All Chapters of The Alpha Who Threw Me Away: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I tell myself I imagined it.The smile. The way his eyes found me like he was looking for me specifically, like I was the thing in the room he had come to see. I tell myself it was nothing, the natural curiosity of a man arriving somewhere new, cataloguing faces the way Alphas do. It meant nothing. I meant nothing by standing there.I am good at talking myself out of things.I finish delivering the towels to the linen closet on the second floor and take the back stairs down to the kitchen, the long way, the way that does not pass through the entrance hall. I do not examine why I choose that route. I just walk it.Reina is at the stove when I come in, stirring something that smells like garlic and slow heat. She glances up and then back down, which is her version of a greeting.“They are earlier than expected,” I say, because someone has to say it.“By two days.” She does not look up. “Alpha Voss runs on his own schedule, apparently. His coordinator sent word an hour ago. I had to pull

Elder Bowen does not rush.This is the first thing you learn about him. He moves through the world at his own pace, deliberate and unhurried, and he has a way of occupying a room that makes you feel like the room was always waiting for him to arrive. He steps into the kitchen now and looks at Mara first, then at me, and the look he gives Mara is gentle but clear.She picks up her mug and her toast and leaves without a word.I have never seen Mara leave a conversation voluntarily in my life.Bowen pulls out the chair across from me and sits down the way old men sit, carefully, with full awareness of every joint, and then he folds his hands on the table and looks at me with those quiet, assessing eyes that have always made me feel like he is reading several pages ahead.“You look tired, child,” he says.“I am fine.”“You say that a great deal.” The corner of his mouth moves, almost a smile. “I have noticed.”I wrap my hands around my mug and wait. Bowen did not come to the kitchen at ha

I feel him before I hear him.That is the thing nobody tells you about a severed mate bond. It does not go clean. It does not snap and disappear the way he probably hoped it would when he said the words. It frays. It leaves something behind, a low and persistent awareness, like a frequency your body refuses to stop tuning into no matter how many times your mind tells it to stop.So I feel Lucian leave the window before I hear his footsteps on the path.Caden feels it too. Or feels something. He goes quiet in the particular way people go quiet when they sense a shift in the atmosphere, and we are both looking toward the corner of the east wing when Lucian appears around it.He is not running. He would never run. But there is a quality to his walk that is not his usual Alpha composure, something underneath the controlled pace that reminds me of a current moving fast below a still surface.He looks at Caden first.Then at me.Then at the distance between us on the bench, which is conside

Selene’s POVI do not sleep.This is not a surprise. I lie on my back in the dark of my small third floor room and stare at the ceiling and listen to the pack house settle around me, the old wood contracting in the cold, the distant sound of wind against the east wing windows, and I wait for my body to stop humming long enough to let me rest.It does not stop.I have spent three months building something careful inside myself. Not happiness exactly, I am not dishonest enough to call it that, but something functional. A life with edges I could manage. Coffee at five-thirty. Work that needed doing. Mara’s voice in the corridor. The mountains outside the window that never change and never ask anything of me. I built it piece by piece out of whatever was left after he said those words in that clearing and I held myself together through the building of it and I was almost, almost somewhere close to fine.And then Caden Voss arrived two days early and Lucian said I wanted you close and the

Selene’s POVBowen does not do dramatics.This is the thing about him. He does not build to things unnecessarily or draw out a pause for effect the way some older men do when they have an audience. When he says we have a problem he means it plainly, and the fact that he came to the kitchen before six in the morning with Mara at his shoulder means whatever it is did not wait for a decent hour to become urgent.I set my cold mug on the counter.“Sit down,” I say, because someone has to manage this room and Lucian is still standing in the middle of it looking like a man who has just said more than he intended to and has not yet recovered his footing. “Both of you.”Mara sits immediately. Bowen pulls out a chair with that slow deliberate care and lowers himself into it and folds his hands on the table the same way he did in this kitchen yesterday morning, like the table is a place he makes decisions and he is about to make one now.Lucian stays standing. I do not push it.“There is a fact