All Chapters of Rejected By Him, Claimed By Another Alpha: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

Amelia POV Zayden left for the Concordat in the second week of winter.Not alone — Aldric had advised against the solitary Alpha approach, which could read as either confidence or arrogance depending on the audience, and had recommended a small, deliberately composed party. Reyna went. Pell went. Two senior wolves who had been with the pack long enough that their presence communicated stability rather than threat.I stayed.That was the right decision and it cost me something, which is often the shape of right decisions. The Teaching Practice needed its visible head at the packhouse — students arriving, letters requiring response, the ongoing work that did not pause because the political situation had entered a new phase. And Zayden needed to walk into that hall as an Alpha presenting a case, not as a husband with his wife beside him, which would have shifted the dynamic in ways that neither of us could fully predict or control.We talked about it honestly, the evening before he lef

Amelia POV Zayden returned on a Friday, eleven days after he left.I heard the gate before I saw him — the specific sound of it, the weight of the latch, the particular quality of boots on the courtyard stone that I had learned to distinguish from every other set in the packhouse. I was in the training room with Donal when it happened, and I finished what I was saying before I went to meet him, because Donal was mid-session and the session mattered.But I finished it quickly.He was in the courtyard when I came out, talking to Reyna with the contained, measured quality he carried after significant things — not depleted, not triumphant, something between those two states that I had come to recognize as the specific register of a man who has done difficult work and is still processing what it cost.He looked up when I appeared.The named feeling, immediate and unguarded, crossing his face before the composure had time to arrange itself."How did it go?" I asked."Come inside," he said.

Amelia POV Caelen's review took twelve days.He did it methodically, the way he did everything — working through the full correspondence archive, the visitor records, the student interactions, the supply deliveries, the packhouse's ordinary daily contact with the outside world. He did it without announcing what he was looking for, which was deliberate. If someone close to us was being positioned by Ferris, the worst thing we could do was signal that we were looking.He came to me on the twelfth evening with a single name.He sat down across from me in the library, set a small stack of letters on the desk between us, and said: "I think it's Aldwyn."I looked at him for a long moment."Tell me why," I said. Carefully. Because Aldwyn had dreamed the warning that Ferris was going to work through someone close to us. And because that warning arriving from the very person who might be that someone was either the most useful piece of information we had received, or the most sophisticated m

Amelia POV The answer came from an unexpected direction.Reyna found it.Not through any of the sophisticated methods we had been deploying — not Donal's impression reading, not Caelen's map analysis, not Aldwyn's dreams. Through the ordinary, unglamorous work that Reyna had been doing since before I arrived at this packhouse: the careful, systematic tracking of who moves through the territory and what they carry when they do.She brought it to me on a Tuesday morning with the flat, certain expression of someone who has confirmed something they suspected and is not particularly surprised by the confirmation."The supply deliveries," she said.I looked at her."The Teaching Practice has been receiving additional supplies since Petra arrived," she said. "Paper, ink, the specific herbs Mara requires for the training work. We expanded the supplier network because our existing one wasn't sufficient for the increased volume." She set a ledger on the desk. "One of the new suppliers. A trade

Amelia POV The letters went out on a Thursday.Forty-three of them, covering every person who had corresponded with the Teaching Practice, every student who had passed through, every visitor whose contact with us had been more than a single brief meeting. Caelen had been precise about the list — not expansive, not cautious to the point of uselessness, but accurate. The people who had genuine reason to know about the breach and the people who didn't were separated cleanly, and only those with genuine reason received a letter.The responses began arriving within two weeks.Not all of them — some people did not write back, which could mean any number of things and which I chose not to interpret until more time had passed. But enough came back, and quickly enough, to tell me that the warning had landed the way honest warnings tend to land when they reach people who have been waiting, without knowing they were waiting, for someone to take their situation seriously.Brenna wrote first.Her