All Chapters of The Alpha's Rejected Luna and Her Secret Heir: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Kael The cold that is the Pale pours up out of the hall and away toward the south, and the silence it leaves behind is worse than any sound he ever made.I drag my shirt down over my head off the black stone. My hands are steady, which surprises me, because nothing else in me is. The mark she set in the corded muscle of my throat still sings, a low bright note under the skin, and through it I can feel her now the way I have never felt another living soul. A second heartbeat laid over my own. Her fear and her fury and her grief all pouring straight down the sealed bond into me, and under every part of it, one word beating like a war drum.Rowan. Rowan. Rowan."We move," I say. "Now. He does not tire, and he does not sleep, and he has a head start down the whole mountain."The bond is so new in me it keeps startling me, the way the tongue keeps finding a missing tooth, except it is the opposite of missing. It is a whole second p

Kael Aria stops so hard her claws score four white lines down the black ice.I feel it come apart in her down the bond, the whole thing, all at once, the war between the wolf that has to get through that door and the daughter that will die before she puts a tooth in the animal standing in it. Her mother. Hollowed and set in the last doorway like a lock made of the one thing on earth Aria cannot break.He did this on his way out. I know it the way I know my own name. The Pale reached back into his hoard with the last of his attention as he poured south, and he set the one silver he knew she could not fight across the door, because it costs him nothing and it costs her everything, because he harvests the soft places and there is no softer place in Aria than this.I have spent five years learning to hate this creature in the abstract, a name in the King's dispatches, a cold in the north, a reason my mate flinched at shadows. I hate him

Kael She screams it into my mind without a sound, and I feel it like a blade going in. The cold has touched him. He felt it in his sleep. He is four years old and a monster older than the pack itself has just breathed on the back of my son's neck from a hundred miles off, and there is not one thing either of us can do about it except run faster, so we run faster, past what my body has left, into the country of running where there is no body anymore, only the road and the reason.The land changes on the second day, and what it changes into tells me the Pale has come this way, and recently.We pass a holding at the edge of the trees, a good one, a Delta family's stone house with a byre and a mill wheel, and it is empty. The door stands open, and the fire is long cold, and there is bread still on the table gone to stone, and there is no one, and there are no tracks leaving, because the ones who lived here did not leave on their feet.T

KaelI have spent every mile of this chase certain I would come over the last rise and find the cold had already taken my son.He calls me Papa. He gave me the word on the side of the black mountain going north, small and grave against my collar, only the second time he had ever said it, and it went through me like a blade and a blessing both, because I had done nothing in five years to earn it and he handed it to me anyway, fearless, certain the world would catch him. On that mountain I promised him the cold would not keep his mother while I was breathing.Then the cold took her in front of us both, the way it always meant to, and to buy our son's life we sent him south out of our own arms, screaming for her, and I have not held him since. Every mile since has been the same two words over and over, no strategy left in me at all. Not late.Please, not late. And now here he is, alive, on his small feet in the frozen Hollow, with a thing th

KaelI do not put my son down.That is the first decision, and I make it before any other, before the King's horse has even stopped, before the long silver-on-black line of the Royal pack has finished pouring down the slope into the Hollow around us. Rowan is asleep against my throat, worn out past the far end of himself, one small fist knotted in my collar.Every wolf coming down that ridge is a warrior of the Citadel. The man at the head of them once decided the safest place for this child was a warded cage behind stone. So I do not put him down. My arms close, and my wolf comes up under my skin and sits square behind my eyes, and I let the King read it in me before a single word is said. This one is mine. You do not reach for him again.King Theron dismounts the way he does everything, without hurry, a wolf so old in his power he has forgotten there was ever any other way to move through the world. Silver hair, straight back, eyes the