All Chapters of Rejected by the Prince, Claimed by the Alpha: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Elara woke sometime after midnight to complete silence. For one disorienting second, panic hit automatically. Then she realized what had woken her. Nothing. No wind against the windows. No distant patrol vehicles. No creaking pipes.The mountain had gone completely still beneath the snow.She rolled onto her back and stared at the dark ceiling for a minute before finally giving up on sleep. At this point, insomnia was becoming less of a condition and more of a personality trait.The lodge was dark and quiet when she wandered downstairs, wrapped in a blanket. Moonlight spilled silver across the wooden floors through the enormous windows lining the hallway. Snow covered everything outside now, trees, cliffs, railings, turning the mountains into something pale and dreamlike beneath the night sky.Elara found Darius in the library. He sat cross-legged on the floor near the fireplace, surrounded by open books and loose papers, reading glasses low against his nose, while several files lay

By the time the storm finally eased, the lodge felt strangely crowded with silence.Not uncomfortable silence.Accumulated silence.Days of shared rooms and late-night conversations and accidental routines settling into the walls around them.Elara noticed it most the next morning.She wandered downstairs, expecting the usual quiet kitchen, and nearly collided with Darius in the hallway outside the stairs.Both of them stopped automatically. The awareness hit instantly.Darius had clearly just come back inside from somewhere. Snow dusted the shoulders of his dark coat while cold air followed him faintly into the hall.“Elara.” His voice still sounded rough from sleep, or lack of it.“You’re covered in snow.”“Observant.”“You say that like I solved a murder.”“One step at a time.”The corner of her mouth lifted before she could stop it.Darius removed his gloves slowly while looking at her with that steady attention she still hadn’t figured out how to survive comfortably.It was too

The lodge lost power just after midnight. One second, Elara was half asleep, reading on the couch in her room. The next, darkness. Complete and immediate.Outside, wind slammed hard against the mountain, while downstairs, a backup generator clicked twice unsuccessfully before dying.“Well,” Elara muttered into the dark. “That feels terrible.”The silence afterward felt enormous. Just unfamiliar enough to make Elaras' chest tighten automatically.She stood carefully, setting the book aside before moving toward the window. Snow whipped violently through the darkness outside, almost completely obscuring the forest below.Another storm. Perfect.A faint beam of light moved through the hallway beyond her door.Then a knock. “Elara?”Darius. Relief hit so quickly that it annoyed her.“Yeah.”The door opened a second later, flashlight glow spilling warmly across the room. Darius stepped inside wearing dark sweatpants and a thermal shirt beneath an unzipped jacket, hair slightly disheveled, l

By noon, the lodge had mostly returned to normal. Or whatever counted as normal anymore.The generators were functioning again. Patrol rotations resumed. Several Nightfall wolves spent the morning repairing storm damage along the western trail roads while others cleared snow from the upper vehicle paths.The house itself settled back into its familiar rhythm of quiet movement and low conversation.Which should have helped.Instead, Elara spent the entire morning aggressively aware of Darius.Not in a dramatic way. Worse. In a constant way.The memory of waking beside him lingered irritatingly beneath everything else she tried to think about. Every time she caught sight of him across a room, her brain helpfully supplied: shared blankets, a sleep-rough voice, a hand on her waistDeeply unhelpful behavior.She escaped to the library after lunch in an attempt to regain psychological stability. It did not work. Mostly because Darius appeared twenty minutes later, carrying two mugs of coffe

The next morning, Elara finally opened one of the sketchbooks.Not because she'd gathered courage.Mostly because she was tired of losing arguments with an inanimate object.She sat cross-legged at the desk in her room, staring at the blank page while sunlight spilled across the snow-covered mountains outside.The pencil felt unfamiliar in her hand.Not wrong.Just distant.Like picking up a language she used to speak fluently, only to realize she'd forgotten half the vocabulary.For several minutes, she did nothing.Then she drew a line. Another.A third.The world didn't end.No one appeared to critique her technique.No one asked what message she intended to communicate.No one informed her that the composition reflected poorly on a sacred bloodline.The silence around the act felt almost strange. Eventually, the page began filling. Not with anything ambitious.Just pieces of the lodge.A window.A bookshelf.The stone fireplace downstairs.Things she'd looked at every day without r