All Chapters of Sold to the Beast Alpha After My Rejection: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

150 Chapters

CHAPTER 11: The Servant Omega

Nerissa POVMorning came loud inside Obsidian Keep. I barely slept.Zayden's voice coming through the gathering below stayed with me long after the corridors went quiet and the torches burned low and the fortress settled into silence a little bit.Mira came early with breakfast and fresh bandaging."How was the gathering?" I asked."I wasn't in it," she said."You heard things," I said.She unwrapped my shoulder without answering and examined the wound."The eastern border situation is being handled," she said."That's not what I asked," I said."That's what I'm answering," she said.She rewrapped the bandaging efficiently and stepped back."You can do light duties again today," she said. "Your shoulder is nearly closed. Another two days and Edna will clear you for full movement.""Mira…""Kitchen corridor first," she said. "The head cook needs linens sorted before midday." I sighed. I recognized a closed door when I walked into one.The kitchen corridor ran along the entire southern

CHAPTER 12:The Alpha's Punishment

Zayden POVI heard things before I saw them.That was how it always worked inside Obsidian Keep. Sound traveled through stone differently than it traveled through wood and open air. The voice was Petra's,I recognized it immediately. She decided her small authority inside a kitchen corridor made her untouchable.I had been walking toward the eastern staircase when it reached me and I changed direction without breaking pace.I turned the corner into the southern corridor just as Mira was pulling Nerissa away from the kitchen doorway.I stopped,neither of them saw me.Nerissa's shoulders were straight and her chin was level and she was looking directly at Petra.Petra said something I caught the tail end of.‘Wolves like you don't stay in places like this for long.’I stayed where I was until they disappeared around the far corner.Then I looked at the kitchen door.Petra was back at the preparation table when I walked in.The two younger ones were beside her. Lena and the quiet one who

CHAPTER 13:The Enforcer Named Kaelor

Nerissa POVThree days after the kitchen corridor incident, Petra was gone.I saw her twice in the eastern passage carrying supply inventory ledgers. She was gone from the southern corridor and gone from the kitchen doorway.Lena avoided my eyes completely whenever we passed.The quiet one whose name I still didn't know had started moving to the other side of whatever corridor she spotted me in first.Nobody told me what happened.The fortress had its own way of communicating. Just the sudden adjustment of behavior that happened when wolves understood that something had changed in the order of things and they better change with it.Something changed and it has something to do with Zayden.I didn't ask Mira about it because she would only give me the careful version and I was tired of the careful version of everything inside these walls. So I filed it.My shoulder is nearly healed now. Edna examined it with her usual complete absence of warmth and declared me cleared for full movemen

CHAPTER 14:The Monster in the Cells

Nerissa POVKaelor walked fast.We moved through the inner corridor and past the eastern staircase and I expected him to go up. Toward Zayden's study. Toward the upper floors where authority lived inside this fortress.He went down the staircase and where he turned into was narrow,darker than the others. The torches set into the walls here were spaced further apart and the stone under my feet changed texture, rougher.The air changed too. It was cooler with something underneath it that I couldn't immediately name but that made my wolf press forward inside me with her ears flat."Where are we going?" I asked."Below," Kaelor said."I gathered that," I said. "Below what specifically.""The cells," he said.I kept walking but something tightened in my chest.Darius had mentioned rogue prisoners in passing the day before and moved on quickly. I filed it then and kept moving.Now apparently the filing was about to become relevant.The staircase ended at a heavy iron door.Kaelor pushed it

CHAPTER 15: Rowan's Restlessness

Rowan POVShe had been gone for eleven days.I stood at the edge of the training ground and watched my warriors run drills and thought about nothing else."Alpha Rowan."I turned.Garrett, my beta, stopped beside me with a ledger in his hands and the particular expression he wore when he had been trying to get my attention for longer than he wanted to admit."The eastern patrol report,you asked for it before midday," he said."Leave it," I said."You said it was urgent," he said carefully."I said leave it Garrett."He set the ledger on the bench beside me without another word and stepped back.I looked back at the training ground.Two warriors were sparring badly in the far corner,sloppy footwork. Telegraphing every combination before it came. I would have stopped the drill three minutes ago if I had been paying attention.I hadn't been paying attention,that was the problem.It started the morning after the mating ceremony.I woke up and the first thing I thought about was her face

