All Chapters of Rejected and Banished Pregnant With the Alpha’s Twins: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The white dress had cost Serena three months of savings.She'd bought it from an old seamstress on the southern edge of the territory — a woman who'd sewn Luna gowns for thirty years and had pressed Serena's hands between her own papery palms when the final fitting was done, and whispered, 'He is lucky, child. Make sure he knows it.'Serena had laughed then. Now, standing before the mirror in her small cottage at the edge of the Thorn Pack grounds, she couldn't remember how that laugh had felt.Her hands wouldn't stop shaking.She pressed them flat against the lace overlay of the skirt and breathed — slow, deliberate, the way her father had taught her before sparring matches when she was small. In through the nose. Count to four. Out through the mouth. Count to four.It didn't help.The woman in the mirror stared back at her with wide, dark eyes still raw at the corners. Honey-warm skin. A mouth that kept tightening at the edges when she forgot to watch it. Her hair was pinned up with

She came back slowly, the way a person surfaces from deep water — first sound, then light, then the understanding of where she was.The smell of lavender. Dried rosemary. The faint copper bite of healing salves that had soaked into these walls over decades.The pack infirmary. Low ceiling. Exposed beams. One clay candle in its familiar iron holder above the bed. She had been here before — a twisted ankle at fourteen, a fever at nineteen, both times she had left within hours. She had never feared this room.She stared at the ceiling and did not move.For one merciful, suspended moment the events of the morning were still slightly out of reach. She was only a body in a bed. Breathing. Warm. The afternoon light was pale and quiet through the small high window and outside, birds were moving in the trees.Then the memory arrived in full.It arrived not in sequence but all at once — his face at the altar, the words, the circlet, the crowd cheering, Selene's profile in that red dress, Damon'

She ran because standing still meant dying.She was not fast enough. She had always known this about herself — she had trained, had drilled, had spent her adolescence in the practice yard with the other pack juveniles, but she had never been built for speed. She was built for endurance. For quiet persistence. For the long kind of strength.Neither of those were useful here.She made forty steps before one of them got ahead of her.It appeared from between two pines without warning — a wall of fur and teeth and fetid heat, planting itself directly in her path with the deliberate ease of something that had done this before. That had run prey to ground in this exact forest in this exact darkness so many times the routine was cellular.It lowered its head.The sound that came from it was not a growl. It was something lower than a growl — a sustained, structural vibration, like the groan a building makes before a load-bearing wall gives way.She dodged left, threw herself between two trees

She woke in a bed that knew how to hold a person.This was her first conscious thought — not where she was, not who had brought her there, but the simple, extraordinary fact of the mattress beneath her. She had grown up on a cot with a wool blanket. She had slept in Kael's rooms twice and found his bed adequate. This was something else entirely. This was a bed that had been engineered from the foundation of the craft by someone who understood that rest, true rest, was not passive — it was earned and supported and held.She opened her eyes.The ceiling above her was vaulted — dressed stone arching thirty feet overhead, cross-beamed in dark timber, hung with a chandelier of crystal that currently held no flame but still caught some ambient glow from the far wall and fractured it into soft geometry across the ceiling.The room was the size of a house.Not a large house. But a house. Stone walls dressed in dark tapestries — abst

She had been at Draven Keep for four days and she had learned its rhythms the way she'd always learned new environments — quietly, systematically, without appearing to.The morning routine: kitchen staff by six, scent of bread and something dark and roasted moving through the stone corridors by seven. A shift change in the guard at eight, conducted with military precision and minimal noise. Lucien appearing in the eastern corridor around nine, always alone, always with documents he carried without a case, always moving with the directed purpose of a man whose time was accounted for.The afternoon quiet: a genuine lull between noon and two when even the guards seemed to breathe differently, the deep stone of the Keep absorbing the day's activity and releasing a brief, cool stillness. She had learned to use this time. To walk the permitted sections of the Keep — she had mapped them carefully against the sections that were unpermitted — and to think.