Todos los capítulos de Rejected by the Alpha Heir, Mated to His Rival Brother: Capítulo 201 - Capítulo 209

Ciara's POVI sat up fully, the furs pooling around my waist. The room was cold—the fire had burned down to nothing in the night—and the air through the window carried that thin, grey smell of early morning.Draven was standing at the window with his back to me, and I knew before he spoke that something was wrong.It wasn't anything in how he stood. He stood like he always stood—still, straight, a man who had learned young that stillness was the same as strength. But I had learned him too well to be fooled by that. There was a tightness across his shoulders that hadn't been there when I fell asleep. His hands were flat against the stone sill, and his knuckles were pale."Draven," I said again. "Turn around."He turned.The breath went out of me.He looked wrecked. There were shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there last night, and his face had a grey, drawn quality to it, like something had been pressed out of him in the night. His tunic was damp at the back. His hair was pushed

Draven’s POVThe council room erupted.Not the murmur of disagreement. Not the careful throat-clearing of men who wanted to be able to say later that they had raised concerns. This was a breaking of something, all at once, the way a dam breaks."Get up out of that chair!""He has no right to it—""His father is not cold in the ground and he has already—"I stayed where I was. I did not move my hands from the arms of the chair. I did not say a word.*Let them talk,* I thought. *Let them talk until they run out of words. You've waited thirty-two years to sit in this chair. You can wait another quarter of an hour to speak from it.*Cassel was on his feet first, one hand flat on the table, his old face mottled. "You were confined to your quarters two months ago by the order of this council," he said. "You were stripped of your authority. You were branded a traitor in this very room. And you sit there as though the burials left you a throne in a will.""It is a will," someone said from the

Isolde’s POVA few days laterThe silk sheets stuck to my knees. Marius was beneath me, red-faced, his hands clumsy on my hips, his breath coming in short wet gasps that I had learned to time and count and ignore.I rolled my hips and he groaned."That's it," he said. "That's it, that's it—"He finished with a sound like a man being sick. His body went slack under mine. His hands fell away from my hips and hit the mattress. His head lolled to the side, eyes half-closed, a thin line of sweat running down into his collar.I stayed where I was a moment longer, both hands braced on his chest. My right hand had drifted up to the base of his throat without my telling it to. I could feel the pulse there. Thick and slow and stupid. It would take almost nothing. The right thumb, the right amount of pressure, and there would be one less fat old man in the world and a great deal more room for someone clever.I counted to ten.Then I took my hand away and climbed off him."Gods," Marius said, to

Draven’s POVThe sun came up over the eastern hills and I watched it from the balcony with my hands on the rail, and I did not feel like a man who was about to be crowned.I felt like a man walking up a hill he could not see the top of.The few days since the council room had gone by the way a fever goes by — in a blur with sharp pieces in it. I had not slept more than four hours in any of them. I had sat in that chair from first light until the candles were stubs, and I had gone through the treasury book, the muster rolls, the grain stores, the border reports, the correspondence that my father had let pile up for a month because he had never once in his life enjoyed paperwork. I had learned things about this house in five days that I had not learned in thirty-two years in it. Some of them were things I could use. Some of them were things that made me want to put my head in my hands.And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the pack had decided about me.Not in a hall, not in a vote.

Draven's POVThe doors opened, and the whole pack was in the hall.I had never seen it like that. The tables had been cleared out and the chairs set in rows from the doors to the dais, and the aisles between them were packed with wolves standing shoulder to shoulder, because there had not been enough chairs for everyone who had come. Every wolf in the house. Every levy from the outer farms. The villages of the eastern road. The old men who could barely walk had been carried up the hill and set in the front row. The children had been brought.Nobody spoke.We walked the long aisle together, Ciara's hand in mine, and the silence was not the cold silence of a room waiting to see whether a man would fail. It was the other kind. The silence of a pack that had buried twenty-two wolves a week ago and was watching the last of the house walk in.I saw Harren in the front row. I saw Cassel beside him, and Cassel was not looking away. I saw Marcus with Liora on his left, and Liora had her hand o