"How many hours was my daughter left alone in that room?"

The officer could not answer. Richard turned back to the tactical grid, his eyes hardening into black voids.

"Initiate Project Eclipse. Warp the First, Third, and Seventh Star Destroyer Fleets immediately. Total blockade of the Vane medical planet."

"Your Majesty, that is equivalent to declaring interstellar war!" the adjutant gasped, trembling in terror.

"My daughter is bleeding there," Richard growled, his voice carrying the finality of a planetary execution. "This is an interstellar war."

"Activate stealth fields," Eleanor added, wiping her tears as her gaze turned to lethal ice. "I want to see with my own eyes who dares to bully my flesh and blood."

Light-years away, aboard the flagship Iron Fang, Kaelen was reviewing routine naval logs when an agonizing, hollow spasm tore through his chest.

His silver wolf pupils contracted into needle-thin slits. A violent tremor ripped across his mental sea, leaving a freezing abyss of biological starvation.

"Commander!" his adjutant lunged forward in alarm. "Your bio-readings are spiking dangerously! Are you experiencing mental sea turbulence?"

Kaelen shoved the officer back violently, wiping cold sweat from his brow. "I am fine," he snarled, forcing his elongated fangs to retract.

"It is merely fatigue from the matching hearing. Bring me the patrol roster now."

He barked orders to drown out the gnawing ache, arrogantly dismissing the phantom pain. He had no idea his wolf biology was screaming over the permanent loss of its true sovereign mate.

Back in the quiet outer orbit of the Vane medical planet, two patrol ships drifted lazily through the void.

In the cockpit of the lead vessel, the operator blew gently on a lukewarm cup of synthetic coffee. An unread text from his sister glowed softly on his personal datapad.

Suddenly, the radar console shrieked with screaming red static. All long-range communications and local relays severed simultaneously.

Before the operator could drop his mug, the black fabric of space tore open like dry parchment. Out of the hyperspace rift slid one colossal dreadnought, then ten, then hundreds of pitch-black Star Destroyers.

Emblazoned on their massive hulls was the golden crest of the Starfall Imperial House. Each behemoth was ten times the size of Vane's flagship, locking heavy particle cannons onto the medical facility below.

The facility staff below continued their shifts in ignorant bliss, completely unaware that an apocalyptic armada hovered over their atmosphere.

Aboard the imperial command vessel, Empress Eleanor looked down through the reinforced viewing deck, her voice echoing across the fleet comms with absolute finality.

"Whoever dared mistreat my daughter... the entire Vane Fleet shall be buried with them."