All Chapters of The Three Alphas’ Rejected Mate: Chapter 211 - Chapter 220

233 Chapters

Chapter 211 — Working Hands

Kael's POVEmily looked at the wounds the way she looked at everything — carefully, and with the specific economy of someone who has been reading bodies long enough to know which details matter and which are just noise. Then she gave us what she could in the time she had: which thorns had gone deepest, what the drawing-out would need to look like, where to apply pressure and where not to. She didn't wait for questions. Rebecca needed her on the other side of the corridor, and Emily went.Which left Lira and me, and Garrick burning through the sheets with a fever that had already climbed past the place where you could pretend it wasn't serious.I'd watched Mira work a hundred times. I'd never been good at the way she could read a wound and know in one look what it needed. But I'd learned, over the years, to tell the difference between two kinds of damage — the kind that need

Chapter 212 — All The Ones We Lost

Rebecca's POV I was still sitting in the corridor with my father when the commander arrived. He was one of Matthew's, he looked steady, the kind who didn't embellish, and he found us by following the sound of the mansion settling into its first real quiet. He delivered his report the way he'd been trained to, which meant plainly and without softening. "We swept the field twice," he said. "We can account for most of our dead. But we can't find—" He stopped, started again. "We can't locate the body of the woman. Dark hair. She was with your group." "Camille," Matthew said. He'd appeared from somewhere down the corridor, drawn by the same instinct that brings people to doorways when they sense something has changed. "Yes, sir. She isn't where we expected to find her. We thought you'd want to know before we moved on." I felt my father's hand tighten around mine. I was already standing. “We're leaving. Inform the others,” I said. We were at the field within the hour. Th

Chapter 213 – Unnatural

Rebecca’s POVThe fire had been going for a long time, and nobody had moved.That's the thing about grief when it finally has somewhere to put itself — it doesn't rush. It just sits there in the space you've made for it and takes up exactly as much room as it needs, and you don't argue with it because arguing would mean admitting you thought it was going to be smaller than this.Tyler saw them first.He didn't shout. He just went still in the particular way he went still when something had his full attention, and that was enough to make the rest of us turn.They came out of the tree line slowly — the creatures, the grave-things, whatever we'd been calling them since the first reports had come in months ago about the dead rising wrong. A dozen of them, maybe more, moving across the field toward the pyre with the particular gait of something that has forgotten what it was walking toward.Hands went to weapons. Matthew's fire flickered in his palm."Wait," Ezekiel said.

Chapter 214 — Terrible

Kael’s POV He woke up in the middle of the night, which was very Garrick — not the slow, disoriented surfacing of someone who'd been under for a long time, but a sudden, complete arrival, eyes open and taking stock before the rest of him had finished remembering where he was. I was in the chair beside the bed. I'd been there long enough that my back had strong opinions about it. Garrick looked at the ceiling first. Then at the room. Then at me. "You're still here," he said. "Yes." "You know I don't ne

Chapter 215 — We Raise A Glass

Rebecca's POV It was Kael's idea to eat together, which surprised me a little. He didn't announce it — he just appeared in the kitchen that afternoon and started telling people, one at a time, that there would be food at the long table at sundown and they should come if they were able. It was the kind of thing Camille would have organized. I think he knew that.By the time the light went amber, most of us were there.Garrick had his crutch against the wall and his arms crossed and the expression of a man who found the whole gathering slightly sentimental but was willing to participate on the condition that nobody made it worse by acknowledging that. Rohan sat carefully, still finding the edges of his body's new rules, with Lira beside him. Ezekiel had come back from the cell — still with his notebook, still working through the markings in the pauses between b

Chapter 216 — Unplanned Yes

Rebecca's POV It happened on a Tuesday, which felt wrong somehow. The kind of thing you'd expect to happen on a night with a significant moon, or at the end of a long meaningful conversation, or at the very least not in the middle of Garrick telling a story about a man he'd once known who'd tried to negotiate with a bear.We were all together — properly together, the way we hadn't been since before the war made every gathering feel like a briefing. Garrick had his crutch propped against the wall and had somehow commandeered the best chair without anyone quite noticing when it happened. Kael was at the window. Elias had fallen asleep in the corner about an hour ago, which nobody mentioned because he'd earned it. The rest of us were just — present. Talking about nothing particularly important. Letting the afternoon go at whatever pace it wanted.Matthew had been quiet for a while in the particular way Matthew goes quiet when he's working something out.Then he said it."The marki

Chapter 217 — What Comes After

Rebecca's POV Matthew had a list by morning.Not a short list. A list with subsections, and what appeared to be a preliminary timeline, and a note at the bottom that said confirm with Ezekiel re: location in the particular handwriting he used when he was trying to be efficient and slightly couldn't help being thorough about it.I looked at it across the table. "You made this last night?""This morning. Couldn't sleep.""Matthew." I said with my arms out."The planning has to start somewhere." He replied indifferently. It did, and it started there, and by midmorning the four of us were sitting around the table with the list and Ezekiel's additions to the list (which were more numerous than anyone had expected, delivered quietly and with complete certainty) and Tyler's contributions, which were fewer in number but had a kind of directness to them that kept cutting through the practical back-and-forth and landing on what things actually meant.My father came in halfway thro

Chapter 218 — Final Yes

Rebecca's POV The dress was right. Everything else was a question.I sat in the chair by the window and looked at my hands and thought about Tuesday. How fast yes had come — not after deliberating, not after weighing anything, just out of my mouth before the rest of me had voted on it. I'd said yes before Matthew had technically finished asking. I'd said yes to three men at once in a room that also contained a sleeping father and Garrick making commentary about the day of the week.And I'd meant it. That was the part I kept turning over.I thought about the beginning. The girl who'd stood in that first room and been told what she was and what it meant and had spent a considerable amount of energy deciding she didn't have to accept any of it. The girl who'd put distance between herself and all three of them on purpose, who'd called the bond a complication, who'd tried very hard to be the person who chose her own story rather than the one written for her.She hadn't been wrong

Chapter 219 — In The Night

Rebecca’s POVThe garden was empty by the time the last of them left. The flowers still stood in the dark like they hadn’t gotten the message that the ceremony was over. The mansion had gone quiet in that particular way it went quiet after holding a crowd and then releasing them—a settling, like a long-held breath finally let out.Matthew closed the door.I was still in the dress. That felt significant—that I hadn’t changed yet, that the day hadn’t fully become the night, that there was still a threshold left to cross.“You can breathe,” Matthew said.“I am breathing.”“You’re doing the thing where you breathe but you’re also somewhere else.”I looked at him. Then at Tyler, who was watching me with the particular attention he gave things he was trying to memorize. Then at Ezekiel, leaning against the wall with his arms loosely crossed, the expression of a man who had decided to let the room find its own pace and was content to be part of whatever that turned out to be.Three h

Chapter 220 — Where I Go Alone

Rohan's POV I found a place I’d known for a while—a small rise about a mile from the mansion, where the trees opened up and I could see the valley below and the sky above it without anything in between. I’d come here alone sometimes during the worst of the war, when I needed somewhere that didn’t know anything about any of it.I brought Lira here today.She didn’t ask where we were going. She just came, which was one of the things about her I’d spent a long time not saying out loud and intended to spend considerably longer saying properly.We sat on the rise with the valley below us and the night above, and for a while neither of us said anything. That was exactly right.“No war,” she said eventually.“No war.”“No pack needing something.”“Not tonight.”She leaned into me. I put my arm around her, and we stayed there while the night did what it wanted and the valley held its quiet. Somewhere behind the trees the mansion held its own separate night that belonged to other people.This

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