Semua Bab Rejected in the Rain: The Alpha's Secret Heir: Bab 1 - Bab 9

The night it all ended, the sky gave no warning at all.The clouds had been thin all evening. Then the storm broke open as if a hand had torn it, and by the time Maren reached the packhouse her coat was soaked through and her boots filled with cold water at every step up the long gravel drive.She had run the whole way from the clinic. Three miles in the dark, her lungs burning.Dorian had sent only four words across the bond before he closed it again.Come home. We talk.He never spoke to her like that. Clipped. Cold. The wrongness of it had her moving before she had even pulled her coat from the hook.All the way up the valley road she told herself stories to keep the fear small.Perhaps a border dispute had flared. Perhaps one of the young ones had been hurt in a hunt. Perhaps, and this was the story she let herself believe longest, perhaps he had heard her news somehow, before she could tell him, and was calling her home to celebrate.Because she had news. That morning, for the th

Five years is long enough to become someone else.Greywater knew Maren Frost now, the way a town knows its own.She was the healer two streets back from the harbour. The one you went to when the doctor's prices frightened you, or when the trouble was the kind you did not want written down in a doctor's book.She set bones. She brought down fevers. She sat with the dying. She had brought more than thirty babies into the world.There was not a street in the lower town where a door would not open to her if she knocked.She had a proper place now. A whole floor above the chandler's shop, with a stove that drew well and shelves of jars in careful rows and a heavy oak table where she ground her herbs.She was respected. She was, in the quiet way of a woman who keeps her own counsel, a little feared.She was, though she would never have said it out loud, content.And she had Wren.The child was five now, and she was a holy terror, which is to say she was exactly what Maren had hoped she woul

She got home and she bolted the door, which she never did.She stood with her back against it in the dark of her own room. The room with the careful rows of jars and the heavy oak table. The room that had been safe for five years.And she shook, finally, now that there was no one to see it.Her hands would not be still. Her breath came too fast. The white roar that had taken her in the great room five years ago was back at the edges of her, waiting.She pressed her palms flat against the wood and made herself breathe the way she made frightened mothers breathe through a hard labour.In, and hold, and out. In, and hold, and out.It steadied her by slow degrees, until her hands stopped shaking and the white roar pulled back to where it lived.She would not let herself think about the other thing. The way her body had leaned toward him in that alley. The way five years had not burned it out of her.She had loved him with everything she had, and he had stood in front of his council and ca

She chose the morning herself, and that small thing was the first in five years that felt like it belonged to her.Not the meeting. Not what she would say when she stood in front of him. Those she couldn't plan, because they turned on him, and she'd learned the hard way how little a plan was worth once Dorian Vale had a hand in it. But the hour, the place, the walking out to him in the open instead of waiting behind a bolted door for him to knock. That much she could own.She lay awake most of the night working it through, and by the grey hour before dawn she had it settled, or settled enough. She would tell him the truth. Not because he'd earned it, and not because she'd gone soft. Because the coin had already told her the truth was coming out whether she spoke it or not, and she would rather be the one holding it when it did.She would tell him Wren was his. And then, before he could so much as open his mouth about the old law, she'd lay down the terms. He would not take the child.