Alle Kapitel von Rejected and Banished Pregnant With the Alpha’s Twins: Kapitel 71 – Kapitel 80

The morning after the gathering.He had been awake since three.He had been sitting in the Alpha house study — the same study where Damon had put the notification on the desk two months ago, where he had spent the months after the ceremony doing the administrative work of a pack that was reorganizing around the removal of a Luna — and he had been thinking about what he had watched happen in the square.He had watched his pack choose her.Not all of them. He was going to be honest with himself about that — not all of them, not the synchronized unified response that the ceremony's rejection had been, not a formal political declaration. Individual choices, made at different speeds by different people for different reasons. The nine-year-old boy whose wolf had simply known something before his mind caught up. The mothers who had watched the boy. The warriors who had watched the mothers.Not all of them.But enough of them that

She had been standing in the square for thirty seconds and the pack had not moved.She had expected this. She had prepared for it in the way she prepared for all significant things — with clear-eyed honesty about what the moment would contain, without either bracing against it or performing readiness she did not have.Three hundred wolves who had known her for twenty-one years. Who had known her as the low-ranked wolf's daughter who had outlasted her father's death by being careful and quiet and precisely as unremarkable as the situation required. Who had known her as the woman the Alpha had taken as his fated mate and who had stood in the ceremony and been rejected before all of them.They had known her as the exile.They were looking at her now and they were trying to reconcile what they remembered with what was standing in front of them, and the reconciliation was not coming easily because the thing they remembered and the thing in front of them

Selene was not in Shadow Fang territory.She was in the holding quarters that the pack council had assigned her — not the Alpha house, not the Luna's suite, not any of the spaces she had inhabited for nine months. A set of rooms in the eastern residential wing that communicated, by their location and quality, exactly where she stood in the pack's current hierarchy.She had not attended the reception in the square.The council had not prohibited her attendance. They had simply informed her, in the specific, formal language of people who had made a decision and were communicating it as neutrally as possible, that her presence at the diplomatic reception would be inadvisable given the current circumstances and the ongoing council review of her conduct.The ongoing council review of her conduct.She had been sitting with that phrase for three days.She had a contact in the square. Several contacts in the square — people who had been

The gathering was held in the square that evening.Not a formal event — the pack's traditional end-of-day gathering, which had been a Shadow Fang custom for as long as anyone could remember. The loose assembly of pack members in the central space, sharing information and maintaining the specific, ongoing social contact that packs required to function as packs rather than simply as groups of people in proximity.She had been told about it. She had decided to attend.Not to make a statement — she had made the day's statements in the council chamber, in the precise, efficient way of someone who understood that statements were most powerful when they were also accurate. She had attended because she had grown up attending these gatherings, had spent twenty-one years as one of the three hundred participants, and because attending as a participant rather than as a visiting dignitary was the specific, deliberate choice of someone who understood that the dign

The third evening.The diplomatic agenda was complete. The formal sessions had concluded with the specific, productive outcomes of meetings that had been prepared for and had involved people on both sides who were genuinely trying to build something workable rather than simply protecting existing positions.The convoy was departing the following morning.She had packed what needed to be packed — which was minimal, because she traveled with the specific, disciplined lightness of someone who had learned, eight months ago, that the things you genuinely needed were fewer than you thought and that the rest was weight.She was sitting on the small balcony of the guest quarters with Cael in her lap, because he had decided that this particular evening was an evening for being awake and looking at things, and because she had found, over weeks of his silver-eyed attention, that his wakeful evenings were not an interruption of her own thinking but a specific k