บททั้งหมดของ Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: บทที่ 71 - บทที่ 80

Ginni had been a servant her whole life, and a servant learns the bones of a house fast. She followed the folded notes the way she followed everything, quietly, keeping to the walls. A laundry girl carried them to a page, and the page carried them into the east wing, into the old family corridors where servants were not meant to walk, and Ginni went anyway, because Haydee had asked her to listen, and listening was the one thing she had left to give.She found the room by the light under its door, and the voice through it stopped her cold."We cannot move until the Rite breaks him." A woman's voice, low and even. "My brother spent his whole life believing the law would hand him everything. Let the stone reject him. Let the girl refuse him. When Bloodpine has no consort and no crown, the pack will remember there was another Roux all along. One who was passed over. One who would never have let it come to this."Ginni pressed to the ga

HaydeeThe Rite saved its cruelest offering for the man who had the least to hide.Hunter had already given at the Trial of Humility. He had offered Nightfall's protection with no strings, and I thought his price was paid. The Moonstone thought otherwise. When it turned its cold light on Hunter Grear a second time, the old meaning that burned off the glass for Pell to read made the whole Nightfall delegation go rigid where they stood."The Rite is not satisfied," Pell said, unhappy. "It has weighed this claimant's offering and found it too easy. Protection costs a strong wolf little. The stone demands the thing that would cost him everything." He swallowed. "It asks Alpha Grear to surrender his claim to Nightfall itself, his pack, his rule, his name, if the Moon-crowned should ask it. It asks him to hold his whole life out, and let her take it or leave it."I understood in that moment exactly what the stone had reached for, and i

Nightfall settled its oldest quarrels in a hole in the ground.The wolf pit lay beneath the black and gold hall, a round earthen sink the width of a barn, its floor dark with old stains no one had ever scrubbed out. This was how wolves chose their Alphas before there were laws or accords or a girl like me to complicate it. Two wolves went down into the dark. One came up. That was the whole of the law, and it was a law I was forbidden to touch.They set me at the rim, Cole at my shoulder, and made it clear in the old cold words: if the Moonborn queen breathed so much as a thread of power into that pit, the challenge was void and Hunter forfeited his rule by my hand. My love could kill him here as surely as Oren's teeth. So I stood at the edge and held still, and holding still turned out to be the hardest thing anyone had ever asked of me.Hunter went down into the dark in his own skin, stripped to the waist, and Oren went down after him, and the two of them shift

HaydeeWe got the silver-eyed boy out of the tunnels and into a warm room in Nightfall's healer wing, and there, in the light, I learned what Rourke had truly been building in the dark under a good man's house.Old Fenna examined him, and I read the blood in him with my own new sense, and between us we put together a horror I had not let myself imagine.The child was not Moonborn. He had not been born with the gift the way I was, the way my mother was, the way the line ran. He had been given it. Made to carry it. Someone had taken the blood they drew out of me, out of a Moongale heir, and forced it into a common wolf-pup's veins, over and over, season after season, until the boy's own blood forgot what it had been and started trying to become mine."He is not a harvest," I said, and my voice did not sound like mine. "Fenna. He is a crop. This is what the bleeding was for, all of it, mine and theirs. Rourke is not selling my blood

HaydeeTara-Lee lost the birth and won the war in the same hour, and she did it with a name.She could not hold the child, so she named her instead. Selene, loud enough for the whole Bloodpine court crowded at the door to hear it and carry it out. A moon name. And then, spent and bleeding and shining with a triumph that had nothing to do with love, she made her real move."She is Cole Shade's daughter," Tara-Lee said. "Born of the woman he chose as his Luna. Let the north remember that when it decides whose the child is."Cole was in the doorway. I watched the words land on him."That is a lie," he said, flat and hard and true, to the whole listening court. "I never completed a bond with that woman. I never lay with her. Whatever she grew in a hunter's cellar, she did not grow it with me, and every wolf who knows how a claim is made knows I am telling the truth."And it did not matter. That was the horror Cole disco