All Chapters of The Three Alphas’ Rejected Mate: Chapter 201 - Chapter 210

Kael's POVThe clearing had gone the kind of quiet that doesn't invite noise back in.The smaller Erased figures had already begun thinning at the edges, each one losing the last of its definition slowly, like ink bleeding out of paper left in water. I watched it happen without moving, without speaking, because Lily and Mae were still seated at the center of it all with their hands joined, and whatever was happening around them felt like something that shouldn't be interrupted.Then the largest one came.It arrived from the tree line — older than the others in some way that had nothing to do with how it looked, just the weight of it, the density of it, the sense that it had been carrying something for a very long time and had arrived here specifically to put it down. It moved past Garrick without acknowledging him, past me without slowing, and stopped in front of Emily.It leaned close. Said something I couldn't hear — something low and deliberate, pressed into Emily's ear l

Rebecca's POV He looked at me the way I'd forgotten he could look at me. Not the hollowed-out version I'd gotten used to — not the man whose eyes had been clouded and borrowed and pointed in directions that weren't his own choosing. This was the other one. The one I remembered from before any of this, from a time when the worst thing either of us had to worry about was whether I'd eaten enough and whether he'd remembered to fix the gate latch. Clear. Present. Mine. Jeremy's hand was still on his shoulder, fingers digging in, using him the way he used everything — as a thing between himself and consequence. But Elias wasn't looking at Jeremy. He was looking at me. And after a moment, very deliberately, very briefly, his eyes dropped. Down. To Jeremy's left leg. To the small, dark line of a cut just below the knee — old enough to have dried but fresh enough to still be sensitive, the kind of thing you don't notice in the noise of a battle until someone points you at it. He looked

Jeremy's POV The bleeding hadn't stopped the way it was supposed to. I'd pressed my hand against the leg wound the whole journey back, applied the kind of pressure that should have been enough by now, and it hadn't been enough. Every step cost something I didn't have an infinite supply of, and the place I was moving toward — the cell, the stone walls, the only room in the world that currently felt like it belonged to me — felt further away with each one. I made it anyway. I always made it. I sat down heavily against the wall, in the exact spot where Elias used to sit when I came to visit him, and I thought about that for a moment — about the particular irony of it — and decided it wasn't funny enough to be worth laughing at. The field was lost. Not in the abstract way fields are sometimes lost, where you regroup and recalculate and come back at it from a different angle. Lost in the way that means the shape of the thing has changed, that whatever I'd been building toward this s

Rebecca's POV The road felt wrong before we'd been on it ten minutes.Not wrong in any way I could point to specifically — no sound out of place, no movement in the trees, no obvious sign that anything was waiting for us. Just the particular quality of air that has been deliberately arranged to feel like nothing, which is a different thing from air that simply is nothing, and which I was learning, slowly and at cost, to tell apart."Emily would know," Ezekiel said, quiet, not a complaint. Just a fact that needed saying.Nobody disagreed. Emily would have read this road the way she read everything — carefully, with the long patience of someone who understood that the world communicated in textures rather than words, and that rushing past anything was how you missed what it was trying to tell you. Without her, we had instinct and history and the knowledge that Jeremy had already proven, twice, that he was more dangerous cornered than in the open.Garrick had gone qu

Garrick's POVI watched Ezekiel from the cart, which was the only watching I was capable of at that point — flat on my back, thorns pulled out but the wounds still making their opinions known every time the wheels found an uneven patch of ground. He was standing at the cell door with his notebook open, looking between the page and the walls one more time, lips moving slightly in the way they do when he's committing something to a format he trusts. I'd seen that expression before, on men who'd survived enough to know that the things you don't write down are the things that slip away.Smart. I'd have done the same, in another life.The road back was the kind of quiet that settles after things have been too loud for too long. Matthew and Rebecca walked close to the cart. Ezekiel caught up after a few minutes and fell into step without speaking. The thorn wounds ached in a steady, rhythmic way that I was beginning to recognize as the fever's way of making itself known — not sharp, jus