Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Three Alphas’ Rejected Mate: Kabanata 251 - Kabanata 260

                Mira’s POV I did not sleep in the room they had made for me, because the room had been made too well. Someone had thought of everything. The bed was turned down and the fire laid, and the bowl of fruit on the table was still cool, as though it had been set there in the last hour by hands that knew exactly when I would arrive. I sat on the edge of the mattress with my boots on and Kael’s stone wrapped in my fist, and I listened to the ground. It was not silent, the way it had been in the tower. It was worse. It was smothered, a muffled, pillowed murmur like a voice speaking through a closed door. Whatever had al

Matthew’s POVI have spent my life counting. Exits, blades, heartbeats, odds. It is the only way I have ever found to keep the people I love from dying, and it has worked more often than I have any right to expect.I had counted Alaric Venn once, in the first week, when I chose him. A good man. Strong, loyal, a little vain, with the right kind of hunger. I had run the numbers in my head and found nothing against him. I had given him a village and a Crown and my word, and I had stood in the ruins of the Forgotten City and told my daughter she would be safe in his keeping.The numbers had been wrong.I did not know how to bear that, so I did what I always do. I stood very still and watched the yard.“No,” Badenoch said again.He did not shout. He had no need to. Five hundred wolves had gone silent behind him, and the sound of his voice moved through them like a stone dropped in a still well. He was Alaric’s second, a heavy man in his fifties with a gray beard and a face like

Mira’s POVWe left the village in the middle of the morning, and nobody spoke for the first hour.Rohan’s riders formed up around us in a loose green ring, two hundred of them, their banners lowered against the dust. Behind us, the village gates stood open and the wolves who had chosen to stay were already dragging carts across the road to make a wall. Rhosyn stood on the palisade with her arms folded, watching us go. She did not wave. I understood why. She had not sworn to me, and she was going to die holding a pass for the one who had killed her Crown, and she was going to do it anyway because someone had to.I turned in my saddle and watched the village shrink until the hills closed over it.Somewhere far north, past the horizon, a long thin line of smoke stood up against the sky. It did not move. It did not need to. I could feel it in the ground, a vast soundless tread, as if the earth itself were being walked across.Half a day, the scout had said. It was already le

Matthew’s POVThe mansion had never looked so much like a home as it did at dusk on the day we came to defend it.Every window held a lamp. The gates stood open, and the courtyard was packed with faces, young wolves in training leathers, witch apprentices with ash on their sleeves, hybrids who had grown up in these halls and thought of them as the only world there was. They had heard something was coming. They had not been told what. They stood in the long evening light and looked at us as we rode in, two hundred riders in green, a wagon, a family, and the girl in a borrowed cloak at the center of it all.I counted them out of habit. Fewer than I needed. More than I deserved.Rohan was out of the saddle before his horse had stopped. He gave the reins to the nearest groom, said something short, and went across the yard in long strides toward the east stairs, where a woman wit

Jeremy's POVThe village had burned to its bones by morning, and I walked through it the way a man walks through his own house after a party.My army was cleaning up the last holdouts in the lower fields. I could hear every one of them die. I had not asked for that. Since I woke I heard every heartbeat for a mile in all directions, a vast wet clatter like rain on a tin roof, and the only silences in it were my own soldiers and the dead.I paused at a puddle and looked down. The man in it had been six feet five and golden. Now the hair at his nape was the color of ash, tied back out of old habit, and the face under it was thinner than I remembered. The loan was eating me from the edges.I flexed my left hand. Two fingers did not answer.You held it well, I had told the wolf woman, and I had meant it. I had also meant the twist of my wrist, which had cost me more than I had planned. A bill, then. I did not mind being billed. I minded not being told the total.The witch fel