Alle Kapitel von Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: Kapitel 151 – Kapitel 155

HaydeeThe Moonwell did not drown me. It held me.I sank into the oldest water in the world with the crown's shards buried over my heart, and the cold did not kill me and the depth did not crush me. It took me down out of the world and held me there, suspended in silver light, between the life I had spent and the death I had earned, waiting to learn which way I would go.And in that suspended place, the water showed me myself.They came up out of the silver one at a time, all the women I had been, each lit from within, each turning to look at me as she passed. The servant girl on her knees scrubbing a floor in a pack that did not know her name, sixteen and certain she was worth exactly what they told her, which was nothing. 

HaydeeThe sparks did not make new fated mates. I want that understood before anything else, because it is the whole of what I left the world.I watched the first of them work in the hours after, there in the ruined chamber and then out across the waking north, and slowly I understood what the broken crown had become. The silver sparks did not seize anyone. They did not whisper this one in a wolf's ear and bind him to a stranger. They did nothing at all, most of the time, and that was the point. A spark sat quiet under the skin and waited, and only when two wolves, both of them, freely and at the same moment, chose to reach toward each other, did anything happen. Then, and only then, a mark rose between them, silver and gentle, a visible sign that two people had chosen to try.

HaydeeIt began, all of it, with a girl on a floor in a white gown.I remember her the way you remember a wound. eighteen years old, in the borrowed gown they put on the rejected without telling her what it meant, standing in the center of the Silvercrest feast-hall waiting to be claimed. I remember Cole Shade's voice saying the words that broke my life open. I reject you. And I remember the laughter, the part that never left me, a hundred wolves deciding together that I was worth nothing. I did not get up off that floor the same girl, and for two years I thought that floor was the truest thing that had ever happened to me.It was not. This was.