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Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Three Alphas’ Rejected Mate: Kabanata 241 - Kabanata 250

262 Kabanata

Chapter 25 - There You Are

Mira’s POVFrom the tower window, an army looks like a spill of ink.It poured down the ridge in perfect silence while the mansion burned bright below it, and I stood with my palms flat on the cold stone and felt every step of it in my teeth. The witches’ fire roared. The wall rang. And then, ahead of the ranks, the ground began to bloom.I had not sent it. I want to be clear about that. The flowers came up through the grass in a white tide, thousands upon thousands, racing across the killing ground, and they did not come by me. They came through me, the way a hand passes through water. I felt each one open like a held breath let go.At the edge of the bloom, the army stopped.“Mira.”My mother stood in the doorway with a stone water jug in each arm. Her sleeves were rolled and her forearms were raw and there was dust in her hair. She had not stopped moving since we arrived. She set the jugs down carefully, as if she were afraid of waking them.I had not been alone with her s

Chapter 6 - The Chair Nobody Sits In

Rohan's POV I woke to the sound of my wife arguing with a ledger. "Fourteen sacks," Lira muttered, propped on one elbow with her hair wild and a quill behind her ear. "Fourteen. The northern mill swears it sent eighteen." "Good morning," I said into the pillow. "It is not a good morning, it is a discrepancy." She glanced down, and her whole face changed, the way it still did every time she looked at me like she'd forgotten I was there and was delighted to be reminded. "Happy anniversary, Rohan." Fourteen years. I pulled her down and kissed her until the ledger slid off the bed, and for a few minutes the world was exactly the right size. Then the day began, and the day was enormous. The mansion had stopped being a fortress years ago. Now it was a hive, and I loved it with a stubbornness I would have denied once. Young wolves tore through the corridors in tangled packs, arguing about drills. Witch apprentices crossed the courtyard with pots of herbs and the grim faces of people

Chapter 7 - Ground Goes Quiet

Mira's POV At eighteen, I wore two things that were not mine to keep and didn't know how to take either off. Kael's river stone still hung at my throat, the cord replaced twice, the stone worn smoother by my thumb than by any river. Bright's leather wrap sat on my left wrist, restitched at the seams after four years of training. I told myself it was habit. It was probably something else. We left the village on a gray morning, and the leaving cost everyone something. Tyler stood at the gate with his arms folded and his weight planted. He had chosen the village the way you choose a wall to put your back against. He did not say goodbye. He hugged my mother for a beat longer than a man hugs a friend, then pressed my shoulder and said, "Be a door, little wolf." I had never understood what that meant. I nodded as if I did. The road to the Forgotten City took six days. My mother rode in front with her spi

Chapter 8 - Four Chairs

Mira's POV The cloth came open in my hands, and the flower inside it breathed. There is no other word. The pressed petals lifted and curled as if a slow wind had passed through them, and a thin warmth crawled up my wrist and settled behind my eyes. The silence did not break. It changed. It stopped being an absence and became a held breath, and for one terrible second I understood that I was not hearing nothing. I was hearing something that had stopped to listen back. Then I felt the thread. It ran out of my own arm, from the tiny cut the witch had made, and stretched taut across the dark, north and north and north, faster than any horse could carry it. My blood was moving. Someone was carrying it toward something. I could feel the pull like a fishhook behind my ribs. I ran. I found Ezekiel in the lower hall with his notebook, still counting flowers. I said it in one breath, the witch

Chapter 9 - The Crown That Wasn't Offered

Mira's POVThe woman in the fourth chair smiled at me as though we had been introduced years ago and she had only now remembered to say hello.Around us the wolves were still staggering to their feet. Someone retched against the aqueduct wall. Alaric Venn had a hand braced on a column and his eyes screwed shut. And across the circle the Warden had drawn a short blade that I was fairly sure she did not remember drawing."Who invited you?" Odette Musk's voice cracked like a whip."No one." The woman crossed one leg over the other. She was perhaps fifty, with skin the color of dark honey and silver threaded through close-cropped hair, and she wore a plain gray coat that cost more than the wall behind her. "No one needed to. My name is Isolde Ayanda. I am a servant of whatever comes next, and I was told it would begin here.""Told by whom?" Matthew had stepped in front of my mother without seeming to move."By the same thing that told all of you." Her eyes moved slowly across

