All Chapters of Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

HaydeeThe old mill smelled of rot and river damp, and Cole was already inside it.He stood in the broken doorway with the last light behind him, and for one breath he was the boy I used to watch across the training yard, before he learned to look through me. Then he turned his head and the Alpha settled over his face again, and I remembered exactly what he had done to me on a ceremony floor while three hundred wolves laughed.I did not tell him about the shapes I had seen on the road. I did not trust him enough to hand him my fear. I kept my spine to the wall where I could watch the door, and I said, "You have something for me."He crossed the rotten floor and put a folded packet into my hands. Old paper, water-stained, sealed with the Shade crest in cracked wax."My father's private records," he said. "The ones Tara-Lee's people missed when they burned the rest." His jaw worked. "Your mother murdered no one, Haydee. She

HaydeeRage I could have survived. Rage I understood.Hunter gave me winter instead.We rode into Nightfall in silence at dawn. He had not spoken one word to me since the mill. He had ordered his warriors to carry Cole to the border and send him home to Silvercrest under guard. He had wrapped me in his own cloak against the cold without once looking at my face, and the not-looking cut deeper than any blow he could have landed.I found him in the war room, bent over maps he was in no state to read."It was not what you saw," I said. "He was dying. The healing woke the bond. I did not choose it, and I could not stop it.""You owe me no explanation." He did not lift his eyes. "You are not mine. You have made that plain enough. Your bonds are your own business."Every word was polite. Every word was a door swinging shut."Hunter.""The Silvercrest envoy leaves at noon," he said. "Decide what answer

HaydeeThe cold of the training yard soaked up through my knees, and the healer knelt over me and would not speak.Her hands moved across me. My throat. The hollow under my ribs. The pale scar on my wrist. Her mouth went thin. Whatever she read in my body had frightened her, and a woman who had spent sixty years drawing arrows and closing wounds did not frighten over nothing.I caught her wrist with what strength I had left. My fingers shook against her skin. "Say it. Whatever you see, say it to my face. I have had a lifetime of people deciding what I could stand to know."She held my stare a long moment. Then she eased me up against the training-yard post, settled onto her heels in the mud, and told me."A true mate bond mourns," she said. "When a mate makes a child on another woman, the bond aches. I have tended that ache more than once. It is a quiet thing. Grief, and no more." Her root-knuckled finger came to rest on m

HaydeeThe Alpha who walked through Nightfall's gate did not move like a man entering another Alpha's territory.He came under a white parley banner, six Bloodpine warriors at his heel and no weapon I could see. He was tall and pale-haired, immaculate as a drawn blade, and he crossed a courtyard full of wolves who wanted him dead as though he strolled through his own gardens.Nightfall warriors tracked him with their eyes and their hands on their hilts. He did not spare them a glance. A man who walked into a rival Alpha's yard with six wolves at his heel and no fear in his face was either a fool or something far worse. Nothing about him looked like a fool.Hunter met him in the yard, and the air between the two Alphas pulled tight as a wire."Lucien Roux," Hunter said. "You are a long way from Bloodpine.""Alpha Grear." Lucien inclined his head, courteous and cold. "I have come for what is mine. I am told you are ke

HaydeeThe Moonstone changed everything, and Tara-Lee understood it before I did.By the next morning the whole territory knew. The rejected servant girl was the lost Moongale heir. The Moonborn who cracked the sacred stone. The true High Luna, if the old tales held. In one night I had gone from nothing to the most dangerous woman in the north, and I had not lifted a hand to do it.It should have been triumph. Some starved part of me had dreamed of exactly this in the scullery dark, the day they would all learn what they had thrown away. But no triumph came. Only a cold, clear understanding. A girl worth a throne is a girl worth killing, and I had painted a target on my own skin the size of the border.Tara-Lee had built her whole life on being the woman Cole chose. On the child she claimed to carry. On a throne she meant to sit. And I had made every piece of it worthless with four words in a stone hall.She had one move l