Lahat ng Kabanata ng Rejected, Then Wanted by My Triplet Alphas: Kabanata 161 - Kabanata 169

Dorian's POVNeva brought me the file at six in the morning, and she did not say a single word.She stood in the doorway of the war room in a gray robe, with a thin brown folder pressed against her chest and her pale hair falling loose around her shoulders. She had the look of a woman who has been running a long way in her sleep. Her eyes were enormous. Her hands, wrapped around that folder, were white to the knuckle.I rose from the long table. I did not ask. I only crossed the room, and took the folder out of her hands, and put my other hand against the small of her back, and she let me guide her to a chair as if her legs belonged to someone else."Seraphine gave it to me," she said. It was barely a voice. "At the kitchen table. She said I should know what they were going to do with the boy.""Do not read it again," I said. "I will.""I have to. We have to." Her fingers closed on my sleeve. "Wake them. Your brothers. I do

Cassian's POVNeva gave me the book at four in the morning, and she told me not to perform.It was a thick bound folder, two hundred and eleven pages, tied with plain white cord. She had worked on it for four nights without sleeping, with a pencil behind her ear and her hair in a knot and Dorian bringing her coffee she did not drink. Every page was numbered. Every figure was sourced."You will want to make it a show," she said, standing at the truck window in the dark with her arms wrapped around herself. "You will want to find the line that makes them gasp. Do not. A crowd that is entertained will forget. A crowd that is told the truth in a flat voice, one number at a time, will remember it for the rest of their lives.""Read it like a ledger.""Read it like a man who is tired and does not enjoy it." Her eyes were grey and fierce in the faint light. "You are not there to win. You are there to be believed."I only nodded. Th

Neva's POVI was still standing in Rourke's stripped study, with the word eyes ringing in my ears, when the horn sounded at the gate.It was not an alarm. It was a long, low, formal note, the kind Nightpine's sentries blew only for an arrival of rank, and it rolled through the old house like a bell. Cassian was moving before it had finished. I heard his boots in the corridor and the clatter of the guards falling in behind him, and I went after them, down the black pine staircase and across the great hall where six hundred wolves had risen to their feet only the day before.The front doors stood open on the cold blue dusk. A single long black car waited at the foot of the steps. And in the courtyard, in the light of a dozen torches, every sentry and servant and warrior of Nightpine was kneeling.I stopped on the top step. Cassian's hand closed around my wrist, hard and warm. He did not look at me. He was staring at the car, and his jaw was

Dorian's POVKieran Moonvale left Nightpine at dawn without the children.I learned it from Cassian over the phone, in a flat shaken voice, standing in the kitchen of Selene's house with a cold cup in my hands and Lucian's eyes on my face. The Hand had sat across a table from his sister until nearly four in the morning. When he rose, he had said only that he would return in seven days, and that he would expect an answer. He had not taken the writ out of his coat again. He had not said why.Neva would not tell me what had passed between them. She came home that afternoon pale and silent, with shadows under her eyes like thumbprints, and went straight up to the nursery, and sat on the floor between the two small beds for three hours without a word. When I tried to touch her shoulder, she covered my hand with hers, very gently, and said only, "Not now. Please. I will tell you when I can say it."So I did the one thing I knew how to do.

Cassian's POVI was sick three times before dawn.It was not a fever. Marlow had examined me twice and told me that my body was perfectly sound. It was the other kind of sickness, the kind that comes from knowing a thing too large to swallow. I knelt on the cold tiles of Selene's upstairs bathroom with my forehead against the porcelain, and I thought, over and over, the same single sentence.I stood on a balcony and called her a mop.I had been telling myself for three years that I had done it because I was a coward. A boy with a crowd at his back and a title in his hands, who had reached for the cheapest laugh. That was a sin I could carry. I had built a whole penance around it. But I had not understood the scale of what I was carrying.At three in the morning I washed my face, and put on yesterday's shirt, and went down to the war room, and took the red marker from the tray on the long table. Then I stood in front of the blank board at the end of the room, where Neva had written her