Lahat ng Kabanata ng HE REJECTED ME AT THE ALTER: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

I want to be very clear about something before I tell you what happened:I looked amazing that day.My locs were pinned up with moonstone clips. My dress was a deep plum silk with a neckline that had made my mother press her hand to her heart when she saw me in it — not from worry, just from the kind of pride that doesn't know what to do with itself. My shoes matched. My something-borrowed was Ozzie's grandmother's bracelet, which he'd pressed into my hand that morning and said absolutely nothing about, because we are not a crying family, officially.Three hundred wolves had gathered in the Silveroak Amphitheatre, which is the oldest bonding site in our territory — open-air stone arches, moonflower vines, the smell of pine and evening air. It was the kind of place that made you feel like something sacred was happening even if you were just passing through.I was not just passing through. I was the bride.I was about to be permanently, beautifully, irreversibly bonded to Casen Wolfe —

He explains himself on a Saturday, which I will note was not my invitation — it was a fire escape situation.I go out on the fire escape sometimes in the evenings when the apartment feels too small for everything I'm thinking. It is not the most dignified coping strategy, but the view of the river is genuinely good and the city sounds are the right kind of noise — present enough to fill the silence, distant enough not to demand anything.I hadn't known that Casen's apartment was in the building next door until I came out on a Saturday evening and found him already on his own fire escape, facing the river, not expecting me.We both saw each other at the same moment.Neither of us moved."I didn't know," he said, after a moment. "About the fire escapes.""Neither did I."Another long pause. The city hummed below us."I'll go inside," he said.And I don't know what came over me — my wolf, maybe, or the particular quality of the evening air, or three weeks of carrying something heavy with

I have a system now.Morning coffee at Groundwork before my shift — I order from Petra, I sit at my corner table, I do not look at the counter unless I am ordering, and I leave exactly when my mug is empty. It is an efficient system. It protects my peace. It works perfectly until the morning it stops working, which is the morning I walk in and find someone sitting at my corner table.My corner table. The one with the window and the good light and the specific angle that lets me see the river between buildings.Occupied.I stand in the doorway long enough for Petra to notice, give me a look that says I know, I'm sorry, it was like that when I got here, and go back to steaming milk.The person at my table is a man I have never seen before in Caldenveil, which is notable because Caldenveil is the kind of city where you start recognising faces quickly. He is tall even sitting down — long legs stretched under the table, one hand wrapped around a coffee cup, the other turning a phone over a

Here are the things I learn about Rael Voss at my corner table over the mornings that follow:He speaks four languages, which I find out when he takes a call in what I eventually identify as Portuguese, handles it in under three minutes, and hangs up without any of the residual tension that usually follows difficult business calls.He grew up moving. Not in the way of a difficult childhood — in the way of a family that treated the world as a map to be read rather than a place to be anchored. He mentions a grandmother in Thessaly, a boarding school somewhere northern, a first apartment in a city he describes only as cold and educational.He is not warm the way some people are warm — immediately, effusively, filling every silence. He is warm the way old buildings are warm: steadily, from somewhere deep, in a way you don't notice until you've been standing in it for a while and you realise you're no longer cold.He notices things. He notices when my coffee is running low before I do. He

The thing about Rael Voss is that he makes it look effortless, and I have learned — from experience I did not ask for — to be suspicious of effortless things.So I pay attention.I pay attention when he tells me he'll be late and is actually early. I pay attention when he changes a reservation because I mentioned offhand that I find that particular part of the city loud. I pay attention when he is in a meeting that runs long and texts me running over, don't wait on me — not because he owes me a text, but because he thought of me and thought the information mattered.These are small things.Small things are what I know to watch.Casen was excellent at grand things — the right words at the right moment, the gestures that read like devotion. It was the small things that told the real story, and I did not pay attention to those, and I am paying attention now.Rael is consistent in the small things. And consistency, I have learned, is not boring.Consistency is the whole point.We go back