Chapter 10 - Everything He Cost Me

Rebecca’s POVThe sand held its shape for exactly one heartbeat, and then it fell.It fell with a soft hiss, a whole standing figure of gray grain collapsing into a heap on the stones, and the pressure that had been crushing the valley lifted all at once. Wolves gasped like drowning men. Somewhere behind me, Odette Musk began to swear in a low steady stream.I lowered my hand from my mouth. My fingers had left marks on my lips.Then it all came back at once, because he had said her name.Elias, gray and shrunken in a chair, his mind eaten from the inside by something Jeremy had planted. Camille laughing in the doorway of our first kitchen, and then n

Chapter 11 - The Loan

Jeremy’s POVDying is not the difficult part. Anyone can manage it. The difficult part is the returning, which comes in pieces and insists on being counted.Hand. Wrist. The long bone of the forearm. I came back a grain at a time in the dark, and I lay on cold stone and took inventory, because inventory was the only discipline I had ever trusted. One body, thinner than I remembered. One mind, intact, which surprised me. One city’s worth of ambition, undimmed.And a second heartbeat, not mine, ticking a few inches to the left of my own.I turned my head. The witch sat against the wall with her knees drawn up, watching me the way a woman watches a pot she has been told might boil over. Her hair had gone gray in the years since I had last seen her. I wondered when that had happened, and then wondered why I wondered.“You’re awake,” she said.“So I hear.” My voice came out rough. “I assume the entire valley agrees.”What the two of us had done in the dark, the night the sand

Chapter 12 - Sworn Ground

Ezekiel’s POVI have always trusted numbers more than feelings. Numbers do not lie to make you comfortable, and they do not lie to make you brave. All my life that rule has served me better than any other, and on the night we left the Forgotten City I was beginning to suspect it had been a mistake.The numbers that night were these. Fourteen riders. Two wagons. One daughter, riding at my left stirrup, with a pressed white flower tucked inside her collar and a secret folded around it. One wife, riding ahead, spine straight, not looking back. One brother, Matthew, riding beside her and not speaking to her. And behind us, a city that had held its breath for a thousand years and now exhaled.Isolde Ayanda had not followed us. I noted that. It bothered me more than if she had.Rohan left us at the first crossroads. He gripped Matthew’s forearm, then mine, and told us he would ride for the mansion and wake Lira’s defenses and send word by every hawk he owned. He looked tired and

Chapter 15 - First Blood

Mira’s POVI opened the door.It tore out of me in a single wave. Bones broke and reset in the wrong order, and my skin split and was replaced by something thicker, and the leather wrap on my wrist snapped with a crack like a whip. My jaw lengthened. My voice left me and a howl took its place. The room went red and enormous and quiet, with every heartbeat in the building suddenly, gloriously audible.Alaric’s face changed.I saw it for one instant before everything went to teeth. His smile did not slip so much as fall, all at once, into the blank, wide-eyed horror of a man who has put his hand into the wrong dark. He stumbled back. The cord dropped from his fingers. He opened his mouth and I do not know what he meant to say.I remember almost nothing after that.I remember noise. I remember the taste of iron. I remember the sound of furniture breaking and the long shuddering groan of the house as the floor bucked underneath us. I remember the ground, finally, answer

Chapter 13 - Sworn Ground 2

Ezekiel’s POVWe reached Alaric’s village at first light.It sat in a bowl of green hills with a palisade of pale stakes around it, and when we came over the last rise the gates were already open. Torches burned despite the daylight. The villagers had lined the road on both sides, hundreds of them, and as my daughter rode through they knelt.Not bowed. Knelt, in rows, like a field of wheat bending.Alaric Venn stood in the gateway with his hands open at his sides. He was the very picture of a loyal Crown, broad-shouldered and warm eyed and slightly out of breath, as though he had run to meet us.“Welcome,” he said. “You are safe here. All of you.”Matthew dismounted and clasped his hand. I watched the pride on my brother’s face and said nothing.I counted the guards.It is a habit. I counted forty along the palisade and sixteen in the yard, and I noted that more than half of them faced inward. Toward the village. Toward us. Their eyes kept finding my daughter and sliding aw

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