All Chapters of The Alpha's Rejected Luna and Her Secret Heir: Chapter 21 - Chapter 29

AriaI have Cassian against the corridor wall before the cell door has finished swinging shut, my forearm across his collarbones, and to his great and damning credit, he does not fight me. He lets me put him into the stone. He holds his hands out from his sides, open, the exact posture Kael has learned, and the part of me that is still thinking notes that Cassian taught Kael nothing, and they have both arrived at the same surrender, the one that says I will not make this harder by struggling against you.My wolf is up snarling, silver bleeding hot into the edges of my sight, every instinct in me wild to tear the throat out of anyone who might be a door the dark could use to reach my son."Where do you go in the winters?" My voice does not sound like mine."North." He says it plainly, no flinch, his scarred face steady under mine. "Every winter for nine years, on the King's orders and

AriaThere is the cold room and Kael's voice behind me shouting for Cassian, and then there is the door of my son's chamber hanging off one hinge with the four guards down across the threshold, two of them moving, two of them not, and a cold coming out of the open room that is not winter, that is older than winter, that I have felt exactly once before, in four words gouged into a waystation door.I have been afraid in my life. I was afraid in the Hollow with my blood running out into the snow. I was afraid every day of the first year I carried Rowan alone, afraid of fever, of rogues, of doing all of it wrong, of loving something that much in a world that takes things. This is not fear. Fear lives in the body, and this has gone straight past the body into some older room, the place where the wolf lives, and the wolf is not afraid. The wolf is only, perfectly, ready to kill or to die with no preference between them, as long as the cold thing

AriaWe ride north out of the Citadel on the morning of the full moon, eleven of us against a thing three hundred years old, and I keep my son in the saddle in front of me where I can feel his heartbeat through both our coats.It is a small company because a large one would be a banner the Pale could read from a hundred miles off. Kael. Cassian.Eight of Thornridge's steadiest, Dorian at their head with his grey beard frozen stiff by the second hour. And Rowan, who is four and furious that he is not allowed to walk, and who has decided that riding to war is a great deal like riding anywhere else, which is to say an opportunity to ask Cassian forty questions about wolves."Do the cold wolves get cold?"Thornridge sits three days south behind its own walls, Halvard holding the gates in Kael's place. An Alpha does not leave his pack. It is the first law they teach you and the last one they let you break. Kael broke it the morning we r

AriaMy mother is a grave I have never seen.That is all she has ever been to me: a name my father spat like a curse, a story with no body in it.My father gave me three facts about her and guarded them like coins. Her name was Maren. She was beautiful, which he said the way other men say a debt. And she died when I was three, of a fever, in a winter so hard the ground was too frozen to dig, which was his explanation for why there was no stone, no grave, nothing of her I could ever go and stand beside.I used to think the missing grave was poverty. We were low and poor, and the dead of low, poor wolves do not get stones. I never once let myself think the missing grave was because there had never been a body to put under it.Fever, he said, when I was small enough to still ask. Took her in a single hard winter when you were three. Don't go looking for ghosts, girl, the dead don't keep. I built my whole life on that grave. I learned

Aria  I am on my knees in the snow, and I cannot make myself stop shaking.Behind me, I hear Kael move, one step, the instinct to come to me, and I hear him stop himself, because he has learned, at last, that there are moments I have to be allowed to stand up on my own or I will never forgive the hand that lifted me. I love him for stopping. I do not have time to tell him so.It is not her. I make myself see that, through the roar in my ears, because if I do not see it clearly, it will break me, and I cannot afford to break here. The wolf in the cage is faded past color, her silver gone, the grey of old ash, and behind her eyes, there is almost nothing left, a guttered candle, a held note with no breath behind it. The Pale hollowed her out a long time ago. He kept the shell and the song and let the rest go dark.I have looked into a great many terrible things over five years as the King's blade. I have learned that the trick of