All Chapters of The Alpha's Rejected Luna and Her Secret Heir: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Kael We go in at first light, and the mountain lets us.That is the thing I cannot get past, in the first hour, and I have been chewing it since the gates. There is no fight. There is no guard, no trap, no cold coming down the corridor at us, no jaw of ice closing behind. The great black doors stand pinned open with the snow drifted tidily into the entrance hall, and we walk into the Frostfang the way you walk into an inn.I have been in here once before. I came in through a goat track over the western ridge with a handful of wolves and a mad plan and my mate somewhere below me in the dark, and I went down these halls killing things. It smells the same. That is what gets me first, before I can see anything. It smells of old ice and wet stone and, faintly, sweetly, underneath it, of dried wolfsbane, and my whole body remembers the last time and starts running the fear again from the beginning.Aria walks ahead of me with her hand tra

KaelI have a fist in the back of my mate's collar, a mountain of breathing women stacked over my head, and a song coming up out of the dark under my boots that has no end to it.That is the part I will never be able to give to anyone who was not standing on that ledge. The singing. It comes up slow and cracked and completely unhurried, note after note after note, in a voice like a rope that has been out in the weather for three hundred years, and it does not stop while we get ourselves into some kind of order, and it does not stop while Cassian counts, and it does not stop later, when the screaming starts."Say it again," Aria says."It is not me." Maren has her thin hand locked round her daughter's wrist. "Four notes are what I had awake. My mother gave me those four, and she had them off hers, and the fifth and the sixth came up out of the water with me on that battlefield, and I have never once known where I got them. I have wondered

Kael · Now"Get her flat," I say. "Cassian, her head. Bryn, stop shouting.""She is not breathing.""I know she is not breathing. Her head, Cassian."I have my hands on my mate's shoulders, and my mate is not here. Aria is sitting bolt upright, Ilva's face between her palms, her eyes half-open, rolled up white, and she is somewhere at the bottom of a woman who is at the bottom of another woman, and what is coming up the bond into me is not words. It is the feeling of a boat rope going out through your fists."Aria. Come up."Nothing."Aria.""She cannot hear you," Maren says. She is on her knees at Ilva's other side with two fingers under the girl's jaw. "She has gone down two. Nobody has ever gone down two.""Then I go after her.""You cannot. You are tied to your mate, and your mate is tied to Ilva, and there is nothing at all between you and Ilva, and if you go in blind, you will simply be a fourth thing

Kael Forty-four.That is the number on Cassian's spear shaft when we stop, and he has cut them in blocks of five like a man tallying sheep, and I have watched him run his thumb over them twice in the last hour the way another man would tell beads.Neither of us has said the other thing out loud. It has been a day and a night since a nine-year-old girl stood on ring three and passed on a message from the bottom of the world, and my mate has not mentioned it, and I have not asked, and I have not slept for one full hour since.Do not bring him any further down.I have taken that sentence apart about four hundred times, and every time I get to the same place, which is that the woman who sent it up is the only creature in this mountain who has never once wanted anything from us, and that my mate is going to go past her anyway, and that I am going to let her.Forty-four women out of the ice in two and a half days. F

KaelBryn is the one who says it, and she says it about four minutes after the voice stops, and I have thought since that somebody had to, and it may as well have been the woman who has been striking a flint at a dead world for four days."Then we stop," she says. "We take the seventy-three and the ones over our heads, and we walk out of this hole, and we leave the rest of them in it."Nobody shouts at her. That is what tells me how bad it is.Cassian has the hide flat on the stone with the light on it, and he has drawn the funnel, and he has written the arithmetic in his small clerk's hand at the bottom, and he reads it out because Aria makes him, and my mate is right to make him, because the number is the only honest thing any of us has."Seventy-three out," he says. "Nine dead. A hundred and thirty-nine still standing on the eleven rings above the ledge, and those are the shallow ones, held loose and cheap, and every one of thos