CHAPTER 16:The Girl Zayden Watches

Nerissa POVI noticed it first on a Tuesday or what I thought was Tuesday. Days inside Obsidian Keep had a way of blurring into each other. The fortress ran on its own rhythm and that rhythm had nothing to do with the outside world. It had to do with patrol rotations and training schedules and the particular way the torches in the upper corridors burned lower by late afternoon and got replaced by servants moving quickly and quietly before anyone important noticed.I had started learning that rhythm.You watched,you listened,you filed things and slowly the shape of the place built itself inside your head until you could move through it without constantly feeling like you were about to walk into something you didn't see coming.I was in the outer passage carrying fresh torch oil to the upper corridor brackets when I felt something at the back of my neck.Someone was watching me,I turned.The corridor was empty in both directions.I stood there for a moment,looking at the doors running

CHAPTER 17:Calista's Fear Begins

Calista POVHe said her name in his sleep,that was the first time.I lay completely still beside him in the dark and listened to it leave his mouth like something that had been sitting behind his teeth all day waiting for the moment his guard came down enough to escape.‘Nerissa.’Like even unconscious he wasn't sure what to do with it.I stared at the ceiling for a long time after that.My jaw was tight enough to ache. My hands were flat against the sheets on either side of me because losing composure in the dark over something Rowan didn't even know he had done was beneath me and I did not spend the last three years positioning myself exactly here to come apart over a sleeping man's unconscious confession.But the name sat in the room like a living thing.‘Nerissa.’I rose before dawn and dressed without waking him and went to sit in the outer chamber where nobody could see my face until I rebuilt it into something appropriate.Breakfast in the main hall was a performance I have bee

CHAPTER 18: Bruises Beneath Her Sleeves

Nerissa POVThe water in the bathing room was hot,steam rising from the surface and curling toward the low stone ceiling in slow lazy patterns.Mira arranged it without being asked.She didn't explain why. She just told me the bathing room at the end of the east corridor would be available for an hour before the morning duties started and left a clean towel folded on the bench outside the door without making anything of it.I stood in the water up to my waist and let the heat work into muscles that had been carrying tension for so long I had stopped noticing how heavy they were.Red Claw didn't have hot water for omegas.Cold pumped water from the barrel outside the servant quarters. In and out quickly because the barrel was shared and taking too long meant someone's hands across the back of your head and a lecture about selfishness.I turned my face up toward the steam and closed my eyes.For approximately four minutes I let myself not think about anything.Then I reached for the soa

CHAPTER 19: The Alpha's Rage

Nerissa POVEdna examined me for forty minutes.She didn't speak much during it. That was fine because I didn't want to have a conversation. I sat on the edge of the examination table in the healer's room on the second floor and let her hands move where they needed to move and kept my eyes on the wall opposite and thought about nothing deliberately.Edna's hands were precise and clinical. She catalogued everything with detached efficiency. But her hands stilled twice,once over my ribs.Once over the scarring across my left shoulder blade that I had forgotten about because it had been there so long it stopped registering as separate from the rest of me.She didn't comment either time.She made notes on the small parchment beside her and kept moving.When she finished she stepped back and looked at me with those unreadable grey eyes."Dress," she said."The rib,third from the bottom on the left side. It healed incorrectly. There was a break at some point that wasn't set properly." She s

CHAPTER 20: The Midnight Nightmare

Nerissa POVI didn't tell anyone about the word on the floor.I stood in that corridor for a long time after Zayden disappeared up the eastern staircase looking at it. Turning it over in my mind the way you turned something sharp over in your hands, carefully, aware that the wrong angle could cut you.Ashwood,Written in blood on the floor of the lower training hall. By a warrior who had been repeating Red Claw gossip about me casually in the corridor that morning like it was nothing worth keeping to himself.A warrior who had traveled with Alpha Magnus.A warrior who was inside Obsidian Keep right now.I filed it. Locked it into the part of my mind where I kept things that needed more information before they came to conclusions. Then I picked up the linen stack I left on the corridor bench and finished the morning duties and said nothing to anyone.Mira noticed my silence at midday."You're quiet," she said."I'm always quiet," I said."You're quieter than you're quiet," she said.I

1 2 3 4 5 6

...

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP