All Chapters of Rejected, Then Wanted by My Triplet Alphas: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Neva's POVThe door unlocked at noon, and I understood the moment I stepped into the hallway that something had already gone wrong.Nobody looked at me the way they used to. Used to meant invisible, meant a servant girl passing with a tray, eyes sliding off me like water off glass. Now every head turned. Every conversation stopped and restarted in a lower register the second I passed, and I felt the weight of two hundred stares land on my stomach before they ever reached my face.I made it as far as the great hall before someone said it out loud."There she is." A woman's voice, sharp with delight. "The little charity mouse, all grown up."I kept walking. Nine years of practice had taught me that stopping only feeds them.Someone spat.It landed near my shoe, not on it, which I understood later was deliberate, a warning shot rather than a strike, and I froze anyway because the sound of it, the wet contempt of it, hit

Lucian's POVThe elders' chamber smelled of old wood and older men, and I stood in the center of it with my heart slamming against my ribs and said the only thing I had come to say."I am claiming the child as mine. Publicly. Before this council."Silence answered me first. Then Elder Barrow shifted in his seat, glancing sideways at my father's empty chair as though it might answer for him, and Dorian's hand closed hard around my forearm before I had finished drawing breath for whatever came next."He does not speak for this family," Dorian said."I speak for myself.""You do not have that right yet." Dorian's voice was flat, controlled, the voice he uses when he has already decided how a conversation ends before it begins. "An unmated Alpha cannot claim an heir under pack law. You know this. You have known this since you were twelve years old and sat through the same lessons I did.""Then let the law be wrong for once."

Neva's POVAlpha Rourke Kane came home on a Thursday, and the whole estate changed shape around him before his car had even cleared the gate.I felt it in the staff first, the sudden brittle efficiency, floors scrubbed twice, silence where there had been idle talk. I felt it in Dorian, who went from Alpha to something smaller and tighter the moment word reached him, shoulders squaring like a boy bracing for inspection. I felt it in myself most of all, nine years of instinct rising up out of the ground like cold through a floor, the old reflex to disappear before he noticed me.It did not work this time. There was nowhere left to disappear to.He summoned the whole pack to the great hall by evening, and I stood near the back with Marlow's warning still coiled tight in my chest, and I watched Rourke Kane walk down the center aisle like a man returning to inspect property he had left too long unattended.He looked older than I remembered. Ha

Neva's POVI stopped crying somewhere around midnight, not because the grief had emptied out of me, but because I finally found something more useful to do with my hands.Numbers.I had spent nine years balancing this family's household accounts in secret, correcting Barrow's arithmetic on the sly, doing the triplets' schoolwork problem sets while they slept off whatever they had been doing instead of studying. Numbers were the one thing in this house that had never once lied to me, not because people couldn't twist them, but because a lie in a column always left a seam if you looked closely enough.So I looked closely.I sat cross-legged on the floor of my locked room with a notebook I had begged off a maid, and I began reconstructing nine years of debt from memory. Every figure Barrow had ever mentioned in passing while I swept his office floor. Every interest rate Rourke had cited at dinner to remind me what I owed. Every payment sched

Cassian's POVI found her in the small library off the east wing, curled into a window seat with a book she was not actually reading, and I told myself this time I would get it right."Hey." I leaned against the doorframe, hands in my pockets, working up whatever charm I had left after the week we'd all had. "Mind if I sit?"She did not look up. "Do I have a choice?""You always have a choice. I'm just hoping you pick the one where I don't have to stand here looking pathetic." I tried a smile. It felt wrong on my face, too big for the room, and I saw her flinch slightly at it, and some instinct told me to dial it back and I ignored the instinct, the way I always do, filling silence because silence has never once felt safe to me.I sat down across from her anyway."Listen," I said. "I wanted to say I'm sorry. About the party. About the whole go find a mop line, that was, in hindsight, not my finest material."Her jaw tightened. "Material.""Bad choice of words." I laughed, short and ne