All Chapters of Rejected By Him, Claimed By Another Alpha: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Waiting for a moment like this."The cut on her hand," I said."A consequence of the turn," Mara said. "The blade redirected across the grip. Her own hold on it became the mechanism of the injury."I pressed my hands flat on my thighs and looked at the floor of the training room."She hurt herself," I said."Yes," Mara said.The consequence came slowly, which was the worst way for it to come.The cut on Diana's palm was deep. Deeper than the initial assessment had indicated in the chaos of the immediate aftermath. The pack's healer — a careful, competent wolf named Sera who had been managing the pack's medical needs for years — had cleaned and dressed it and been satisfied with the initial closing of it.But wounds in certain places, along certain lines, can do things that are not immediately apparent. The hand is complicated — layered with structures that serve functions that are only visible in their absence. Sera had checked thoroughly. She had not been negligent. But she had also

And then she looked at Zayden, who was standing by the window in his customary position, and then at Mara, who was seated to my left, and her expression was doing something I had not seen in the faces of women who operated in the register she operated in — something that was not quite surprise, because people who have been expecting something do not experience its arrival as surprise, but was the emotional equivalent of watching a long anticipated thing finally come through the door.Relief. And beneath the relief, something vast and weighty and not entirely comfortable."Tell me about the children," Calla said. To me, specifically, but in a way that included everyone in the room."They're healthy," I said. "Mara has assessed them regularly. Both strong, both developing normally—""Not normally," Calla said. Gently, but without softening. "Nothing about what these children are is normal, and I think you have sensed that. I think the blood has been telling you, in the way it tells you

The news of the prophecy had reached Moonlight Pack the way most significant information reached most packs — through the network of contacts and informants and overheard conversations and deliberately shared intelligence that constitutes the informal communication system of the wolf world. It arrived not as announcement but as rumor, the way things arrive when they are significant enough to travel but not yet official enough to be transmitted through formal channels.The rumor reached Jace in the way that most things reached most people in a packhouse — imprecisely and incompletely, with the distortions of multiple retellings already embedded in it. He heard that a Luna in the Zayden pack was carrying children said to be significant. Prophesied, some versions of the rumor said, though the specifics of the prophecy were not in the version he received. Powerful. Important in ways that exceeded the ordinary importance of an Alpha's heirs.He heard it and, by the account I later received

What had happened at Moonlight Pack, in the days since Jace had stood against a thin wall and heard Lydia's voice constructing a lie, was this:He had confronted her.Not immediately — not in the hot, reactive way of someone who has just heard something explosive and cannot contain the explosion. Jace had, apparently, sat with what he heard for a day and a half before he walked into Lydia's space and told her, plainly, that he knew what she had said and he needed her to say it again, to his face, with the full account behind it.Lydia had not expected to be confronted. Or had not expected to be confronted by Jace specifically, whom she had apparently assessed, over the years of knowing him, as someone who could be managed through careful information control. She had underestimated the specific effect that hearing your own name attached to a prophecy through a wall has on a person's willingness to be managed.She had maintained the lie.Had given him the full constructed version — the

Four of them. Positioned, I understood now, with the specific intentionality of people who had not come to escort but to ensure. The difference between those two things was visible in how they held themselves — the readiness in the line of their bodies, the slight forward weight that is not aggression but is preparation.I turned to run.I want to be honest about that. I did not stand and make a speech. I did not attempt a negotiation that the geometry of the situation had already made impossible. I assessed the situation with the speed that months of threat had trained into me and I understood that talking was no longer the available tool and I turned and I ran for the packhouse wall.I was fast. I had always been faster than expected, one of the quiet advantages of the blood that had never been fully explained until Mara had begun explaining it. My body moved with the efficiency of someone whose constitution is not ordinary, whose healing and strength run at a different baseline tha