All Chapters of Rejected By The Beta, Claimed By The Alpha King: Chapter 201 - Chapter 210

The tiles were cold through my palms. I had been sitting on the bathroom floor for too long to measure, my back against the side of the bath. The tap was still running because the sound of water seemed like the one thing that might help.It had not helped much. I kept it running anyway.Forty-eight hours. The number sat in my chest beside the nausea. Both occupied the same hollow space, keeping company like unwelcome things. I had written it on the whiteboard less than two hours ago, using the same careful script I had used for seventy-two. Replacing the old number with the new one felt like changing a bandage while the wound waited underneath. Nico had watched from his chair without saying anything. I had appreciated that.Then the nausea started. Quiet at first, the kind that sits at the back of the throat like a warning. I reached for my tea with the specific stupidity of someone hoping warmth might settle it. Instead, I spilled it down the front of my sweate

Dr Thornwood crossed the room wearing the expression she used when she had walked into something unexpected and was already cataloguing it. Her amber eyes moved from my face to Lukas’s, then to the space between us in a rapid, professional assessment.“My Queen,” she said, stepping toward me. “What happened?”“Amelia is suddenly able to hear thoughts,” Lukas said. His voice was low and even, the tone he used when facts needed to be received calmly and he was modelling calm as a form of suggestion.Elara stopped moving for a full two seconds. For Elara, that was significant.“Well,” she said, precisely. And then, after a brief pause during which she appeared to be reviewing her options and finding them all equally inadequate: “Fuck.”I felt the laugh come up without entirely meaning to let it. “Well, fuck covers it indeed, Elara,” I said.She collected herself with

The palace knew what day it was.It was the only explanation I had for the quality of the silence that had settled over the corridors since dawn. Not the comfortable quiet of a building at rest, but something held, like a breath taken and not yet released. On the morning of a full moon, the kitchens would usually have been running since before light. The distant thud of preparations would carry through the stone floors. Celebrations. The elaborate joy of a pack marking the moon’s fullness with ceremony and excess. Those sounds were absent today, replaced by something more careful. The guards at their posts moved with controlled economy. The household staff kept their eyes down and their steps quick. Everyone was doing what the royal city did when the palace asked them to trust it: they kept their heads down and waited.I understood that instinct. I had lived most of my life inside it.By ten in the morning, the four of us were standing in Lukas’s off

Sleep had been a polite fiction I’d maintained until around three in the morning, and a losing battle from there.I lay in the dark with my eyes open and the ceiling doing nothing useful above me, listening to the palace at its quietest hour. The building had its own language in the small hours: the breath of the ventilation, the distant step of a guard changing shift, the way stone carried sound differently when there was no ambient noise left to absorb it. I had learned that language over weeks of lying awake beside Lukas, cataloguing the hours before dawn with the thoroughness of a former servant who had never quite learned to trust sleep completely.The space beside me had been empty for a while. Long enough for the sheets to cool on his side. Long enough for me to register his absence without being certain when it happened, which meant I had drifted off at some point and woken gradually rather than suddenly. I lay there another ten minutes, honest with myself, then admitted that

The hour had a unique quality to it. Not slow, not really, but loaded.The way time gets when you are tracking too many things at once and your mind starts filing each piece against the others, building a picture you don’t want to see finished. Three more contacts to the south. Two to the west. Each one dealt with, each one a door closed. I stood at the window and watched the city and counted what I knew and what I didn’t.The reports kept coming. Dominic updated the board in the precise, unhurried script he used for intelligence documents. Nico managed the mental traffic with the focused quiet of a man running multiple conversations through a mental switchboard. Amelia sat with the stillness of someone whose stillness was active, cataloguing everything, her eyes moving between the board and the window and the map with the rhythm of a mind already three steps ahead.She had the colour in her cheeks that meant she was managing something, the pale determination that had replaced the pal