All Chapters of The Alpha's Ruined Bride: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

KessaI had to put everything aside. Forget about the fact that on the other hand, my life was quietly falling apart at the seams, and plan my title ceremony like someone who had it together. It was, to say the least, hectic and I had already pulled myself through the pack meeting that morning without looking like someone who was two decisions away from unraveling completely. Now Mia and I were at the pack market, moving between stalls and bolts of fabric, trying to find the thing that existed perfectly in my head but was refusing to exist anywhere else.Beta Quinn had mentioned, almost as a footnote, that most pack events went through Fiona or one of the other established planners. That every detail, every arrangement, every choice of cloth and color and centerpiece had typically passed through someone else's hands.This was different.This was my title ceremony. Mine. And I wanted it to be entirely perfect, no hiccups, no last-minute discoveries, no moments where I looked at someth

Ronan I smiled at myself in the mirror, feeling more anticipated than I had felt in almost anything recently and it was entirely because of the thought of seeing Kessa today. It had been what? Almost a week since I had set eyes on her. "As if you weren't the one that let her go." My wolf groaned from somewhere deep and unimpressed. I still hated myself for that. I beat myself up late at night over it, over letting go of the woman who held the key to everything in me that still felt alive. But whenever the voice of her father came ringing back through my head, I knew I had to stay level. Stay on my toes. Not fall into something I couldn't see the bottom of. There was no way that man hadn't believed what he was saying. He was a father before he was anything else. He knew his daughter in ways I didn't. He had years of her that I was never present for. "You let that mess with your head any longer and you'll be defending him soon enough." My wolf hissed, sharp and disgusted. He wasn't

Kessa I could see the look on everyone's face the moment I took the stage. It was a specific kind of look, the version of skepticism, the kind that had learned to wear patience as a mask. Some of them had been doing it so long it had become a resting expression. A few of them weren't even bothering with the polite version. They were just watching me the way people watch something they've already decided won't work, waiting to have it confirmed. I had seen that look my entire life. It no longer had the effect on me that it used to. I reached out and took the microphone cleanly. "Hello, everyone." The pockets of conversation around the room settled. The people whose attention had been elsewhere looked up, located me on the stage, and whatever they saw in my posture made them decide to pay attention. That was something, at least. "I am so glad that you made it here." I let my eyes move across the room as I said it, making it land on different sections rather than the middle distanc

Kessa I woke up with a pounding headache to realize it was already late in the evening and that I had missed a lot out there. I was meant to go around the pack today, visits, check-ins, the groundwork rounds I had been planning since the ceremony but it seemed that had been cut short by my own doing. A loud groan slipped out of my mouth as I sat up, my head feeling like it was filled with liquid that was threatening to spill in every direction. I pressed my fingers against my temples and kept my eyes closed for a moment, breathing through it. "Remind me to never drink that much," I mumbled to no one. Looking around, I realized I wasn't in Mia's house, where I had always stayed over when nights like that happened. I was in the pack house. In my old room. And no matter how hard I tried to push through the fog in my head, I could not piece together how I had ended up here. The last clear thing I remembered was the tail end of the ceremony, the conversations, the stage and then somewhe

Kessa It was the first day I was stepping out to do what I had planned for the pack, and the first item on that list was making sure that every woman wrongly imprisoned was released. There had been a report of a significant number of them. Some had been imprisoned under my father's orders, and Dylan had enthusiastically taken the lead on others, adding his own contributions to the list with the particular energy of someone who had been handed authority and had immediately used it to make himself feel large. When I went through the list the night before, I had actually laughed. Not the warm kind. The other kind, the short, disbelieving sound that comes out when something is so absurd that your body doesn't know what else to do with it. Some of the listed offenses were so ridiculous that I had to read them twice to confirm I was seeing correctly. Women imprisoned for speaking out of turn in a pack meeting. For refusing a directive from a male pack member who wasn't even ranked above