Alle Kapitel von Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: Kapitel 51 – Kapitel 60

HaydeeThe knife went into my mother's heart, and I died a little with her. I heard myself make a sound I had not known a body could make. I reached the top step with my hands out to catch a corpse.Carmen did not fall.The blade stood in her chest to the hilt, and her blood ran down the black stone in a dark sheet, and she did not slump, did not gray, did not go. Her eyes found mine over Tara-Lee's shoulder, wide and astonished and living, as though death had come knocking and been turned from the door by a law older than itself.Moonborn blood, spilled on Moonborn stone. Tara-Lee had said it like a killing. It was a key.The throne drank my mother's blood, and it woke under all of us.A sound rose out of the ground, low and enormous, the note a mountain might make if a mountain could grieve. The broken seat split down its center. The steps beneath my boots drew apart, and cold silver light poured up out of the dar

HaydeeThey gave Cole Shade a healer's cot in the heart of Nightfall, in the house of the enemy who had spent a whole season wanting him dead, and not one of us missed the strangeness of it.Old Fenna worked over him the way she worked over everything, without softness and without pause, and I stood at the foot of the cot and watched the man who had thrown me away on the ceremony floor lose his color hour by hour.The silver had gone into his shoulder shallow. It should not have been killing him. But silver in an Alpha does not stay where it lands. It travels. The black had climbed from the wound up the cords of his neck and down beneath his ribs, and his breath had started to whistle, and the great arrogant heat of him, the Alpha weight that had filled every room I ever hated him in, was guttering out in front of me like a lamp gone dry.Fenna set down her cloth, wiped her hands, and did not lie to me. She never had."The

ColeCole Shade woke on his second morning in a Nightfall sickroom and reached for her before his eyes opened, the way he had reached every dawn for a season.The bond did not answer.He lay still a long while, telling himself it was the poison, the strange bed, the silver still working its way out of his blood. Then he stopped lying. He knew what he had watched her do. He had been awake for the end of it, awake enough to understand that she had taken the tether between them in both hands and remade it into a thing with a lock, and set the key somewhere he would never reach.He reached anyway. A man worries a missing tooth with his tongue a hundred times a day, knowing the gap is there, unable to leave it be. Cole reached down the bond over and over that morning, into the place where Haydee had lived at the edge of his mind since the moon first tied them, and every time his hand closed on nothing.He had done this to her.

HaydeeThey dressed me for a crown before they let me ask a single question.Bloodpine received me the way you receive a treasure and a prisoner at once, which are nearer the same thing than anyone rich will admit. Maids I had never met undid my travel clothes with soft careful hands. They washed the dead forest out of my hair and left the silver in it, because the silver, one of them whispered, was a sign. They wound me into grey Bloodpine silk worth more than the whole orphan quarters I had starved in. And through all of it not one of them met my eyes, because you do not look a queen in the eye, and you do not look a thing you are pricing in the eye either, and I had become both inside a single season.That was the joke the whole north kept telling and never once heard itself tell. Eighteen years they had called me worthless. A weak wolf, a kitchen orphan, a nothing to be bled in winter and forgotten by spring. Now the same wolves who

HaydeeThey gathered the whole north into one hall to watch me be worth something.Bloodpine's coronation hall could hold a thousand wolves and held near that many now, ranged along both walls, and every eye swung to me on the dais the moment I stepped in. I wore their grey silk and their moonstone, and I held my face still as the ceremonial glass, because I knew what these people did with any crack they found.The packs came in by law, in order, announced at the great doors.Silvercrest first, in the silver and white I had worn as a servant, the colors that had thrown me on a floor. Cole Shade led them up the center of the hall in a grey formal coat, and he did not swagger the way the old Cole would have. He walked like a man carrying something heavy toward a place he had decided to set it down.Nightfall second, in black and deep gold, and my breath caught before I could stop it. Hunter came at their head. He did not gla