All Chapters of The Alpha Who Threw Me Away: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Selene’s POVI have asked myself this question before.Not out loud. Not to anyone who could answer it. But in the dark of my room on the nights when sleep would not come and my mind kept turning things over the way it does when it cannot leave something alone. I asked it to the ceiling. I asked it to the mountains through my small window.Did someone put that word in his mouth.I never let myself land on an answer because landing meant examining things I had packed away carefully and I needed them to stay packed. I needed the rejection to be his choice entirely, his arrogance entirely, his failure entirely, because that version was survivable. That version had an edge I could press against and feel something solid.This version does not have that edge.This version has a father.Lucian is still looking at me and he has not answered yet but he does not need to because I can see the answer sitting on his face as plainly as I have ever seen anything. He has a very controlled face normal

Selene’s POVPetra is not a woman who panics.I have known her for four days and I can already say that with certainty. She has the kind of face that processes things quickly and quietly and presents only the edited version to the room. Watching her come around that corner with urgency sitting openly on her features is like watching a carefully constructed wall develop a visible crack.Whatever she is carrying is bad enough to break her composure.She looks at Caden first. Then at Lucian. Then at me, briefly, with an assessment in her eyes that takes about two seconds and feels considerably longer.“They are gone,” she says.Caden goes very still. “Both of them.”“Both of them. Their rooms were cleared before six. Petra’s voice is clipped and precise, the way people get when they are angry and professionalism is the only thing standing between them and the anger. “Whoever tipped them off did it in the last hour.”I think about the kitchen. Bowen and Mara coming in together. The conver

Lucian’s POVI have rehearsed this.Not this specific version. Not this morning, not with Bowen and Caden and Mara all standing in a corridor watching me ask for something I have not earned. But I have rehearsed the shape of it, late at night in my study when the pack house was quiet and the words I never said to Selene collected themselves into sentences I kept dismantling and rebuilding because none of them were right.None of them were ever right enough.She follows me to the study because she is Selene and she does not run from things even when she has every reason to. I hear her footsteps behind me on the staircase, even and unhurried, and I focus on them the way I have focused on them every morning for three months, the specific sound of her moving through this house, which I have memorised without meaning to and cannot unmemorise now.I open the study door and she comes in and I close it behind us.The room is in its early morning state. No fire yet, cold light coming through t

Lucian’s POVI should not have called her name.The thought arrives about two seconds after I do it, after the word leaves my mouth and travels up through the ceiling and I hear the immediate shift in the silence above me that means she heard it. I should have called for Bowen. Should have called for one of the sentinels stationed at the east entrance. Should have handled this the way I handle everything, contained and controlled and without pulling Selene into another thing she did not sign up for.But her name came out before the should haves could stop it.Old habit. Dangerous habit.I look at the man sitting in my study chair.He is not a large man. That is the first thing you notice. Medium height, medium build, the kind of face that slides out of your memory almost immediately after you stop looking at it. He has the careful unremarkable quality of someone who has spent a long time cultivating it on purpose. He is sitting with his hands visible on the arms of the chair and his l

Lucian’s POVMy father looks older.This is the first thing I notice and I notice it without sympathy, just observation, the way you observe something you have been bracing for and find slightly different from what you prepared yourself to see. He is heavier around the jaw and there is more grey in his hair than fourteen months ago and he is standing at the bottom of my front steps with two sentinels behind him and the particular posture of a man who has decided he is owed something and has come to collect it.He looks at me the way he has always looked at me.Like I am a project he has not finished yet.“You look tired,” he says.“You are not welcome here,” I say.He does not flinch. He never flinches. That was one of the first things he taught me, or tried to, that flinching is the body advertising its weakness and an Alpha cannot afford to advertise anything.I spent twenty six years believing that.I spent the last three months watching Selene carry things quietly and understandin