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Chapter 25 – The Gala
publish date:
2026-05-09 23:57:46
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Reborn on my wedding day Chapter 30 – What She Witnessed
The Council convened the following Thursday.Not the preliminary review — the formal hearing, the one with all five members seated and the official record running and the weight of regional law behind every word spoken in that room. Adler had moved it from the original date with a brevity that told Claire the Council had been waiting for exactly this sequence of events to complete itself before acting.The charges against Derek Cole were read by the Council's legal officer in a flat, procedural voice that made each item sound like an inventory — which, in a way, it was. The wolfsbane poisoning attempt. The fabricated fraud complaint. The boundary attack on a pack member. The kidnapping. The Gala footage, authenticated and documented. The full picture, assembled piece by piece over four months, was a thorough and damning portrait of a man who had been dismantling other people's lives with the confidence of someone who expected never to be held to account for it.Claire sat in the witne
Reborn on my wedding day Chapter 29 – Her Fight
The Old Mill boundary point sat in a clearing where two territories had touched for decades without resolution — South Ridge's western edge, North Ridge's southeast corner, the kind of contested ground that showed up on both packs' maps with different colored borders and no one had ever fought hard enough to settle definitively. It was also, Claire knew, the place Derek had used as a meeting point when he didn't want witnesses. She had heard him mention it twice in her first life and had stored the information the way she stored everything: quietly, completely, without letting on.They reached the tree line at dusk, exactly as the note had specified. Julian's eight wolves had been in position for forty minutes already, silent on the four routes, giving nothing away. Cal's signal — a low, specific whistle that meant I have eyes on the target — came from the north as they entered the clearing.Derek was there. Four South Ridge wolves behind him, which told Claire he was afraid and was c
Reborn on my wedding day Chapter 28 – The Cost
Dr. Parks confirmed it Wednesday morning.Early — very early, earlier than a standard test would have caught. Only a wolf's senses and a healer's intuition had found it before the science did. Parks ran the full workup and sat across from both of them with the expression of a man who had important news and difficult news and was sorting out how to deliver both at once."Confirmed," he said. "Six weeks, possibly seven." He looked at Claire. "Healthy indicators at this stage. The wolf marker in the bloodwork is active — the gold line, which we haven't seen in this pack in thirty years. That's significant." He paused. "But I want to be honest with you.""Be honest," Julian said. Beside Claire, his hand was on her knee — steady, constant, barely moving."A newly woken wolf carrying a gold-line pregnancy is high risk," Parks said. "Not uncommon in the historical records, but high risk. Your wolf has been dormant your whole life. It woke six days ago. The pregnancy woke it the rest of the w
Reborn on my wedding day Chapter 27 – I Want You
She went to him.Not because anything had happened. Not because of the mark or the wolf or the gala or the packed weeks of evidence that had built like a tide to this point. She went to him because on a Tuesday evening three days after the assembly, she was standing in the sitting room between their doors looking at the light under his and she simply decided that the last thin layer of the thing she had been calling caution was gone.She knocked."Come in," he said.He was at the window. Not working — just at the window in the dark with the city lights laid out below and his hands loose at his sides, the posture of a man who had been standing in his own thoughts. He turned when she came in.She crossed the room and stopped in front of him."I'm done working up to it," she said.He looked at her face. Reading it, the way he read everything — carefully, completely, without assumptions. "Claire—""I want you," she said. Plainly. The way he said things — no performance, no decoration, jus
Reborn on my wedding day Chapter 26 – The Mark
Three days after the gala the Council opened a formal review of Derek's Alpha standing.The audio recording, the strike in public, the documented pattern of behavior across four months — it was, as Adler put it to Julian in a call Claire sat in on, a remarkably complete picture. The review would take time, procedures had to be followed, but the outcome had the particular quality of foregone conclusions dressed in proper clothing.South Ridge without an Alpha was not Claire's problem to solve. She had not set out to destabilize a pack — only to stop one man from continuing to cause damage. She trusted the Council to manage the transition. She had, by this point, enough evidence of Adler's competence to trust it without anxiety.What she had not planned for was what happened the evening after the Council call.They were in the courtyard — the open stone yard at the back of the pack house where the full pack gathered on Sunday evenings for the informal assembly that was North Ridge's old
Reborn on my wedding day Chapter 25 – The Gala
The Luna Gala was the region's oldest social tradition — every Alpha and Luna, every Council member, every senior pack elder, in one ballroom once a year. Formal. Public. The kind of event where things said or shown became immediately and permanently part of the pack community's record.Claire had attended once in her first life, on Derek's arm, in a dress he had picked for her, with instructions about who to speak to and what to say and which topics to avoid. She had smiled the whole night and come home with the particular hollow feeling of a person who had been in a room full of people and been no one in it.Tonight she wore a dress the color of deep water. Her hair was up. Julian had looked at her at the top of the stairs the way he had been looking at her lately — steadily, warmly, without any attempt to look like he wasn't — and offered his arm and said nothing, and she had taken it.She had the footage on her phone. She had been carrying it for three weeks.It had come from a so
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