Alle Kapitel von Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: Kapitel 31 – Kapitel 40

ColeCole did not knock. He shoved the solar door so hard it cracked against the wall.Tara-Lee looked up from her mirror as though she had waited hours for him. She probably had. Pale silk, a fresh bandage on her wrist, the prop from her fall. She smiled like a woman who had already won."You cuffed her," she said. "Good. The pack needed to see their Alpha again.""We have never shared a bed."The words dropped flat into the quiet. He watched for the flinch. None came."I have never touched you, on the ceremony night or any night after." He crossed to stand over her. "So whose child do you carry? Because it is not mine, and you know it."She laughed, soft and low. "Does it matter?""It matters to me.""To no one else." She tilted her head. "You chose me before the whole pack, Cole. At your own Luna ceremony, with your rejected mate still bleeding on the floor. And in all the weeks since, you ha

HaydeeEighteen years I had grieved a mother I could not picture. Now she was looking up at me out of a hole in the world.Two silver eyes, sunk deep in a face I could not make out. A voice ruined by eighteen years of screaming. And my name, my true name, climbing the broken stair toward me."Talitha."I had built her a thousand times in the dark of the scullery. A warm shape. A voice that might have sung to me once. Every version I made, I took apart by morning, because a mother I invented could not be taken from me twice. Now the real one lay under the floor of the house that had enslaved her daughter, close enough to hear, and every made-up mother I had ever grieved fell away at once.The whole hall was screaming for my blood. I could not hear it. My whole body had narrowed to one cracked voice and one word.I moved toward the crack without deciding to.The silver cuffs caught fire on my wrists.The

HaydeeStolen blood. Mine.The words landed in the shrine, and everything I thought I understood rearranged itself around them.Tara-Lee's pregnancy. The bond-sickness that had dropped me in the training yard. The fevers that took me every winter and no other servant. The bruises in the crook of my arm. Eighteen years of waking dizzy and gray, of a cup drawn from me in the dark while I slept. They had not been taking my blood only to keep me weak. They had been saving it. Building something out of it. Building an heir out of the girl they called nothing."There is no child," I said. "You made one. Out of me."Tara-Lee laughed, high and bright, her bleeding hand still on the altar."Grown," she said, "from the only blood that could carry it." She looked at Cole, and all the tears and trembling were gone, and what was left was hunger. "Your father understood, even if you never did. The Moongale line was the only blood

HaydeeI woke in a Silvercrest bed, in the house that had made me a slave, and my mother was breathing in the bed beside mine.That was the first thing I reached for, before my own hands, before the ache that had hollowed me out from the inside. Carmen. Alive. Thin as a bundle of sticks under the blankets, her wrists wrapped where the silver had grown into them, her breath a thin rattle. But her chest rose and fell. And rose and fell.I had a mother. After eighteen years of grieving a woman I invented, I had a living one, sleeping an arm's length away. I lay there and watched her breathe until I trusted it, counting the rise and fall the way other children must count sheep, and something in my chest that had been clenched my whole life loosened by a fraction. I had saved her. Out of everything done to me and taken from me, I had reached into death and pulled my own mother out by the wrist. No one could take that one from me.Then

HaydeeBloodpine did not look like a place that had ever betrayed anyone.That was the first thing I held against it.White stone, scrubbed pale as bone. Corridors where every candle stood the same height and every servant moved without sound. No dust dared settle here. No voice rose. After the noise of Silvercrest and the dark of Nightfall, Bloodpine met me with the hush of a held breath, and I did not trust a house so quiet.Carmen's warning rode through the gates with me. Bloodpine betrayed us first. My mother had climbed out of eighteen years of darkness to say those four words, then sank again before I could ask her what they meant. I carried them into a hall that smelled of beeswax and cold stone, and every polished surface in it seemed to answer me. Not us. Surely not us.Lucien gave me a wing of my own.Attendants who never met my eyes and never let a cup run dry. Guards at my door who bowed as though I alre