All Chapters of The Three Alphas’ Rejected Mate: Chapter 221 - Chapter 230

Rebecca's POV Garrick left in the morning, the way he did everything — without announcement and without making more of it than it was.He'd said his goodbyes the night before, which meant the morning was just the logistics of it: his men assembled at the gate, a cart for what needed carrying, his crutch finding its rhythm on the uneven ground the way it had been finding its rhythm for weeks now. He'd gotten good at it faster than anyone expected, which surprised nobody who actually knew him.He stopped in front of Matthew and me."The fracture will close faster without me in it," he said. "You know that.""I know," Matthew said."Good." He looked at me. "You built something worth protecting. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise." Then, because he was Garrick: "Including yourself."He nodded once — not a bow, never a bow, just an acknowledgement — and turned to where Kael was standing a few feet back.Kael walked him to the gate. I watched them go, two men who had spent years

              Matthew's POV I'd done the math three times.Not because I enjoyed it — I didn't, particularly — but because my mind did this with problems it couldn't resolve through action: it ran the numbers repeatedly, looking for a variable it might have missed, until it either found one or accepted that the answer was going to remain uncertain for reasons outside its control.The answer remained uncertain.I knew when each of the markings had happened. I knew the sequence of events. I'd constructed a rough timeline that was thorough enough to be useful and incomplete enough to be useless, and I'd looked at it from several angles and come to the same conclusion each time: I didn't know. And I wasn't going to know through calculation. Which meant I was going to have to wait.Waiting was not something I was constitutionally suited to.

Ezekiel's POV I woke before the others.That wasn't unusual — I'd always been an early riser, the kind of person whose mind begins its work before the rest of the world has decided to participate. But this morning was different. This morning I lay still for longer than I normally would, looking at the ceiling, turning the decision over.We'd said yes last night. All four of us, in the particular way we said things when Rebecca led and the rest of us followed — not because we lacked will, but because her certainty had a quality to it that made the direction obvious. We were going to do the spell. We were going to know.I'd been careful, these past weeks, not to want it too much.Wanting things openly was not something I'd ever been particularly good at. I observed. I noted. I arrived at conclusions through evidence rather than hope, and I held those conclusions loosely enough to revise them when better evidence arrived. It was a useful way to move through the world. It was also,

Rebecca's POV It seemed the child had opinions.Specifically, the opinion that arriving was something to be done on its own terms, in its own time, regardless of what Emily said or what my body was attempting or what the three men in the room were communicating through their carefully controlled expressions. The labour had been going long enough that carefully controlled had started giving way to something more honest, and I'd spent enough time reading Matthew's face to know that the thing behind his eyes right now wasn't composure, more like composure scaffolding, holding up the space where composure used to be.Emily worked without stopping. She didn't say it wasn't progressing. She didn't have to. I could feel it — the child pushing against something that wasn't physical, some resistance that had nothing to do with my body and everything to do with something I couldn't name, the way my power had been pulling inward since the pregnancy began, and now it was pulling hard

Rebecca's POV The old woman led us to the center of the village before the morning had fully decided what it wanted to be in the early hour where the light was still making up its mind, and everything looked like the version of itself that hasn't been asked to perform yet.The village had gathered. Not really in a formal way, just present, the way communities are present for things that belong to all of them, standing at the edges of the open space with the quiet of people who understood what they were witnessing.The rites were old. I didn't know the words, but my body did. Some recognition in the blood, the same one that had stirred when my feet touched the path yesterday and everything had shifted. The old woman spoke and the three men I married stood beside me, the child was in my arms and the village bore witness, and whatever the mansion ceremony had begun, this completed it in the way that only ground can complete things.When it was done, the old woman reached into th