All Chapters of Rejected and Banished Pregnant With the Alpha’s Twins: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

50 Chapters

The Impossible Bond

'Serena.'Lucien.She could not see him — her eyes were shut against the pain — but she heard his step crossing the room. Fast. Not the measured pace he used for everything. Fast, as if something in him had cut through calculation entirely and was simply moving.'Don't,' she managed. 'You don't have to—'His hands covered hers.Both of them. Large, warm, certain, covering her hands where they were pressed to her stomach, and the warmth of them was not merely temperature. It was the same quality she had felt when he'd held her arm in the study — that deep, structural warmth that operated below the surface of the ordinary. That quality of rightness that her body recognized before her mind caught up.The pain stopped.Completely. Instantaneously. As though someone had closed a door on it.The silence in the room was the loudest thing she had ever heard.She opened her eyes.She looked at his h

The Royal Wing

The morning arrived differently inside the royal wing.Serena had noticed this on the second day and had spent the days since trying to understand why. It was not simply the quality of the light, though the light here came through older glass and fell at an angle that softened everything it touched. It was not the silence, though the silence of these walls was particular — deep and deliberate, the product of stone two feet thick and the generations of instruction that had trained every person in this wing to move as if sound were currency to be conserved.It was the weight of the attention.She could feel it, even in rooms where she was alone. The specific awareness of being regarded — not watched, not surveilled, but regarded, in the way that something rare and significant is regarded by people who understand its value and are uncertain whether it knows its own worth.She was in Moonspire's royal wing. Not the guest quarters. Not the east cor

The King's Reason

He came to her chambers that evening under the pretext of checking on her recovery.Serena recognized it as a pretext. She suspected he knew she recognized it. Neither of them acknowledged this, which was how most of their exchanges worked — two people with a great deal of information operating on the surface of an agreed-upon fiction while the real conversation happened somewhere beneath it.She was in the sitting room adjacent to her suite when he arrived — reading by the fire with her feet tucked under her and the blanket Mira had appeared with three days ago, the one in the deep burgundy wool that was the single most comfortable object she had encountered in her entire life. She heard his knock and said come in and did not look up from the page, because she had learned that looking up immediately gave him information she preferred to control the timing of.'You're reading,' he said.'Consistently, yes. I find it useful.' She turned the pag

The Palace Gardens

She asked Mira about the gardens on the fifteenth morning.She asked in the casual way she had developed for things she actually wanted — the offhand framing that prevented the request from becoming a negotiation, that allowed the answer to be a simple yes rather than a deliberation about logistics and security and whether the east-perimeter path had been cleared.'The southern garden is usable this time of year,' Mira said, with the tone of someone who had been expecting this question and had already arranged its answer. 'The northern garden is where His Majesty's morning routes run — you would cross paths. The southern is—''Private,' Serena said.'Quiet,' Mira corrected.She went after breakfast. Sorin's guard — two of them, present without being intrusive, the operational style she had come to understand as the Keep's standard mode of protection — materialized at a discreet distance as she descended the south stair

Not Ordinary

Aldric brought three colleagues.Serena had not been consulted on this. She had been brought back inside from the garden by the guard and Mira — who had appeared with the supernatural promptness of someone who monitored things from a position she never disclosed — and had been settled in the sitting room with tea she didn't drink while the palace medical staff assembled outside her door with the discreet efficiency of a household that had long practice in managing crises without appearing to.The garden episode had lasted eleven minutes. She knew this because she had counted them — had anchored her focus to counting while her body did something she didn't control, because counting was the kind of simple, repeating task that kept a person inside their own mind when other forces were attempting to move them out of it.She was fine. She said this to Aldric when he arrived. She said it to the first colleague. She said it to the second. By the third

The Nightmare and What Came After

The nightmare came at two in the morning.She had them occasionally — had always had them, in the years since her father died and she'd been fully alone in the pack in the specific way of someone surrounded by people who weren't her people. But these were different from those. These were precise and detailed and recent, built from material she was still too close to.She was back in the pack hall.White dress. White flowers. Three hundred wolves in a space that smelled of candles and winter laurel and the collective held breath of a crowd that already knew the ending.And Kael at the altar. Looking at the floor.In the dream, she kept walking toward him. That was the dream's particular cruelty — she could not stop moving forward, could not turn back, could not do anything except walk the length of the hall again and again while the crowd parted the same way each time, the same faces, the same careful not-looking, the same slow accumulat

The Morning After

He pulled back.Not immediately. Not before the kiss had been what it was — slow and certain and weighted with everything sixteen days of proximity had accumulated. But he pulled back, and when he did he went still with the specific stillness of someone who has just walked through a door and is standing on the other side of it working out what they've done.She watched his face.She had been watching his face for sixteen days with the focused attention of someone reading a language that was mostly grammar with very little vocabulary, and she had gotten good at it. She could see what was happening in the seven or eight seconds of that stillness.Not regret. She was certain of that first.Something else. Something more complicated than regret, that existed on the other side of a line he had been maintaining and had now crossed and was currently calculating the full consequences of crossing.'Lucien,' she said.'I shouldn't have&md

Why a King Must Not Love

He was avoiding her.She had expected something after the night of the nightmare — some form of recalibration, the specific adjustment that happened when two people stepped past a line and then had to decide where to stand in relation to it. She had expected awkwardness, or the careful over-formality of people trying to re-establish distance. She had even expected, briefly, that he might come to her and say something direct about it, the way he said most things.She had not expected absence.He was present in the palace — she could tell from the household's particular energy when he was in the building, which was different from when he'd ridden out, which was different again from the quality of his personal absence when he was in the private wing. He was here. He was simply not where she was.The library, which she visited every morning, he did not visit for three days.The eastern study, where she had taken to bringing her afternoon re

The Guards She Didn't Know About

She found out about the secondary guard detail by accident.She had been awake since four — the twins were restless in the early hours, a pattern that Aldric had told her was normal for the gestational stage and that she was choosing to interpret as two children with strong opinions rather than any symptom requiring concern. She had given up on sleep at five and gone to the library, which she was developing a possessive relationship with, and it was on the way back that she took the wrong corridor in the dark of six in the morning.Not the wrong corridor in terms of getting lost. She knew the palace well enough now to navigate it in the dark. The wrong corridor in the sense of unexpected — a passage she had used only twice before, running along the outside of the royal wing's lower section.Three people were in it.Not the standard palace guard — not the visible rotation she had catalogued in her first days of mapping the building. Three

What the Dying Say

She did not stay.She told herself, after, that the decision had been practical rather than reckless — that she'd heard the secondary guard team in the lower corridor move past the great hall door at speed, which meant whatever was happening was happening behind her as much as in front of her, which meant staying in the great hall was not actually safer than knowing where the threat was.This was partially true. Mostly she simply could not stay still while people moved toward danger on her account.She went into the corridor. Sorin appeared from a side passage with the rapid, compressed focus of someone moving at operational speed, and he did not tell her to go back inside — he took one look at her face and made a decision.'Stay behind me,' he said. 'Three feet. Don't close that to two unless I say.'She followed him.The east wall was an exterior section she hadn't spent much time in — it ran along the back of the palace'

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