All Chapters of Sold to the Beast Alpha After My Rejection : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Nerissa POVHis hand was warm. That was the thing I focused on first. The way it turned over slowly beneath mine and closed around my fingers.He had chosen to hold my hand.He turned his hand over and held mine and the choice of it sat in my chest with a weight that had nothing to do with the storm outside.We stayed like that for a long time.The fire burned down slowly,the storm didn't quiet. If anything it deepened, settling into the particular sustained violence of weather that found its rhythm and intended to keep it through the night. Rain against the glass in solid walls,wind finding every gap in the fortress stonework.Neither of us spoke.I stopped being afraid of the silences between us weeks ago. They started as the silences of someone who managed information carefully and released it on his own terms. They became something else. His thumb moved once on the back of my hand and something in my chest came apart."Zayden," I said."Don't," he said."I haven't said anything

Kaelor POVThe message arrived inside a supply crate.It arrived folded into the lining of an equipment crate that came through the eastern gate with a legitimate supply delivery that was checked by gate guards who found nothing wrong with it..I found it because I checked the supply crate linings. I check everything.That was not paranoia. That was eleven years of understanding that the things most likely to destroy a fortress from the inside were the things that looked most like they belonged there.I stood in the eastern storage room with the folded paper in my hand and read it.Then I folded it back exactly as it had been and put it in my inside chest pocket and went about the rest of my morning duties.I gave nothing away to the forty additional wolves currently moving through Obsidian Keep who were all paying attention to me.I found a private moment at midday.The small equipment room off the lower training hall. It has no windows, only one door. Stone walls thick enough that s

Nerissa POVKaelor left me at the mountain pass junction.He didn't make much of it. That was his way.He pulled his horse to a stop at the split in the road where Dorian's two guards werewaiting and he looked at me with those dark professional eyes and said nothing forseveral seconds.Then he said, "Don't do anything that requires me to come back early.""I'll try," I said.He nodded once,turned his horse back toward Obsidian territory without looking back.I watched him go until the road bent and the trees took him.Then I turned to Dorian.He sat his horse with the relaxed competence he had grown up riding through mountainterrain and found nothing remarkable about it.He was quiet for most of the journey."The settlement is two hours north," he said."I know," I said. He looked at me."You know?" he said."Zayden showed me the maps," I said.He nodded and clicked his horse forward.I followed and I told myself the tightness in my chest was the mountain air.E

Rowan POVShe didn't look at me and that was the first thing I noticed and it was the wrong thing tonotice and I noticed it anyway because apparently I had lost the ability to control what Ipaid attention to where Nerissa Ashwood was concerned. She walked into that pack house and she looked at Harper and she looked at thecorridor and she looked at the door at the end of it and she said what she came to sayclearly and directly but she did not look at me.That was what stopped me.Avoidance I understood,avoidance was what she did for nineteen years inside thesewalls.where her eyes went and how long they stayed and what they gave away. The survivalinstinct of who learned that looking at the wrong thing at the wrong time producedconsequences.This was not avoidance,this was indifference.Complete and genuine and so total that it produced a sensation of standing in a roomthat you assumed contained you as a relevant element and discovering you had beenwrong about tha

Nerissa POVDorian came to find me before dawn.I was already awake.The small room Harper arranged for me at the back of the pack house held itsmemories in the walls the way old places held everything.I sat on the edge of the bed with my mother's three letters in my lap and didn't try tosleep.His knock came soft.I folded the letters back into my riding pack and opened the door."You didn't sleep," he said."No," I said.He accepted that without filling it with anything and stepped back from the doorway."We should leave before the pack wakes," he said. "The road north takes four hours.We can be back before dark if we move now." I pulled the pack onto my shoulder and followed him out into the grey pre-dawn quiet ofa pack house that did not find its morning rhythm yet.The mountain settlement appeared through the tree line like something grown.Low stone structures,dark timber. Everything constructed with practicality of peopleThe kind of place that survived fo