All Chapters of Rejected by the Alpha Hockey Captain And Then Claimed By His: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Rosalie's POVI noticed the maid on the second day, mostly because I'd gotten good, over two years of being watched and whispered about, at sensing exactly when someone's attention lingered a beat too long to be accidental.She was young, dark-haired, carrying a basket of linens down the corridor outside our guest quarters with the kind of practiced casualness that would have fooled anyone who hadn't spent two years learning to read a room full of people pretending not to look at her.I caught her eyes for half a second before she dropped her gaze and hurried past, and something cold settled low in my stomach that had nothing to do with the corridor's draft."Elias," I said that evening, once he'd returned from another brutal morning of solo training in the yard, "I think someone's watching me."He went very still, the way he always did when something threatened my safety, all the careful ease sliding off him in an instant. "What makes you say that?""A maid. I've seen her three times

Rosalie's POV The quarters were small. Smaller than I'd let myself expect, even after Magnus's ruling made it clear exactly how little welcome either of us had actually earned. One room, mostly, a narrow bed, a washstand, a single window overlooking the training yard. No sitting room. No private hearth beyond the small iron stove in the corner. Nothing like the royal wing I'd once, in another life, imagined myself occupying as Luna, the wide windows, the private gardens, the wardrobe rooms bigger than this entire space combined. I unpacked what little I owned in under ten minutes. A second dress. A cloak. The plain silver ring that never left my finger anymore, though I still hadn't decided what, exactly, wearing it meant. I set each item down with a kind of grim, methodical precision, cataloguing the space the way I'd learned to catalogue everything since the altar, with the cold, clear-eyed accounting of someone determined not to be surprised by her own circumstances twice. T

Elias's POVCoach Reyes ran the first drill without preamble, no easing hopefuls into the pace the way I remembered other coaches doing back when I was young enough to still be counted among them. Full-ice scrimmage, mixed lines, evaluation starting the second the puck dropped.I let my body do what six years of border skirmishes and drills far more dangerous than hockey had trained into muscle memory. Controlled strides, economical movement, reading the ice a half-second ahead of wherever the puck was actually headed rather than chasing it after the fact. It came back faster than I expected, not like riding a bicycle, exactly, more like remembering a language I'd never actually stopped thinking in, even six years removed from speaking it out loud.I felt the shift in the rink before I consciously registered its cause. A pass I read early and intercepted clean. A gap in the defensive line I exploited without needing to think about it. By the third rotation, I noticed Coach Reyes's cli

Rosalie's POVThe pup found me first, three days after the corridor encounter with Easton, while I was sitting alone in the small courtyard garden trying to convince myself that fresh air counted as a productive use of an otherwise idle afternoon.She couldn't have been more than six, all gap-toothed grin and unbrushed hair, marching directly up to the bench where I sat with the fearless confidence only very young children ever seemed to possess."Are you the lady who fell in the scary hole?" she asked, tilting her head, studying me with open, guileless curiosity that carried absolutely none of the calculated cruelty I'd grown accustomed to from the adults around her.I blinked, caught entirely off guard, something startled and warm cracking through the careful composure I'd been maintaining for days. "I... yes. I suppose I am.""Was it scary?" She climbed up onto the bench beside me without waiting for permission, swinging her legs, entirely unbothered by whatever whispered rumors ha

Rosalie's POVI lay awake long after Elias's breathing settled into the slow, even rhythm of real sleep, staring at the dark ceiling, chasing the feeling I'd been carefully not naming since the moment my fingers had lingered too long near his jaw.It wasn't gratitude. I made myself be honest about that much, alone in the dark where no one could witness the admission or use it against me later. Gratitude was simple, clean, the kind of feeling I understood completely, he'd saved my life, protected me with a marriage that cost him considerably more than it benefited him, and I was grateful, genuinely, for every bit of it.This wasn't that.This was lower, and hotter, and considerably more inconvenient, an ache that lived somewhere beneath my ribs and refused to be reasoned with, that had settled into my chest the moment his voice had gone rough saying my name and hadn't fully left since. I wanted him.Admitting it, even silently, even alone in the dark with no one to hear it, felt like s