All Chapters of Rejected in the Rain: The Alpha's Secret Heir: Chapter 11 - Chapter 16

"You want to help me," Maren said. "Then you do it my way, or you do not do it at all."Dorian had got up off the floor of the rented room, and something had changed in him when he did. The grief was still there, she could see it sitting behind his eyes like a stone at the bottom of clear water, but he had put a lid on it, the way he put a lid on everything, and turned the cold working part of himself toward the problem she'd handed him. It was the thing she'd once loved to watch and had learned, too late, to fear. Now she was going to have to use it."Tell me the way," he said."You do not take her." She said it first because it was the thing that mattered most and because she wanted to watch his face while she said it. "Whatever happens with Sera, whatever the law says, whatever your council would tell you. You do not lay a claim on my daughter. You do not speak the old law over her. Not to Sera, not to me, not to anyone. If I hear that you have, I take her and I am gone, and this t

He was waiting where she'd said, in the dead-end lane behind the ropewalk, when she came to hear his account of the watching.She had left Wren with the chandler's wife, bolted in, and she had come alone in the last grey of the afternoon, and she found him standing very still against the wall with his hands loose at his sides and his face wrecked in a way he had not bothered to hide from her.He had been crying. Not now. But not long ago. She knew the signs of it in a face the way she knew the signs of fever, and Dorian Vale, Alpha of the Hollow, the coldest man she had ever known, had stood in a lane behind a ropewalk in a human town and wept, and had not scrubbed all the evidence of it away before she came, and she understood that this too was a kind of message. He was letting her see it. He, who let no one see anything."She counts eggs by the size of the yolk," he said, before Maren could speak. His voice was not steady. "She told the egg woman a small egg is less egg. Unless the

He rode out at dawn to meet the council's riders, and he was gone four days, and Maren spent all four of them discovering that she had made a mistake she had not planned for.She missed him.Not the man who had broken her. She was not such a fool as that, and she watched herself carefully for it, the way she'd watched for years for any sign of the old softness. It was not that. It was that for four days there had been someone on her side of the thing, someone who did the sum as fast as she did and chose the child every time and asked nothing back, and then he was gone up the river into danger on her behalf, and the town felt thinner without him in it, and she caught herself, twice, three times, turning toward where his attention should have been and finding only empty air.She did not tell anyone that. She barely told herself.He came back on the fourth night, and she felt him before she saw him, the thread of him coming down the river road in the dark, and she was at her window befor