Lahat ng Kabanata ng EVEN ALPHAS KNEEL: The Rejected Mightiest Luna : Kabanata 41 - Kabanata 50

Chapter Forty OnePOV: Sera AshwoodThe combat challenge was set for the morning of the second day before the full moon ceremony and I stood at the edge of the field with my father on one side and Lyra on the other and watched the Alphas line up and thought about how completely insane my life had become that this was something I was actually participating in, that this was a sentence that existed now in my actual life, that I was standing here at seven in the morning about to watch fourteen grown men hit each other for the privilege of pitching me on marriage afterward.There were fourteen of them. Fourteen Alphas who had arrived in Pack Ironveil over the past weeks and formally registered their interest and were now standing on a combat field in the early morning light ready to fight each other for the right to present themselves to me as a bonding candidate, and I stood there and looked at the entire line of them and thought, not one of you is who I actually want, and I did not let

Chapter Forty Three### POV: Sera AshwoodWe went to the elder's meeting room because it was the closest building with walls and a door that closed properly and I did not particularly want to have whatever conversation this was about to be in the middle of a field with fourteen Alphas and a cursed man watching, and Kael came in behind me and I turned around and looked at him standing there in my space, in Pack Ironveil, in the elder's meeting room, like some version of my life had been quietly rearranging the furniture while I was looking the other way and I had only just walked back in to notice."Talk," I said."Mordecai of the outer territories is not here for your hand," he said, which was not a sentence I had been expecting but which landed with the specific weight of something I had already half known and had not let myself fully look at. "His wolf carries an ancient curse placed on his bloodline five generations back, and the only thing in the known world that carries enough p

Chapter Forty FivePOV: Sera AshwoodI walked out of the elder's meeting room and went directly to find Lyra.I had been going to her for twenty years when something needed processing. The familiar path to her door, the knock she always answered within seconds because she always seemed to know I was coming before I got there, the way she sat beside me and held on without trying to fix things that could not be fixed and without filling the silence before I was ready to fill it myself. Twenty years of that. Twenty years of it being the single most reliable thing in my life, the one thing I had never once had to question, and I was walking toward it now with Reuel's words ringing through my skull and the maid's face sitting in my chest and a phone call I had been talking myself out of examining for three weeks stuck in my throat like something I could not swallow no matter how many times I tried.She opened the door before I knocked."Sera," she said, and her face did everything it alwa

Chapter Forty SevenPOV: Kael DravonSera came back to the elder's meeting room an hour after she left and she looked at me with something in her face that was different from when she had walked out, something heavier, something she was still carrying the weight of, and I did not ask what happened because I could see she was not ready to put it into words yet and asking before she was ready was not something I was going to do to her, not after everything I had already taken from her without asking."The ceremony is tomorrow night," she said, and her voice was steady but I caught the small tremor underneath it, the kind only someone who had spent months learning every register of her voice would catch. "The elders have confirmed it. Full moon. The clearing where I first shifted. Every Alpha in the territory will be present.""I know," I said."Mordecai is still in the territory," she said. "He is not leaving without either what he came for or a reason he genuinely cannot argue against.

Chapter Forty NinePOV: Sera AshwoodShe opened her mouth, and I stood there in the center of the clearing with the whole world holding its breath around me, waiting for whatever was about to come out of Lyra's mouth to finally be the truth.What came out instead was a sound. A short, broken sound, like the beginning of a word that lost its nerve halfway through, and her knees buckled before the sound even finished, and she went down onto the grass with both hands pressed against her own throat like something inside her had reached up and closed around it from the inside."Lyra," I said, and I do not know why I moved toward her, after everything, after the stone going black, after twenty years of warmth I now had every reason to question, my body simply moved before my mind agreed to it."Do not touch her," Kael said, his arm coming across in front of me, and I looked at him and looked at her and felt something cold settle into my stomach because she was actually struggling, actually