All Chapters of Rejected by the Alphas Claimed by the King : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

DEUS POV Coach didn't even ask me to sit down, which told me everything I needed to know before he opened his mouth, and I stood there in the doorway of his office bracing for whatever came next. "I'm pulling you from the roster," he said, not bothering with any kind of explanation, and the words landed harder than I expected even though some part of me had been waiting for something like this for days. "Effective when," I asked, forcing my voice to stay still. "Effective immediately," he said, finally motioned his eyes looking up from the papers on his desk. "I know the championship's only a few months out, and I know how that sounds, but this isn't a decision I made lightly." "My performance hasn't changed," I said, stepping fully into the room now. "I've made every practice, hit every drill, and nothing about how I play has dropped even slightly, so if this is about the ice, I'd like an actual reason instead of just being told to leave." He set his pen down slowly and ru

TATIANA'S POV "Did you hear about Deus," Priya said, sliding into the seat across from me at lunch before I had even fully sat down myself, and something in her tone told me this wasn't going to be another piece of gossip I could easily ignore the way I had been trying to for weeks. "Hear what," I asked, keeping my voice carefully neutral despite the way my stomach immediately tightened.’ What do you mean by that statement?” "He's failing two classes now," she said, lowering her voice slightly like she was sharing something scandalous. "Missed three assignments in a row in Advanced Pack Law, and apparently his professor already sent a formal warning home, not that it matters much given everything else going on with his family right now." "That's unfortunate," I said, forcing my attention back down to my own plate. "That's not even the worst part," She continued, clearly not finished. "Someone said he's barely eating anymore either. Grabs something small, sits alone, leaves

DEUS POVThe smell of something warm reached me before I even opened my eyes properly, and for one disoriented second, still caught in the fog of barely three hours of actual sleep, I thought I was imagining it entirely.I turned my head and found Tatiana already sitting on the small chair near my desk, a covered plate balanced on her lap, watching me with an expression I couldn't immediately place, and the sight of her there, calm and unbothered like this was somehow a normal thing for either of us, sent a spike of irritation through me before I had even fully processed what I was looking at."What are you doing here," I said, sitting up too fast, my head spinning slightly from the sudden movement."I told you I'd come back," she said, setting the plate down carefully on the edge of my desk, her voice steady in a way that only made me feel more unsteady.“I don’t remember asking you to,” I said, my voice sharper than I meant it to be. I was embarrassed that she had found me half asle

TATIANA'S POV Deus stared at the graded paper sitting on his desk for a long time before he actually said anything, and I watched him do it, watched the way his jaw tightened around whatever number was printed at the top of that page, though he angled it just enough that I couldn't quite make out the actual grade from where I sat. "That bad," I asked, nodding toward the paper. "Bad enough," he said, finally setting it face down, though the gesture felt more like defeat than actual privacy at this point. We sat in silence for a moment, the same comfortable silence that had settled between us over the past several days, though tonight it carried a slightly different weight, something heavier sitting underneath his usual quiet. "I need to ask you something," He finally said, and his voice came out steady than I had heard it in days, careful in a way that immediately told me whatever he was about to say cost him something to actually admit out loud. "Okay," I said, waiting. "Will yo

DEUS POVOur sessions had settled into a routine neither of us had ever actually talked about. We trained in the mornings on the empty stretch of field behind the old equipment shed, where hardly anyone ever went, and spent our evenings with textbooks scattered across my floor while she quizzed me on pack law terms I still couldn’t seem to remember.Neither of us had ever actually talked about the schedule. It just happened naturally over the past week. One day turned into the next, and before long, showing up at the same time had become something we both did without even thinking about it.I found myself noticing things about her lately that I probably shouldn't have been paying quite so much attention to.The way she pushed her hair back impatiently when she was concentrating hard on something. The way her nose scrunched slightly whenever she disagreed with something I said but decided not to argue about it directly.The way, whenever she genuinely enjoyed herself, whenever some sma