All Chapters of Rejected: The Alpha's Fatal Mistake: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

WrenThe ride to the summit grounds took two full days, and Wren spent most of the first one going over border-dispute logistics with Ezra so thoroughly that by the time they made camp that evening, she suspected she could have recited Ashborne's grazing-rights complaint from memory in her sleep."You're overpreparing," Ezra said, watching her go through the intelligence reports for the third time by firelight, Rennick and Dara already asleep a few yards off, the rest of the honor guard taking watch in shifts around the small clearing they'd chosen. "I've seen you do a lot of things in five years, Wren. Overprepare isn't usually one of them.""There's a first time for everything.""Mm." He didn't push, which by now she understood was his particular way of pushing anyway — the silence doing the work his words weren't going to. "This isn't about the grazing dispute, is it.""It's partially about the grazing dispute.""Partially." He let that sit in the firelight a moment. "Look. Whateve

KadeShe walked through those doors like she'd never once in her life been anything other than exactly what she was now, and it took Kade's mind a full three seconds to reconcile the woman in front of him with the girl he'd spent five years failing to stop thinking about.Older, obviously — the softness of nineteen worn away into something leaner, more deliberate, every movement carrying the particular economy of someone who'd learned, the hard way, that wasted motion could cost you your life. Her hair was different, darker somehow, or maybe that was just the hall's low light, pulled back in a style that had nothing ceremonial or decorative about it, purely practical, the hairstyle of someone who'd long since stopped dressing for anyone's approval but her own. She wore Nightshade's colors like she'd been born to them instead of having built the entire pack from six starving strangers and a cabin with more moss than roof — a dark, unadorned coat, the crescent-moon seal visible at her c

WrenThe rogue reports came up almost by accident, buried in the middle of Ashborne's border dispute presentation — a passing mention of increased incursions along three separate territorial lines, all bearing a mark none of the assembled delegates could immediately identify, though Wren's stomach had gone cold the instant the herald described it.A crescent moon, inverted, burned into leather.Ashenmoor."Nightshade's had six documented incursions bearing that mark in the past two years alone," Wren said, standing to address the hall before she'd fully decided to, aware of every eye in the room shifting toward her — including, unmistakably, Kade's. "We believed it to be a revived symbol from a pack destroyed forty years ago. Ashenmoor. If it's appearing on Ashborne and Ironfang's borders now as well, this isn't isolated incidents. This is coordinated, and it's spreading."A ripple went through the assembled Alphas — Ashborne's representative, an older woman Wren didn't recognize, exc

Kade He didn't remember the walk back to his own quarters. That, at least, was becoming a familiar enough sensation that it barely troubled him anymore — another lost stretch of minutes, another gap in his own accounting of himself, filed away alongside all the others he'd stopped bothering to track. Seraphine was awake when he came in, seated by the window with a book she wasn't actually reading, and one look at his face told her, apparently, everything she needed to know about how the evening had gone. "You told her." Not a question. "I told her." She set the book down, unread, and studied him for a long moment before she spoke again. "How do you feel." "Honestly? I don't know." He sat heavily in the chair across from her, the satchel of reports forgotten at his feet. "Lighter, somehow. And considerably worse. Both at once, which doesn't make any sense, but there it is." "That sounds about right, for something you've been carrying five years." Seraphine's voice stayed even, ca

KadeThe expedition set out three days after the summit formally concluded, delayed by the practical business of coordinating supplies and guards from five packs' worth of overlapping bureaucracy, and Kade spent most of those three days in a state he was beginning to recognize as his new permanent condition: simultaneously dreading and anticipating the exact same thing.Seraphine saw him off at Blackthorn's gates the morning they left, Torren already mounted and waiting a respectful distance off, the small contingent of Blackthorn wolves assigned to the expedition falling into formation behind them."Four weeks, they're estimating," she said, adjusting something on his pack that didn't need adjusting, a small, practical gesture that had nothing to do with logistics and everything to do with needing something to do with her hands. "Ashenmoor and back, assuming the ruins don't take longer to properly survey than anyone's accounting for.""Four weeks." He tested the number, feeling its w