All Chapters of After I Left, the Powerful Alpha Gave Up Everything To Win Me Back: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

It was the largest room in the whole compound, south-facing, carved with bone, the floor layered three deep in furs, the window looking straight onto the Moon Goddess grounds. The place my mother had lived when she was alive.That little house was her favorite place in the world. Roses in spring, a trellis in summer; in autumn she'd sit on the porch and comb my hair and say, “Elara, when you have pups of your own one day, bring them back so I can see them.” My father proposed to her in front of that house. The first rosebush he ever planted with his own hands still stood in the center of the garden.I tore Magnus's face apart a hundred times in my head.I traveled most of the night and reached a neutral trading town on the Iron Claw border at dawn.Towns like that sit on no pack's land, watched over by a few old neutral wolves. Caravans pass through, goods change hands, anyone can come. I found an inn and slammed the pack treasury seal down on the counter.“Your best room. And I need a

When I woke in the healing room, the back of my head was still throbbing.The rubble from the collapse had caught me on the skull, and my left leg was one long bruise. The healer said mild concussion, a few days flat on my back.I lay in bed staring at the crack in the ceiling. Moonlight leaked in, ghost-pale. The rejected bond in my chest had started its low ache again.My head was full of the moment Cain threw himself at Seraphine: no hesitation, no pause, like a decision his body made on its own. He half-knelt to check her wounds. She rested her hand on his shoulder, and he did not pull away. The whole crowd circling her while no one turned to look at me.Maybe it was the head wound, but my mind wouldn't behave. All the little details I'd hoarded for three years and never told a soul came pushing up, one after another, like something had pried the lid off.The night of the blood moon, our first resonance. We hadn't been together long. He pressed me to the stone wall, his lips at the

When Cain said “go back to Silver Mane,” I froze for a second.He hadn't punished me.I'd expected him to lock me up. Throw me in the cells, or chain me to the Moon Goddess grounds for everyone to see. At the very least he should have said, you wounded Seraphine, there's a price for that.But he didn't. Why hadn't he punished me?Maybe there was a tiny bit of reluctance in him to let me go. But I didn't want to stay one more minute in that heartbreaking place. I took the medicine and left on my own.Silver Mane was out; that was Magnus's ground now. On the evening of the third day I walked north along the wilds toward the neutral border town. Dusk was closing in, the wind high, dry grass flattened against the earth. I couldn't shift right now, but if I kept walking I'd reach town before dark.Then I heard footsteps. From behind, from both sides, from the dead grass ahead, all at once, treading on cracked earth. I stopped. My right hand went to the dagger at my waist.Gray shapes took f

The night of the full moon, I came to the Moon Goddess grounds in the wedding gown Thornwood had prepared for me, my left hand still wrapped, and walked slowly through the press of noble guests to the dark edge of the field.The fire-basins ringed the whole circle, lighting the grounds bright as day. On the high platform, beneath the Moon Goddess stele, lay the moon-patterned runner used only when a Luna is acknowledged. Cloaks from every pack stood shoulder to shoulder in the firelight, Ink-Black and Silver-Gray and Moon-White, like a field of flowers blooming far too brightly.The ceremony had already begun.Seraphine stood on the platform in a snow-white rite-gown, her face tipped up, her voice soft and clear. “All these years, it's been Cain looking out for me.” Her eyes reddened, as if real feeling had moved her. “I'm weak, so he brought the best healer from the South to watch over me. I'm afraid of the dark, so he kept a fire burning outside my chambers all night. The old grudges

(Cain's POV)It was deep night by the time he got back to Iron Claw.The first thing he did was send wolf-couriers, one after another, north along the link that had long gone dead.He never explained himself to anyone. But this once, the words he'd swallowed for three years he sent out, line by line, with the couriers. What was melted was a fake; he'd already recast the real one. There was more to the silver-cage matter than she knew. Her memory crystal was kept in his vault. Come back.By dawn the couriers came back, one by one.None had gotten through. The links were dead. The wards turned every courier back at the Northern border, again and again.He stood at the window, listened to the last courier's report, and was silent a long time.The most he'd ever spoken in his life, and not one word of it reached her.When the day was full bright, Marek came.He'd spent the whole night running down the fang-token matter. His eyes were bloodshot, his expression unusually grim. He dropped to