All Chapters of Rejected by My Mate, Desired by His Enemy : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

"You have healing hands. We could use you in the clinic if you're interested."Two months become three. Three become four. And somewhere in there, I stop counting.Meredith offers me work in the healer's room after watching me reorganize her supply closet for the third time. I'm going stir-crazy sitting in my room all day and she knows it."Are you sure?" I ask. "I'm not part of this pack officially.""You're here. You're skilled. That's enough." She hands me a basket of herbs that need sorting. "Besides, the pack could benefit from another trained healer."So I start working. A few hours a day at first. Then longer as my energy returns and my baby grows.The pack members are cautious with me at first. Polite but distant. They know I'm the rejected Luna from Silverpine. The one Alpha Donovan brought in from the storm.But healing has a way of breaking down walls.I stitch up a warrior's training wound and he thanks me with genuine gratitude. I help a mother with her sick child and she

"You're doing amazing."Labor is war, and I'm losing.My water broke an hour ago. Gushing warm and shocking all over the bedroom floor. Meredith arrived within minutes. Donovan right behind her.I didn't even have to ask for him. He just came. Like he knew I'd need him.Now I'm four hours in and the pain is beyond anything I imagined. Beyond the rejection ceremony. Beyond the poisoning. Beyond everything.Contractions roll through me in waves. Building. Cresting. Crashing. Each one stealing my breath and my sanity with it.I scream. Can't help it. The sound tears from my throat raw and animal.Donovan holds my hand. Has been holding it for hours. I'm crushing his fingers. Breaking bones probably. But he doesn't complain. Doesn't pull away."You're doing amazing," he says again."I can't." The words come out between gasps. "I can't do this.""You can." His other hand brushes sweat-soaked hair from my face. "You're the strongest person I know.""I'm not strong. I'm dying.""You're not d

"I said yes to the Summit, and now I can't sleep."The words sit heavy in my chest. I've been staring at the ceiling for two hours, listening to Haven breathe beside me, slow, easy, the kind of sleep only babies and people without problems can manage. Her little chest rises and falls. She has no idea her mother just agreed to walk back into the worst chapter of her life.I pull the blanket tighter even though I'm not cold.Donovan's voice keeps playing on repeat. *The Summit. Two weeks. All packs represented.* Professional. Calm. Like he was reading from a script. And me, nodding along like I had a plan. Like I wasn't already calculating how many exits a conference hall usually has.Damon will be there.My stomach does something ugly at the thought. Not fear exactly, something more complicated. Like touching a burn scar and feeling pressure instead of pain. The nerve damage kind of numb. I spent two years convincing myself I'd moved past what he did. Most days I believe it. Tonight is

"Shifting has always hurt. But this is different, this is transformation."I say it out loud, standing at the edge of the clearing Sage led me to, and the words hang in the cold air like smoke. The full moon sits directly overhead, so bright it throws shadows. My bare feet press into the ground, damp grass and soft earth between my toes, and I can feel the moonlight the way I've never felt it before, not just on my skin but through it, like something on the other side of a door it's been trying to open for years.Sage moves around the clearing's perimeter with quiet focus. She places flat grey stones at four points, sets small bundles of herbs between them, and lights them one at a time. The smoke that rises is pale blue-white, sharp and clean like winter air, nothing like incense. It doesn't drift. It holds its shape, rising straight up in four columns, marking the circle's edge."Step in," she says.I do.The air inside the circle is immediately different. Thicker. Charged. Like sta

"Sage is a harsh teacher. I love her for it."I say it to Haven while pulling my boots on at six in the morning. She looks up from her cereal with that serious expression she gets when she's deciding whether something is funny or not. She decides not. Nods like she agrees completely.Three years old and already has opinions about training schedules.Sage is waiting in the clearing when I get there, moving through a warm-up sequence that makes my joints ache just watching. For a woman her age she moves like water. No wasted motion. Nothing performative. Just function.The first week was purely physical. She assessed every gap, every bad habit, every reflex that had been trained into me by years of being the lowest-ranked person in a room.There were a lot of gaps."Again," she says after I deflect her strike and immediately step back.I stepped back without thinking. That's the problem."You deflected correctly," she says, "and then you apologized with your body. You gave the ground bac