Alle Kapitel von Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: Kapitel 41 – Kapitel 50

Cole did not remember leaving the war room. He remembered the table splitting. Then the wolf had the reins, and the world reached him in torn pieces.The training yard at first light. Frost on the practice posts. He went through them the way a storm goes through wheat. Posts he had driven into that ground with his own hands, snapped off at the root. The weapons rack overturned. The water trough split and bleeding across the frozen dirt. His wolf wanted a throat and found none to close on, only the bond screaming in his chest that something of his was being touched a hundred miles away, and he could not reach it, could not stop it, could do nothing but ruin the earth beneath his own feet.A boy froze in his path. A trainee, fourteen at most, a wooden sword forgotten in his fist.The wolf swung toward him.Somewhere under the fury the man caught the reins. Not the boy, never a child of his own pack. He threw himself sideways and drove his claws through the

HaydeeI had spent my whole life afraid of wolves. No one had taught me to fear men with ledgers.The carriage stopped at a compound with no scent of pack about it. No markers on the posts. No wolves at the gate. Only men. Human men in dark oiled coats, silver at their belts, rifles slung easy across their shoulders, moving through a yard of low stone buildings the way clerks move through a counting-house. Orderly. Bored. At home.They took me out of the carriage by the silver on my wrists. Ginni they led the other way, still weeping, calling my name until a door swallowed the sound.A man waited for me in a cold bright room that stank of iron and lye. Middle-aged, grey at the temples, a face with no cruelty in it and no mercy either, only attention. He considered me the way a man considers a delivery he has been expecting."Talitha Moongale." He said my true name like a line in an account book. "Or Haydee. We hold you und

HaydeeThe lamps died, and the whole compound went mad in the dark.I had spent eighteen years being drained in silence. Now the silence broke everywhere at once. Down every corridor of that place, men who had walked in as Rourke's wolves came apart, the false bonds I had grown for them out of my own blood tearing free of their minds like roots ripped from frozen ground. They howled. They wept. Some of them stopped being anything at all.Rourke did not come apart. Whatever leash tied his men to my blood had never run through him. He was only a man, and men do not break as stolen wolves break. I heard him in the dark, that flat voice climbing at last, hurling orders into the black. Hold the cellar. Drown the east wing. Count what still lived. A fortune was coming apart around him, and he chose the fortune. His boots struck stone and carried him off down the corridor at a run, because a girl cuffed and strapped to a chair was the

HaydeeI had wanted a father my whole life. I built one on cold nights the way a starved child builds a feast in her head, then took him apart by morning so the wanting could not cut me. Now a blind woman in a burning yard had handed me one whole, and he was worse than the blank had ever been.The first Alpha of Bloodpine. Lucien's own blood. My name already inked in a betrothal in his vault.The words would not sit still in me. If they were true, then the man who had courted me with gowns and rooms and cold patient kindness had been courting his own kin. Then the contract binding me to him was not law. It was rot dressed as law.I turned to watch Lucien deny it, because I needed him to.He did."An old woman half-mad from a hunter's cell." His voice had never run so even, and that was how I knew. Lucien raised his voice for nothing. Now he had smoothed every edge off it on purpose. "She smells a Bloodpine trace on

HaydeeCole's word reached me at the waystation before dawn, carried by a Silvercrest scout who could not meet my eyes. Tara-Lee had walked out of the packhouse through a dead guard and a wall of blood, and she had taken my mother with her.I had held Carmen Moongale's hand exactly once. I had poured my own life down into her chest to start her heart and nearly died in the doing of it. One touch, one mother, after eighteen years of a blank where a mother should have been. Now she was gone again, before I had ever heard the sound of her voice awake.Tara-Lee's own messenger came an hour behind the news.Not a wolf. A frightened human boy in Silvercrest livery, sent because a human could cross lines no pack scout would risk, holding a small oilcloth bundle in both hands as though it might bite him."She said to give you this first," he whispered. "So you would believe the rest."I opened it. Inside lay a strip of pale