All Chapters of The Alpha's Rejected Luna and Her Secret Heir: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Kael Forty people fall down in the snow at once, and then they start to weep, and it is the best sound I have ever heard in my life.It is the walked who go down, the living, the taken, every one of them inside a stone's throw of Rowan, and they hit the ground boneless and they lie there in the churned red slush sobbing and retching and saying names, their own names, their children's names, the name of the holding they were called out of a week ago, and one of them is laughing, which is somehow worse than the weeping.The girl in the grey apron is on her hands and knees six feet from me, staring at her own hands like she has never seen them.I get to my son, and I go down on my knees in front of him, and I do not grab him, though every part of me wants to, because his hand is still up and I do not know what happens if I break whatever this is."Rowan.""Hi, Papa.""What are you doing, pup?" My voice is not worki

Kael The patient thing on the other end of that cold stops being patient, and I find out what the last three hundred years have been holding back.No more roads made of hostages, no more soft voices, no more of the long, unhurried, disgusting craftsmanship of a monster who has never once had to hurry. He simply throws them at us. The whole hundred, all at once, from a hundred miles away, spent like a man throwing his own furniture on a fire, and they come up that ridge with no thought behind them at all beyond one thing, which is to get to my mate and stop her mouth forever."Line! On the Warden!" I have Aria up under one arm, and she cannot stand; her legs will not do it, she is grey to the lips, and her hands are as cold as the girl's were."Dorian, get the boy behind the horses. Halvard, close on us, they are all coming, they are done pretending."They close. Crown and Thornridge, shoulder to shoulder in the churned red sn

Kael I wake at dusk on the second day with my chest stitched from throat to belt and my son sitting cross-legged on the furs beside me, eating a bannock and explaining something at length to a woman who has been dead for twenty years."And that one's Dorian; he's the Beta. He lets me hold the spear, but only the bottom bit. And that one with the cross face is Halvard, and he's not really cross. And that's my papa. He's asleep because he got broked.""He is not asleep," says Maren Hollis, and her voice is still dust, but there is a thread of something in it now that was not there yesterday. "He has been awake for a little while, and he is pretending, because grown men are cowards about being fussed over."I open my eyes. She is sitting up against a saddle, with three cloaks on her and her grey-and-silver hair cut short by a healer's knife. She is thin past anything a body should be, and she is watching me with her daughter's exact ex

KaelWe bind him in my own tent with his own cord, and he is the one who asks for it."Hands," he says, holding his wrists out to Dorian like a man offering a coin. "Behind, not in front. And put two on me who will actually do it if it comes to that, not two who like me." He looks up at my Beta and adds, without any humor at all, "You do not like me, do you, Dorian?""Not much," says Dorian, and knots it."Good."Halvard wants him out of the tent before we say one word of the plan, and my mate overrules it in four."He has heard everything," she says. "For seven days. There is nothing left in my head worth keeping from that thing, and I want Cassian in this room when I take it out of him."So that is how the war council of the North is held: nine of us around a charcoal map in a cold tent with the King's second-best captain sitting bound on a saddle in the middle of it, and the whole plan of the campaign already blown

KaelThree hundred and eleven.We sit with that number for a day and a night, and it does what numbers of that size do: it sorts a camp into the people who can look at it and the people who cannot.Halvard can. He puts the whole column in order in eight hours, three hundred and seventy-nine freed and the wounded and the grieving and a thousand warriors, all of it sorted onto a frozen road, and he never once says the number out loud.Dorian cannot. My Beta has been with me since we were twelve, and I have seen him carry men out of fires, and he goes off past the horse lines on the second morning and stands there a long while with his back to the camp before he comes and asks me for orders in a voice like gravel.He does not come again. Not on the third night, not on the fourth. I post double watches and sleep in my boots, and nothing walks in that camp at all, and when I say so to Aria, she does not look relieved for one second, and