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Chapter 11: The Woman Who Knew My Mother

Author: Aliza J. Byrd
last update publish date: 2026-09-19 18:45:48

I found Mirela in a small garden near the eastern wall, tending a row of herbs with hands that shook slightly but hadn't lost their certainty of movement. She didn't look up when I approached, though I was fairly sure she'd heard me coming long before my shadow fell across her row of plants.

"I wondered how long it would take you," she said, not unkindly. "Sit, if your legs will let you. Standing over an old woman makes her nervous."

I sat on the low stone bench beside her, watching her hands w
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  • I Rejected My Mate On Purpose   Chapter 34: The Ember Rises

    I never got the chance to answer.The chamber erupted into chaos so suddenly that for one disorienting heartbeat I thought the mountain itself had cracked open. Cassian moved first, faster than I'd ever seen him, closing the distance to the nearest soldier guarding Selene before the man could react to the sudden shift, and his gathered allies poured into the chamber from side passages I hadn't even noticed, weapons drawn, years of quiet planning finally breaking loose all at once."Now!" Cassian shouted, and Ronan didn't hesitate, throwing himself toward the soldier holding the blade against Torvin's throat with a speed that spoke of every ounce of fury he'd been holding in check since his father's projection first appeared on that mountain ledge.I moved on instinct, heat flooding hot and desperate into my palms, catching the soldier nearest Selene with a burst of light that sent him sprawling before he could finish whatever motion he'd started. Selene twisted free of her remaining b

  • I Rejected My Mate On Purpose   Chapter 33: Inside the Mountain

    We ran the last two miles.There was no more time for careful pacing, no more room for the cautious, measured approach we'd tried to maintain since leaving Blackthorn territory. Cassian's group moved alongside us, a dozen exhausted, determined wolves who'd spent years hiding from exactly this mountain and were now sprinting straight toward it, and I felt the strange, aching gratitude of not facing this final stretch entirely alone.Thornecrest itself, when it finally rose into full view above the tree line, looked exactly like the ruin the world believed it to be. Broken walls, collapsed towers, the skeletal remains of a stronghold that had supposedly fallen generations ago, all of it silvered under a moon so close to full that its light felt like something physical pressing down against my skin."The training grounds should be along the eastern face," Cassian said, breathless, scanning the ruins with the careful eye of someone who'd clearly studied maps of this place long before toni

  • I Rejected My Mate On Purpose   Chapter 32: The Signal Back

    Thornecrest's outer boundary announced itself long before the mountain itself came into view, a change in the air that raised every hair on my arms the moment we crossed some invisible line neither map nor instinct could fully explain."Wards," Selene would have called it, I thought, and felt a fresh pang of worry at her absence, at the silence where her steady, knowing voice should have been guiding us through exactly this kind of unfamiliar magic. Instead I had only Ronan's grim certainty and my own untrained instincts to rely on, and neither felt like enough against whatever waited ahead."We should send word to Kael before we go any further," Bram said, adjusting the pack that held our small collection of signal supplies. "Last we heard, our warning about House Thorne's dual ambush reached him. We don't know what's happened at Blackthorn since."Ronan's jaw tightened at the reminder. "Do it," he said. "Quickly. Whatever answer comes back, I'd rather know now than discover it too l

  • I Rejected My Mate On Purpose   Chapter 31: The Ledge

    We tried three different routes before dawn, each one leading us back, sooner or later, toward the same narrow ledge Deshi had warned us about the night before."This isn't coincidence," Bram said, after the third attempt dead-ended at a rockfall too steep and unstable to climb safely. "Someone's blocked every other path. Deliberately.""Or they never existed at all," Ronan said grimly, studying the terrain with an expression that had gone hard and resigned. "Maybe there was only ever one way through these mountains, and everything else Deshi mentioned was just enough detail to make the lie feel like local knowledge instead of a trap."I stood at the edge of our small group, watching the pale gray light of early morning creep slowly across the jagged peaks around us, and felt the particular exhaustion of a plan that had run out of alternatives. "Then we take the ledge," I said. "Carefully. Watching for whatever's waiting, because something clearly is."We approached the narrow stretch

  • I Rejected My Mate On Purpose   Chapter 30: The Village That Paid the Price

    The smoke thickened as we climbed the last ridge before the village came into view, and what we found in the shallow valley below stopped all of us cold.It hadn't been a full massacre. That was the first thing I understood, taking in the scene with the same grim, practiced assessment I'd learned to apply to violence over the last several days. A handful of homes still stood untouched at the valley's edges, while others burned or smoldered in the center, chosen with a deliberateness that made my skin crawl once I understood the pattern. This hadn't been random destruction. It had been a message, precise and calculated, aimed at whoever survived to read it."Blackthorn colors," Bram said quietly, crouching beside a scrap of torn cloth caught on a fence post at the village's edge. "Or something close enough to pass for them at a distance.""That's not possible," Ronan said, though his voice carried none of the certainty the words demanded. "This is a Blackthorn tribute village. My fathe

  • I Rejected My Mate On Purpose   Chapter 29: The Ransom

    "Torvin," Ronan said, and the name alone seemed to cost him something, his voice going rough in a way I hadn't heard even when he'd confessed his father's crimes to me in the wreckage of my own room. "They took Torvin."I didn't recognize the name immediately, and something in my confusion must have shown on my face, because Ronan continued, his voice thick with old grief now layered over fresh fear."He served my father before I was born," he said. "Taught me to fight before I could properly walk. When my father supposedly died, Torvin was the one who sat with me through the worst of it, the one who told me I was allowed to grieve a man everyone else insisted I should simply replace as quickly as possible." He rubbed a hand roughly over his face, exhaustion and pain plain in every line of his body. "He's closer to a father to me than the man whose blood I actually carry. And they took him the same way they took Selene. Not killed. Taken.""Alive," I said slowly, understanding settlin

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