All Chapters of Rejected By Him, Claimed By Another Alpha: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

"How do I know that's not what you would say regardless?" he asked."Because I have no reason to lie to you," I said. "Think about that carefully, Jace. What would I gain from denying paternity if the children were yours? I am bonded to another Alpha. My position is established. My pack is established. If anything, the admission would create leverage for me — the father of prophesied children has claims that the law recognizes. Denying it gains me nothing except the truth."He was quiet for a moment.The uncertainty in his face deepened slightly. Which meant the logic had landed.But logic landing and belief shifting are not the same thing, and what I was beginning to understand — sitting in that room, reading the face I had once known well, assembling the pieces of his behavior since the thin wall — was that the children's paternity was not actually the center of what he wanted.It was the cover for it.The paternity question was real — he genuinely believed it, or wanted to believe

"Zayden's pack has been under attack," I said, "because people have been trying to prevent these children from existing. The attacks were not a feature of the environment — they were a response to what the children are. They will follow these children wherever they are." I looked at him. "Including here."He hadn't thought about that. I could see it landing — the recalibration, the slight shift of someone whose argument has just encountered a dimension it hadn't accounted for."The attacks came to Zayden's pack because that is where I am," I continued. "Where I am is where the threat goes. The question is not which pack is more stable — the question is which pack has the Alpha who has already demonstrated that he will absorb everything that comes and refuse to waver." I held his gaze. "That is not you, Jace. You are not that person. Not because you couldn't be — I genuinely don't know whether you could be. But because you have not been, and these children need what is already proven,

I worked the latch for the better part of an hour, using a technique that required patience and a thin, rigid implement — the handle of the small grooming implement that had been left with the basic supplies in the room, never intended as a tool but serving as one now. The latch had the vulnerability I remembered. It was responding.I had it almost open when Reyna appeared in my mind — not Reyna, obviously, not actually Reyna, but the memory of something Reyna had said in my early weeks at Zayden's packhouse about windows as entry and exit points. About what people forget when they secure a room through a door. About the way attention distributes itself and the directions it tends to neglect.She had been talking about packhouse security in general. She had not been teaching me to escape captivity.She had inadvertently done both.The latch came free.I had the window open two inches before I heard the movement on the other side of it — a guard had been stationed outside the window, w

The prophecy. Walking toward her in a corridor. Unavoidable.The guard completed the redirection.I let him — I had been letting the redirections complete, because fighting the individual redirections was not the point. The attempts were the point, and the information gathered during them, and the consistent communication to everyone in the building that I was not a passive element of this situation. The redirection itself was fine.But as I was turned back toward my room, Lydia spoke."Amelia."Her voice was different. Not dramatically — she would never permit dramatic difference, would never allow her voice to fully express what was happening underneath it. But different in the small, structural ways. Less resonant. Less certain of its own authority in the space it was occupying.I stopped. The guard stopped with me.I turned to look at her.She was still at the far end of the passage. She had not moved toward me — had not closed the distance, had made no physical approach. She was

Reyan who had been one of Lydia's closest allies and whose loyalty, I had been observing, was now navigating the new landscape of Lydia's reduced position with the careful recalibration of someone who has made a long-term investment and is deciding whether to hold or adjust — Reyan came to my room with food and lingered in the way of someone who has something to say but hasn't fully committed to saying it.I had learned, in the years at Moonlight Pack, how to make people who have something to say feel that they can say it. It required a specific quality of receptive stillness — not pressing, not inviting explicitly, but making the space between you feel safe enough for the thing to emerge on its own.I made that space.Reyan set the tray down and rearranged things on it that didn't need rearranging and then said, to the tray rather than to me: "She told him to let you go."I looked at the side of her face."Lydia," I said."Last night," Reyan confirmed. "She went to him. Privately. To