All Chapters of Rejected, Then Wanted by My Triplet Alphas: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

Neva's POVI heard my own voice before I understood I was speaking."Deny it."Selene did not move. She stood in the middle of her own hall with Vivienne's hand still resting on her wrist, her face the color of old candle wax, and she did not look at me."Selene. Deny it. Tell me she is lying."My mother opened her mouth. I watched the muscles in her throat strain, watched her chest rise as though she were lifting something enormous. A single dark bead of blood welled at the edge of her nostril and slid slowly toward her lip. No sound came out. Not one."She cannot," Vivienne said, very gently. "She will bleed before she says it. And she will bleed before she says the opposite. I am sorry, Neva. This is the cruelest part of the oath. It does not only stop us from telling the truth. It stops us from correcting the lies that grew up around it.""I did not ask you.""No. You did not."I turned on her. Every

Neva's POVMarlow found me at the kitchen table that evening, staring at a cup of tea I had not touched in two hours.The house had gone strangely quiet. Dorian was upstairs with a legal team on a satellite line Ironmoor had somehow kept alive. Lucian had both children in the nursery. Cassian was somewhere I was careful not to be. I had not spoken to him since the pantry, and every time I closed my eyes I heard one word in his voice, small and bright and terrifying, and my whole body turned to ice.I did not want to think about that word. I did not want to think about anything. I wanted to be a column of numbers in a ledger, something that added up, something that could be checked and balanced and filed away."May I sit," Marlow said.I nodded. She lowered herself into the chair across from me with the slow care of a woman whose knees had given up complaining years ago. She had her old leather bag in her lap. She set it on the tabl

Dorian's POVAt three in the morning, with the power still cut and the generator coughing in the cellar, my analyst finally found the rider.I had been working in Selene's war room for nine hours. Neva was asleep upstairs, finally, with Wren and Rowan curled against her on a mattress dragged into the nursery. I had stood in the doorway for a long time watching the three of them breathe. Then I had come back down to the maps and the cold coffee and the one thing I knew how to do, which was to open ledgers until something bled.I had read every crown payment record a hundred times. I knew the dates, the sums, the pattern of deposits stretching back nineteen years. What I had never seen was the contract underneath. The payments were the visible tip. Somewhere in a bank vault, someone had signed an agreement that told my father exactly what he was being paid for.My analyst had spent the night inside the archive of the northern bank. Now her

Neva's POVThe horror did not arrive the way I expected.I had braced for something loud. A scream, a collapse, a long dark fall like the one I had taken in Selene's kitchen. Instead it came sideways, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, while I stood in the nursery doorway watching Lucian braid my daughter's hair.He was terrible at it. His big hands fumbled with the thin pale strands, and Wren sat patiently on the stool in front of him, instructing him in a firm, grave voice. "Over, Uncle Lucian. No. The other over." He tried again. The braid slid sideways. He laughed under his breath, helpless and warm, and glanced up.Our eyes met, and something tugged hard behind my breastbone.It was the thread. The one I had felt in the kitchen, the night he baked honey bread. The thin bright pull of something I had been told was cut and gone. It stirred and tightened, and my whole body answered it, heat and ache and a want so sharp it al

Neva's POVAt dawn, the siege simply ended.I woke to the sound of engines starting, dozens of them at once, rolling away down the road. By the time I reached the upstairs window, the black vehicles that had ringed the estate for four days were pulling out in a long, silent column. The hired crown wolves had melted back into the trees. Rourke's own convoy followed them, unhurried, as though a bell had rung.No shots. No messages. Nobody came to explain."I do not like it," Rask said, standing beside me in the war room an hour later with his arms crossed. "A hundred wolves do not withdraw from a won position without orders. Somebody above Rourke has told him to stand down.""The stay expired at five," Dorian said. "Legally he could have walked through that gate and taken them.""And he did not.""Which means he was told not to."I stared at the empty road on the monitor Hild had rigged up. My stomach had settled