All Chapters of Rejected by My Mate, Desired by His Enemy : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

"Elder Silas's dark magic hits like a freight train and half our warriors don't get up."They hit the ground before I process what happened. One second they're charging. The next they're down, ten wolves flat in the dirt, the purple-black wave still rolling outward across the courtyard stones.Silas stands at the head of the ritual circle with his arms raised and two hundred years of dark magic crackling across his skin like weather. He looks at the bodies on the ground and then at me with the specific patience of someone who has done this before and will do it again without losing sleep."Bonded Alphas." His voice is almost amused. "How quaint."Through the bond Donovan's fury hits mine at the same moment. We don't speak. We move.The bond snaps into full power-sharing without either of us deciding to. His strength pours into my muscles, my speed floods into his feet, and we hit Elder Silas from opposite sides simultaneously.He blocks both of us. Barely. But he blocks us.The counte

"There might be a way to save Haven, but it requires a sacrifice I don't know if I can make."Sage says it quietly, hands folded in her lap, eyes on Haven's face. The medical tent is small and warm and Haven looks impossibly pale against the white blankets, her chest moving in the shallow rhythm it's been holding for two days. Not worsening. Not improving. Just holding.Donovan stands at the tent entrance with his arms crossed. Through the bond I feel him processing Sage's words the way he processes everything dangerous, quietly, completely."Tell me," I say.Sage looks at me. "The power that activated during the ritual exposure is too much for her body. She's three years old. Her system can't contain what got transferred into her. It's burning through her from inside and if we don't relieve the pressure, she dies. Days, not weeks."The tent goes very quiet."What's the option?" Donovan asks."Transfer ritual. We pull some of Haven's power out and move it somewhere else. Relieve the bu

"Montana in winter is beautiful and brutal, much like hunting a desperate Alpha who knows he's cornered."The snow comes sideways off the mountains, sharp and fine, finding every gap between collar and skin and staying there. The small plane rattles through turbulence on the descent and I watch the white landscape expand below us and think about a man who funded a monster for thirty years and is now hiding in a cabin twenty miles from nowhere, hoping nobody comes.We came.Haven is back at Summit with Sage, color returning to her cheeks when we left this morning. Oliver is beside me pressing his face against the window with the complete absorption of a child experiencing flight for the first time, which is exactly what this is. He insisted on coming. Arms crossed, chin up, completely immovable. "I can sense bad people." Nobody had a good argument against that.Alpha Catherine of Silverpine Pack meets us on the airstrip, breath coming in visible clouds in the cold air."Luna Whitmore.

"Fourteen signatures," Elder Crane says, standing at the chamber podium like he's been waiting his entire career for exactly this moment. "Fourteen Elders formally object to this nomination on grounds of precedent, tradition, and practical capacity."The chamber is packed. Word spread fast that today's session would include an open debate on the omega Elder nomination and every Alpha at Summit found a reason to attend. The air is thick with body heat and tension and something underneath both of those that feels like electricity, the specific charge of a room where something is about to be decided that cannot be undecided.I sit in the witness chair with my hands still in my lap and my ribs aching under my shirt and I watch Crane arrange his notes at the podium with the careful movements of a man who prepared this speech and intends to use every word of it."The Elder Council has existed for three hundred years," he says. "In three hundred years, no omega has held a seat. This is not o

"Fourteen names," Vera says, spreading the list across the table. "Fourteen children. The youngest is eighteen months old."The list is handwritten in Thorne's precise script, each entry thorough and specific. Names, pack affiliations, locations, ages, power manifestation status, and a column at the far right labeled simply *priority* that I look at for exactly one second before I look away. What that word means in this context, applied to children, is something I don't need to sit with longer than that.The war room is silent in the way of people absorbing something carefully. Marcus stands at the far wall with his arms crossed. Donovan is beside me, reading over my shoulder. Vera sits across from us with her hands flat on the table, still.Haven is in the medical tent. Oliver is with her. Neither of them knows this list exists and they won't, not in these terms, not for a long time. But the reason this list exists is in that medical tent eating breakfast and asking Sage when she can