Todos os capítulos de Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: Capítulo 61 - Capítulo 70

HaydeeThe silver in the floor found Tara-Lee and climbed her like ivy up a wall, and the whole hall watched the oldest law in the north reach out and name the blood inside her its own.She let it. She stood in the center of a thousand enemies with her hood down and the ritual light crawling up her swollen body, and she smiled as though the moon itself had risen to announce her."You all saw it." Her voice carried to the rafters. "Your own Rite. Your own sacred floor. It reached past your crowned orphan and found me. It found the child I carry." She laid both hands on the great curve of herself. "Because the true Moonborn blood in this hall is not in Haydee Moongale any longer. It is here. My heir. And by your own ancient law, blood has standing at this Rite. You cannot crown her over the head of a Moonborn child your own floor has this moment acknowledged."The hall erupted. A thousand wolves come to crown one queen, and the gro

HaydeeThe hall came apart around me, and I did not let it take me with it.A thousand wolves on their feet at once, shouting, some for my head and some for Tara-Lee's and some for no reason at all except that the ground of the whole north had tilted under them in the space of one sentence. Bloodpine guards moved without orders. Somewhere a woman shrieked that I had cursed the coronation. And in the center of it I stood with my hand still warm from my enemy's belly, the roar breaking over me like surf, and I did the thing the old Haydee could never have done.I let them see the noise did not frighten me.I lifted one hand, slow, palm out, and held it there, and waited. Not shouting over them. Waiting. And one by one, the way a room quiets when it notices the calmest person in it has not moved, the hall began to still, because the silver in my hair caught the moonstone light and reminded every wolf there what I had become.

HaydeeI had put Tara-Lee in a tower to silence her. Within three days she had made the tower the loudest room in Bloodpine.She did not need to leave it. She only needed to be seen from it. She carried her meals to the window and let them go cold there, untouched, so the servants below would spread word that the poor caged mother was starving herself for grief. She wept at the hours when the corridors ran busiest, loud enough to climb the stairwell. She stood at the barred window with both hands cradled under her belly and her face turned up to the light like a saint in a cheap painting, and she made certain every wolf who crossed the yard looked up and saw a woman heavy with child, weeping alone behind bars.She was good at it. That was the thing I kept running into. Tara-Lee Rainhart had spent her whole life learning how to be pitied, and confinement had handed her the finest stage she ever stood on.The rumors moved faster th

HaydeeThe Rite did not only ask me to marry. It asked me to judge.They called it the Trial of Mercy, though there was little mercy in its design. On the third morning they cleared the judgement floor, set the Moonstone at the head of it breathing its cold light, and brought me three prisoners in chains, one from each of the three packs whose Alphas wanted to wed me. Every soul in that hall understood the true test. It was not the prisoners being judged. It was me.I saw it in the three of them the moment the prisoners were led in. Cole, Hunter and Lucien, each wearing the same quiet certainty, that the woman he was courting would not humiliate his house before the north. Each had a prisoner of his own blood on that floor. Each expected me to remember whose goodwill I needed. They had all forgotten what I was before I was worth courting, and how much a judgement is worth when it is bought.The first was a Nightfall man, gray-bea

HaydeeThe Rite had cracked a thing in Lucien Roux that a hundred years of Bloodpine winters never had, and he came looking for me before he had learned how to close it.I found him in the cold hall where the Moonstone sat, hours after the testing floor emptied. He stood in front of the stone with his hands clasped behind him and his spine straight, the way he always stood, but the mask he wore over everything had slipped a hairsbreadth, and through the gap I saw a man I had never once been allowed to see."You saw it," he said, without turning. "What the stone made of my future. You saw the woman I would build.""I saw it.""I have stood here since, trying to decide whether it lied." A long pause. "It did not. That is the trouble. I looked at that hollow woman on the throne and I knew her, because I have been building her in my head since I was a boy. I only never let myself see her finished."He turned then. And L