Lahat ng Kabanata ng EVEN ALPHAS KNEEL: The Rejected Mightiest Luna : Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

Chapter Seventy Two POV: DamienReuel's guards were good the way that guards were good when they had been trained by someone who understood conventional threats and had never once had to account for someone who had spent years learning how to move through spaces that did not want him in them.I was through his outer perimeter in four minutes and standing in his doorway in five and when he turned and saw me I watched his wolf come forward immediately and hold my ground because backing down from Reuel's wolf was not something I was going to do and we both needed to understand that before the conversation started."Sit down Reuel," I said. "What I have to tell you changes tomorrow night and you need to hear it before you walk into that clearing thinking you know what is happening."He looked at me for a long moment with those sharp calculating eyes of his and then he sat and said, "Talk."I sat across from him and said, "Lyra has a substance from the witch doctor that she is planning

Chapter Seventy FourPOV: ZaraI had been sitting with the announcement since morning and by afternoon I had made my decision and by evening I was at Sera's door and I was not going to pretend I had thought through every angle of it because I had not. I had thought through the one angle that mattered, which was that Seraphine Ashwood was not going to stand in that clearing tomorrow night and complete a willing bond with my husband while I was still breathing and capable of doing something about it.I knocked.The door opened and it was not Sera who opened it. It was Lyra, standing in the doorway with that warm devoted face of hers, and I looked at her and felt something cold move through my chest that had nothing to do with Sera and everything to do with the fact that Lyra was here, in Sera's house, standing at her door like nothing had happened, like the eastern wall meeting had never happened, like everything I knew about what Lyra had done an

Chapter Seventy SixPOV: Sera AshwoodThe clearing was full when I arrived and I stopped at the edge of it and looked at all of it and felt something move through me that was not nerves and not fear and was the specific quality of a moment that had been a long time coming finally arriving.Five hundred wolves. Maybe more. Every elder in their white ceremonial robes at the center. Every Alpha who had come through my door since the ceremony arranged around the outer ring. The settlement wolves fill every space between. The moon was already visible above the tree line with that particular brightness it carried on the nights when something that mattered was about to happen.My hands were steady. That surprised me more than anything else about the moment. A year ago I would have been shaking. A year ago I would have needed someone to hold my arm just to keep my knees from betraying me. Tonight my hands were steady and my breath was even and the only thing moving fast in me was my heart, an

Chapter Seventy Eight POV: Reuel AshtonI had not planned on feeling anything about tonight.That was the honest truth of it and I was always honest with myself in private even when I was performing something else entirely in public, and the honest truth was that I had walked into that clearing with the contract in my pocket and my pride fully intact and my agenda completely clear and somewhere between watching her walk in on my arm in that silver dress and watching her turn away from me and say Kael Dravon's name out loud in front of five hundred wolves I had felt something that I had not been expecting to feel and that I was not entirely sure what to do with.I was not going to call it what it was. Not yet. Possibly not ever.What I was going to do was focus on what I actually had, which was a contract that was still technically valid, a woman who had used me intelligently and without apology which I respected enormously, and a personal agenda that had not changed simply because th

Chapter EightyPOV: DamienI was at the east gate before dawn.I had not slept. I had sat in the hollow of the outer settlement with everything I needed to say arranged in my head for the fortieth time and told myself this was the last thing I was going to do in this territory and then I was going to walk away from it and not look back, and I had told myself that convincingly enough that I almost believed it by the time the sky started getting light.The gate guard looked at me and I said, "Tell her Damien is here. She is expecting me."He looked at me for a long moment with the specific expression of a gate guard who has received unusual instructions and is deciding whether to follow them and then he sent a runner and I waited and the dawn settled around me and I thought about everything that had brought me to standing at a gate at dawn waiting for a woman who had every reason never to speak to me again.She came by herself. No guards. No Reuel. No Kael. Just Sera in the early morni