All Chapters of The Alpha's Rejected Luna and Her Secret Heir: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Aria · Five Years AgoThe whole pack is watching when the Moon Goddess gives me the only thing I have ever wanted.I feel it the second Kael steps onto the ceremony grounds, a pull behind my ribs, sweet and electric, like a thread I didn't know was tied to my heart suddenly going taut. My wolf lifts her head inside me for the first time in months and breathes one word into my blood.Mate.Kael Thorne. The Alpha's son. The boy I have loved since I was old enough to know what the word meant, since the summer he pulled me out of the river current and didn't laugh when I cried, since every year after that when he was kind to me in small, quiet ways no one else ever saw. And the bond, the real one, the one the Goddess weaves and no one can fake, says he is mine.I'm shaking as I walk toward him under the strung lanterns. The whole clearing smells of woodsmoke and crushed pine and the honey-wine they pour at every mating ceremony, and three hundred faces turn my way as I move through them.

Kael · Now (Five Years Later)The third farm in a month burns on the eastern border, and I stand in the ash of it and feel my pack dying around me one acre at a time."Rogues again," Beta Dorian says at my shoulder. He doesn't say the rest. He doesn't have to. We're both looking at the same wrong thing: the grain store gutted, the warriors' bunk hit clean, the easy prey two fields over left entirely untouched. Rogues don't coordinate. Rogues don't choose targets and ignore others. Rogues don't move like they have a map of my territory drawn in a steady hand and a grudge older than this season.Something does. Something that knows us."How many dead?" I ask. "Two. The Mearns boy and his father. The boy was nine." Dorian's voice is flat in the way that means he is holding it that way on purpose, because the alternative is breaking. "That's nine of ours in the ground this season, Alpha."Nine. While I rule the strongest pack on the northern range, I cannot stop a single one of them. Ni

AriaHe knows me.Not all of it. Not yet, not the worst of it, not the small grey-eyed reason I nearly turned down this posting and damned the consequences. But his face is doing what mine did on the ceremony grounds five years ago: that struck-bell shock, the helpless turn of his whole body toward me like a compass swinging north, before his pride catches up and locks it down.The bond. He severed it, and it does not care what he decided. It stretches between us across the courtyard like a wire pulled singing-taut, and I feel it grope for the soft place I have spent five years sealing over with scar tissue and discipline and long cold nights.I don't let it in. I have chained my wolf through worse moments than the sight of Kael Thorne's face. I have chained her through childbirth with my teeth in a leather strap so I wouldn't cry out his name."Alpha Thorne." I climb the steps and stop one above where courtesy would put me, so that he has to look up to meet my eyes. A small thing. It

AriaHe's getting close. I can feel it in the way Kael watches me now, not just the bond-starved hunger I've learned to look straight through, but a question building behind his eyes, sharp and terrible, hauling itself nearer the truth with every hour we spend bent over those maps shoulder to shoulder.I should request a transfer tonight. I should run before the question finishes forming in his mouth, before he says a name I have never let cross my lips inside these walls.Instead, I do my job because Thornridge wolves are dying, and whatever I feel about their Alpha, the rogues do not care how he broke my heart, and the boy I am protecting will inherit a world with this rot left in it if I don't cut it out at the root while I have my teeth in it.We're at the eastern barracks past midnight, walking the gap in the patrols I flagged on the first day, when they come.Not three this time. A dozen. They pour out of the treeline in a we

Kael"...Who's your mother, pup?"The boy opens his mouth to answer, because he is four and he answers questions, and Aria moves faster than anything I have ever seen.She is between us in the space of a blink, dropping to a crouch with her back to me and her body curved around the child like a shield made out of a mother, and she gathers him up against her chest, and I watch the silver flicker at the edges of her, just under the skin, the wolf rising to defend her young. The air in the room goes electric with it. Even my own wolf, who wants nothing in this world but to go to them both, knows better than to take a single step."Don't answer him, baby," she says, soft, into his hair. "It's all right. Mama's here.""Aria." My voice comes out wrecked, a stranger's voice. "Aria, look at me. He's mine.""He is not yours." She rises with the boy on her hip and turns, and her eyes are pure silver now, lit from within like a blade h