All Chapters of Pregnant And Rejected Mate : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

We didn't get the chance. More footsteps crashed through the underbrush, several sets this time, and I felt my exhausted body brace for another fight I wasn't certain I had the strength left to win.Voices called out, urgent, familiar, and relief crashed through me so completely my knees nearly buckled at the sound of them."Sera! Ada!" Ines's voice, breathless, relieved, cutting through the trees ahead of the riders now visible through the foliage. "We found them! Ada's wounded, unconscious, but Sera's still fighting, she's got—"I stood up fully, Lena cradled protectively against my chest despite my aching ribs, and watched Ines skid to a halt at the sight of the fallen enforcer, at my own battered, exhausted state, understanding dawning across her face with something like awe."You did this," she said, staring at the unconscious man at my feet. "Sera, you fought him off alone.""I didn't have a choice," I said, my voice unsteady, exhaustion finally catching up now that the immediat

Ada finished securing a fresh dressing over the darkening wound, her jaw tight with a concentration that told me the poison was worse than she'd let on a few minutes ago. "I need herbs I don't have here," she said. "Something to slow whatever this is until we can find out what it actually is. Sera, there's a healer three doors down, one of Renner's people, she may have what I need. Can you—""I'll go," I said, already rising, ignoring the protest my ribs made at the movement."Sera." Kael's grip tightened on my hand before I could fully pull away. "You should rest. You just—""I just fought off a trained enforcer with a rock and my bare hands," I said, and something in my own voice surprised me, some steel I hadn't known I still had reserves of after everything. "I think I can manage walking three doors down a hallway, Kael."He looked at me for a long moment, and something in his exhausted face shifted into an expression I hadn't seen from him before, not exactly — not pride, not qui

"I believe it," he said. "Sera, I think some part of me is going to spend the rest of my life catching up to exactly who you've become. I don't say that as a complaint. I say it because I think it's the truest thing I've ever felt about you."I let myself lean into his hands, exhaustion finally cracking through the fierce composure I'd held together through the entire brutal night, and for a long moment neither of us said anything else, simply standing together in the battered courtyard, holding onto each other through everything that had happened while we were apart."Lena," he said finally, pulling back slightly. "Is she—""Sleeping," I said. "Ada's watching her. She's fine, Kael. Scared, but fine.""And Ada. Rowan told me she was wounded.""She'll heal. She held her position against two enforcers with a healer's blade and her own stubbornness, and she's earned the right to grumble about her recovery time for the next month at minimum."A tired, genuine laugh broke free from him des

"That's not the end of it," Kael said slowly, echoing my own unspoken fear. "A man like that doesn't simply disappear because he lost one fight."Renner's face carried a grim confirmation of exactly that fear. "There's something else," he said. "My scouts found this, left deliberately, in plain sight at the center of the abandoned chamber. Addressed to you, Kael. Not hidden. Not subtle. He wanted it found."He held out a sealed scroll, and Kael took it with hands that had gone tense all over again, breaking the wax with a grimness that told me he already expected whatever waited inside wouldn't be good.He read it in silence, his jaw tightening with every line, and when he finally looked up, something in his face had gone hollow in a way I hadn't seen since the night he'd first confessed everything to me in that farmhouse."Read it," I said. "Whatever it says, Kael, I need to hear it too."His voice, when it came, carried a weight that settled over the whole tent like something physic

The next three days blurred into a strange, tense rhythm — Kael training in careful, measured sessions with Rowan each morning, testing his strength as it slowly returned, Ada tending his wound with the same fierce dedication she'd shown every crisis this past impossible month, and Renner's elders continuing to comb through old texts, searching for any additional advantage the shrine's ancient laws might offer.I spent those days doing what I'd learned to do best — refusing to sit still while danger circled closer. I trained too, in whatever hours I could steal from caring for Lena, working with one of Renner's warriors on the basic defensive skills I'd been forced to learn on instinct alone in those woods days ago. My ribs still ached, but movement, I'd found, hurt less than stillness did. Stillness left too much room for fear."You don't have to do this," Kael said, watching me practice a defensive stance in the training yard on the evening of the third day, Lena asleep against my sh