Alle Kapitel von The Alpha's Rejected Luna and Her Secret Heir: Kapitel 11 – Kapitel 20

AriaWe find the traitor's thread on the fifth day, and it leads exactly where I have been dreading it would lead since the night I dug a brick of dried wolfsbane out of a cabin floor.The poison was bought, not foraged. Bought through a grain-and-sundries merchant in the border town, paid for in good Silverpine silver, every coin stamped with the mountain crest, I have been catching at the ragged edges of this whole rotten business since the hour I walked through the Thornridge gates. Someone inside the alliance is funding the rogue attacks on the pack that the alliance is sworn to protect. Someone wants Thornridge weak. Bleeding. Frightened enough to lean harder on Silverpine, to cede more ground, more grain, more sons, to need them past the point of ever standing alone again."Your marriage was never an alliance," I tell Kael. I spread the merchant's ledger flat across the rough table of the eastern line-cabin, where we have ridden to read it well out of range of the pack's ears.

KaelThe whole world narrows to a single white point."What do you mean, gone?" I say, and it comes out in the Alpha's voice, the one that flattens grown warriors against walls, and Cassian does not flinch from it because he is already far past fear and out the other side."She told the gate guards she was escorting the boy to the King herself. As evidence of your, her exact words, 'betrayal of the alliance.'" Cassian's jaw is a bar of iron. "By the time a kitchen maid thought it strange enough to come find me, they had three hours on us. They took the north road. Toward Silverpine. Not toward the Citadel."Not toward the King at all. Toward her father.Aria does not scream. Aria does not break. I watch Aria go utterly, terribly silver, the wolf rising whole and ancient and awake behind her eyes, and when she finally speaks, there are two tones layered under the words, the woman and the wolf speaking at once, and the sound of it li

KaelWe carry my son home, and I begin the long, slow work of becoming a man who might one day deserve to.Seraphina goes south to the Citadel in irons, and with her goes the merchant's ledger, the bag of stamped Silverpine silver, and every last thread that Aria pulled loose from the dark. And I stand before my whole assembled pack in the great hall, and I do the thing I should have found the spine to do five years ago.I tell them the truth.All of it. The alliance was built on a blade behind a smile. The rejection I made to keep a low-ranked girl alive, and how it failed her anyway, and how it was never mine to decide for her in the first place. The son I did not know I had, and the woman who raised him alone into the fierce, laughing, impossible boy standing at her side. I do not spare myself a single thing. An Alpha who hides his shame from his own pack is only an Alpha waiting for his turn to be hidden from.When I finish, th

KaelI get Rowan back to sleep in the warded inner room with Cassian standing over him like a blade someone left propped against the wall, and then I go back out to where Aria is still staring at the door, and I make myself ask the thing I do not want the answer to."Whose hand is that?""I don't know." She says it too fast. She is lying, or she is afraid she knows, which in Aria is the same animal wearing two coats. "A border hand. Old-fashioned letters. Nobody schools wolves to write like that anymore except..." She stops. Her jaw works. "Except the far north. Past the wards. Where they still keep the old ways because nobody ever bothered to bring them new ones.""The north." Seraphina's voice comes back to me, blood bright on her teeth in the snow of the Hollow. You have no idea who has been quietly asking, up and down the border, after a child born with the old blood. "Aria. What is in the north?""Nothing is in th

KaelThey keep Seraphina in the lower cells, and the Citadel's idea of a cell for a highborn traitor is a clean stone room with no window and a door that does not open from the inside, and she has been in it long enough to have lost the wine-and-silk gloss she wore like armor her whole life. The wrist Aria broke is splinted and set. She does not stand when we come in. She has stopped performing, and a Seraphina who has stopped performing is, I find, a far more dangerous woman than the one who poured wine she never drank.I married this woman. I stood beside her at a hundred councils and shared the high table at a thousand meals, and never once in five cold years did I know her, because she never let me. We were two people performing a marriage for two people who needed to believe in it. I find, standing here, that I cannot even hate her cleanly.She wanted a strong pack and a real title and a husband who looked at her, and she got a