All Chapters of The Alpha Rejected His Bride For Me: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

 (Lena POV)The smell woke me before anything else.Dried herbs, eucalyptus, clean cotton. Every nurse house in the Lowlands smelled exactly like this. I knew it before I opened my eyes.A woman was sitting beside the bed. Older, with grey-streaked hair and the unhurried posture of someone who had been waiting a while and hadn't minded."Where am I," I said."Eastern Lowlands nurse house. Ten minutes from the border." She poured water and held it out. "Drink first."I drank. Lowlands well water. The mineral taste of it hit something in my chest I hadn't been prepared for."Two men found you unconscious at the tree line before dawn," she said. "They brought you here. My name is Diane.""Did they recognize me?""They did."I closed my eyes briefly."How long have I been here?""Since before dawn. It's early afternoon now."I sat up slowly. "Who else knows?""

 (Lena POV)I started pacing without deciding to.The nurse house room was not large enough for pacing in any meaningful sense, four steps one way, four steps back, but my body needed to be moving while my brain worked through what it was working through.Mira watched me from the bed. Diane watched me from her chair. Neither of them spoke, which I appreciated.The thing I hadn't said was sitting in the room with us like a fourth person.Kai knew her mother wasn't being treated. That was what the document said. His seal, his authorization, the restriction order that kept me out of that room while she lay in it dying. I had burned the document but the fact of it didn't burn with it. And Mira was sitting three feet away from me and didn't know, and Diane didn't know, and I was the only person in the Lowlands carrying that particular piece of information.I stopped pacing.I thought about what happened if I s

 (Lena POV) "I need to notify someone first," she said."I understand," I said. "Take your time."She blinked. I think she had expected an argument. The gate was still closed between us, the iron cold and solid in the afternoon light, and beyond it was everything that came next.Mira's hand found mine.I looked at her.She wasn't looking back at me. She was looking at the compound, at the stone walls and the gate and the guard with her radio.I held on.The guard stepped back and raised her radio. "This is Cassidy at the south gate. I have a... situation." A pause. "It's Lena Graves. She's requesting entry." Another pause, longer. Cassidy's eyes moved to me briefly and away. "Yes. She's on foot. She has one person with her." She listened. Nodded. "Understood."She lowered the radio and looked at me. "Someone's coming.""Okay," I said.We waited.The Lowland

(Lena POV)I started towards the door Julian following me but Julian stopped walking before we reached the first turn."There's no seeing Theo without seeing Kai first," he said.He stepped in front of me, blocking forward momentum. "Kai has to authorize the release. That's how this works. I don't have the standing to walk into holding and open a cell door unilaterally, and you know that.""You're his second," I said. "You have more authority in this compound than almost anyone.""Almost," Julian said. "That word is doing significant work in that sentence and I need you to sit with it.""Julian.""I'm not being obstructionist," he said, and his voice was patient in the way it got when he had already anticipated every version of this argument and prepared for all of them. "I'm telling you the procedural reality. Theo's detention was authorized by Kai. It releases by Kai. I cannot shortcut that without creating a different set of problems that will take longer to fix than the ones we cu

(Lena POV) Kai did not follow us and I told myself I was glad about that and mostly believed it.The holding area was in the lower east section, stone-walled and deliberately spare. Julian unlocked the door and said Theo's name and stepped back.For a moment nothing happened.Then Theo appeared in the doorway.He looked at Julian first, then he looked past Julian and found me, and everything in his face that had been held carefully in check for however many days he had been in that room came undone all at once.I crossed the distance before I decided to and we collided somewhere in the middle of it, his arms coming around me and mine around him, and he held on with the specific force of someone who had been alone for a long time and was recalibrating what it felt like to not be.I pressed my face against his shoulder and breathed.He smelled like the holding room, stale air and old stone, and unde