Chapter 81

KaelI have carried my son through a battle on my shoulders. I have put my own body between his throat and his grandmother's teeth. I have done a number of things in the last fortnight that I would not have believed of myself, and not one of them was as hard as standing on a warm floor at the bottom of the world and not closing my hand on the back of his collar."Rowan," I say."She's asking, Papa.""I know she is asking.""You said." He is not arguing. He has never once argued. He looks up at me with his mother's stubbornness in my own grey eyes, and he says, reasonably, "You said if a lady asks you nicely, you go and see what she wants."I said that to him about a bowl of stew, in a hall, in front of a fire, in a country nine hundred miles south of here, and he has kept it in his pocket for four months and brought it out now.Aria says, "Let him go, Kael."So I let him go.He crosses that floor the way

Last Updated : 2026-08-26

Chapter 82

AriaHis hand shuts on hers, and I put mine over both of them without thinking, which is the single stupidest thing I have done in this mountain, and I have killed nine women in this mountain.It is like laying my palm on a stopped mill wheel. There is no cold coming off him. There is nothing coming off him at all, and the nothing is so complete that my own arm goes numb to the elbow, and the seven stones in my chest all turn over at once like dogs hearing a whistle."Do not touch him," Eira says.I do not let go."Girl. Take your hand off my husband."I take my hand off.Nobody says anything for a moment, and I watch the word go around that floor and land in every face on it, and Cassian's spear comes down about two inches, and Ilva says, very quietly, "Ah.""He was not," I say."He was." Eira lies there with a dead man's fingers locked through hers and does not look at any of us."For eleven yea

Last Updated : 2026-08-27

Chapter 84

AriaThere is a hand on my son's head.I have been told since that what I did was brave, twice, by people I love, and both times I have wanted to be sick.First, I do nothing.That is the truth of it. For about two seconds I stand on the second step of a font of black ice with my hands loose at my sides and I do absolutely nothing at all, and in those two seconds every single thing I have is screaming at me to go across that floor, and I know, with the clean certainty you only ever get about the very worst things, that if I move he wins.Because he wants me to move. He has wanted me to move since the threshold. He has never once in three hundred years taken a woman off the road. He stands on the thing she loves, and he waits, and she comes to him on her own two feet, every time, and every time she thinks she is being brave.So I do not move. And my son, who is four, and who has a dead man's palm flat on the crown of his head

Last Updated : 2026-08-28

Chapter 83

KaelI have my son off my hip, behind me, and my back to the wall, before the thing on the floor has got one shoulder off the stone.Ilva shifts. She goes over between one step and the next, seventeen years old and thirty-seven years old and twenty years drowned, and what comes up off that walkway is a grey wolf the size of a yearling stag with her hackles standing in a ridge from her skull to her tail. Bryn goes over beside her. Cassian does not, because Cassian is holding the steps, and Cassian would hold a set of steps against the sea.And the Pale stands up.It takes him a long time. That is the part I was not ready for, and I have been ready for this man since a threshold in the snow. He does not surge. He comes up off that floor the way a barn door comes off a frozen hinge, in stages, with things in him giving way and setting again, and the dust goes off him in sheets, and when he is finally standing he is a head taller than me, and

Last Updated : 2026-08-28

All Chapters of The Alpha's Rejected Luna and Her Secret Heir: Chapter 81 - Chapter 84

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 84

Chapter 83