All Chapters of Rejected By The Alpha, Claimed by His Billionaire Brother: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

The first betrayal did not come with blood.It came with certainty.Aria woke before dawn, breath shallow, heart racing as if she had been running. The echo of the Vault still lingered behind her eyes. That single word repeated in her thoughts like a pulse.Heir.She pushed herself upright, the sheets sliding down her skin. Damien was already awake. She could feel it in the room, the way his presence settled like a watchful animal even when he did not move.“You felt it too,” she said quietly.“Yes.”He sat on the edge of the bed, forearms braced against his knees. Shadows clung to him, not ominous, just heavy with thought. “The city shifted last night. Nothing visible. But the wards… they reacted.”“To me,” Aria murmured.Damien didn’t correct her. That silence carried more weight than reassurance ever could.Before either of them could speak again, a knock struck the door. Sharp. Formal. Wrong for this hour.Serel entered moments later, armor half-fastened, expression rigid. “We hav

The silence after the ritual was wrong.Not peaceful.Hollow.The wind that swept across the southern pass carried no tremor of magic now. No oppressive weight. No buried heartbeat beneath the soil.For the first time in centuries…The realm was unanchored.Aria felt it instantly.Not as power.As absence.She stood at the edge of the shattered ritual basin, breath shallow, Damien’s arm still braced around her waist. The ground beneath them had stabilized, but something deeper had shifted in ways no map could chart.“It’s gone,” Serel whispered behind them.Aria shook her head faintly. “Not gone.”“Then what?” Damien asked quietly.She swallowed.“Free.”The word lingered like frost in the air.Behind them, Caelum Vireth let out a broken laugh from where he knelt among the cracked sigils. Dust clung to his robes. His certainty had drained out of him like blood from an open wound.“You don’t even understand what you’ve done,” he rasped.Damien’s grip tightened on Aria instinctively.“E

The first impact did not come with thunder.It came with silence.A terrible, unnatural silence that rolled across the Citadel like a living thing. Conversations died mid-sentence. Footsteps slowed. Even the ever-present hum of magic embedded in the fortress walls dimmed into something thin and fragile.Aria felt it before she understood it.A pressure behind her ribs.Not pain.Not fear.Recognition.She was halfway down the eastern corridor when her knees nearly buckled. Damien caught her instantly, hands firm around her arms.“Aria.”She didn’t answer.Because in that moment, something inside her shifted.Like a string pulled tight across her soul had suddenly gone taut.“It’s here,” she whispered.And then the sky screamed.The sound wasn’t audible at first.It began as a vibration, low and wrong, crawling through the stone beneath their feet. The Citadel shuddered once, twice, like a beast trying to wake from a nightmare.Then the vibration became sound.A tearing.A vast, grindi

The first thing that fell from the Veil wasn’t a creature.It was silence.A terrible, unnatural silence that swallowed the world whole.The city below stopped laughing. Music cut off mid-note. Fires crackled too loudly, like they were trying to fill the void.Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.Aria felt it press against her ears, thick as water.Then the screaming started.Not from the sky.From the streets.People were pointing upward now. Running. Dropping lanterns that shattered like tiny suns against stone.The fracture above widened with a sickening sound, like bone splitting under pressure.And something moved inside it.Not clearly. Not yet.Just a shifting mass of shadows that didn’t belong to this world.Damien’s arm tightened around her.“We need to move.”But Aria couldn’t.Because the Crown was awake.Fully awake.It pulsed inside her chest like a second heart, burning brighter with every second the Veil stayed open. Silver light bled through her veins, illuminating

The world bent around her.Not metaphorically.Reality actually folded.The courtyard, the palace, the broken sky above Valeris, all of it seemed to draw inward toward a single point.Her.Aria took one step forward.And the ground remembered her.Cracks spiderwebbed across the marble, not from force, but from recognition. Silver light pooled beneath her bare feet, spreading outward like liquid moonlight, swallowing shadow wherever it touched.She didn’t feel pain anymore.Didn’t feel fear.Didn’t feel the Crown burning inside her veins.She felt vast.Like her body had become too small for what she carried.Somewhere behind her, she heard her own heartbeat.It sounded very far away.The creature stared at her.For the first time since it had descended through the Veil, its expression wasn’t hunger.It was certainty.And something else.Something ancient.“Ah,” it whispered.The word rippled across the courtyard like a dropped stone in still water.“Now I see.”Damien moved instantly.