All Chapters of The Alpha's Rejected Luna and Her Secret Heir: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Kael The whole clearing turns to Cassian, and I feel Aria stop breathing.He is grey to the lips. There is blood dried down one side of his face and more of it soaking his side, and he cannot shift; his wolf is still locked half-flat under the Pale's leftover cold, and he has three dead, hollowed silvers at his feet that he put down with a blade and refusal and no wolf at all.He is a Royal enforcer. He has knelt to Theron his whole life. The King has just given him a lawful order in front of forty of his own kind.Cassian gets one hand on the standing stone and drags himself up it until he is on his feet, swaying, and he faces his King."No, Your Grace," he says.The silence goes so deep I can hear the horses breathing on the ridge."I have served you since I was fourteen." Cassian's voice is a wreck, but it does not waver on what matters."I have gone north for you nine winters running, alone, under you

Kael My son wakes up in my arms two hours later, in the firelight of the waystation, and looks at me like he is checking whether I am still real.I have carried him the whole way here, down off the ridge and along the King's road to the old stone road-lodge where the Royal healers have set their fires and laid out the wounded, and I have not once loosened my grip, because every time I think about setting him down some cold animal part of me remembers a smiling dead thing at a tree line saying only walk, and my arms will not do it. So he wakes against my chest, and his storm-grey eyes, my eyes, open slow and unfocused, and for one terrible second I brace for the cold to still be in them, for him to surface somewhere far away and not know me.He knows me. There is no fear in him at all. He looks at me, and then at the mark on my throat, healing silver, the twin of the one on his mother, and he reaches up with one small hand and pats my jaw,

KaelAria is out of bed and at the window, with the furs clutched to her chest, before I am fully awake, and down the bond I feel the ice come off the north and pour into her, and I am on my feet beside her in the same breath."What," I say. "What is it?""She reached me." Her voice is very quiet and very steady, which is how I know it is bad."My mother. Down the blood, down the old silver, all the way from the Frostfang. She hummed the four notes to me, Kael. She has never once reached out. He has always held her too deep."She turns from the black window, and her eyes are silver in the dark. "And then a hundred other voices came in under hers. Humming. All of them. All at once."I go cold in a way that has nothing to do with the room. "The caged silvers.""They are not caged anymore." She says it like she is reading it off the inside of her own chest.  "I broke the first seal when my light spilled across

Kael"He's wearing Grandma."Four years old, perfectly clear, in the voice he uses to point out an interesting bird, and it goes down the whole column like cold water down a collar. I hear it travel backward through the ranks in horrified pieces, wearing her, he's wearing her, and I feel a thousand wolves start to come apart underneath me on that saddle.So I do the only thing an Alpha is actually for."THORNRIDGE." It comes out of me with the whole weight of my wolf behind it, and every head in my line snaps round, and half the crown's line with them. "Eyes front. Eyes on me. You have all seen worse than this in your own bad dreams, and you were alone then. You are not alone now."It buys ten seconds. Ten seconds is enough. Beside me, Aria is already moving, already ordering, that flat-carrying enforcer's voice cutting the panic into work, form on the saddle, spears to the narrow, horses back and behind, nobody goes down onto that

Kael They come into our line like a wave into a harbor wall, and the wall holds, and the wave is made of people.I have fought rogues. I have fought raiders and hollowed silvers and my own bad decisions for five years running, and nothing in my life has prepared me for this, for a woman in a shrine-keeper's apron coming at my throat with her teeth bared and her eyes streaming and her mouth shaping the word sorry around a snarl she is not making.I get my shield into her chest and turn my shoulder and put her down in the snow as gently as a thing that weight can be put down, and Dorian drops on her legs and binds them, and she thrashes and howls and bites his forearm to the bone and he does not even grunt, he just knots the cord and rolls to the next one."Reversed spears," I am roaring, up and down my own line, "shafts, not points, take them at the knee, bear them down, they are ours, they are all of us, hold your hands," and my war