All Chapters of Rejected, Then Wanted by My Triplet Alphas: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Neva's POV The hall kept moving around me even after the ruling, elders gathering their papers, warriors murmuring in low clusters, the ordinary business of a council session closing out as though the ground had not just been pulled from beneath my feet entirely. I stood alone in the aisle and watched it happen, and something in my chest that had held steady through nine years of cruelty finally began to strain against its own carefully guarded weight. I would not cry. I had made that vow at ten years old, whispered into a pillow in a room with a mop shelf over my head, and I intended to keep it now more than ever, in front of the very family that had just doubled my chains and forged my dead mother's signature to do it. Vivienne was still watching me. I made myself look away from her first, a small victory I needed more than she would ever know, and my eyes found Lucian instead, standing ri

Neva's POVIt took me three days to find her.I asked Marlow first, careful and roundabout, describing the old woman as best I could remember her, hunched and small, quick despite her age, gone through the side doors before anyone thought to stop her. Marlow's face did something complicated at the description, a flicker of recognition swiftly buried, and she claimed not to know who I meant. I did not believe her, but I did not press either, not yet, because something in the careful blankness of her expression told me pressing would only close a door I might need open later.I found the answer instead the way I found most answers in this house, by watching who avoided a subject too carefully. A kitchen maid, younger than me and far less practiced at guarding her own face, mentioned in passing that old Wren kept to herself out past the tree line, had done for years now, never bothered anyone, best left alone if you asked her.Wren. Not a name I reco

Neva's POVI did not ask Dorian for help after all.I told myself, lying awake through another restless night, that I would find a way to reach him properly, choose my words carefully, present the theft as a partnership rather than a plea he could refuse. But by the second night without sleep, patience had worn thin enough that I abandoned the plan entirely and decided simply to try the vault myself first, quietly, alone, before risking anything as fragile as trust with a man who had once torn a mask from my face in front of the whole pack.I waited until the house had gone fully silent, well past midnight, past even the latest patrol change I had learned to track by the shift in footsteps along the outer corridors over these past few weeks. Then I slipped from my room, my heart hammering hard enough to hurt, and made my way toward Rourke's study on legs that did not feel entirely steady beneath me.The warding pressed against my skin the moment I

Neva's POVWe fell into a strange, uneasy rhythm after that first night in the vault, meeting well past midnight when the house had gone fully quiet, working side by side over documents neither of us fully understood yet. Dorian brought folders from his father's study one at a time, careful never to remove enough that Rourke might notice a pattern, and I brought my own particular gift for numbers, cross referencing shipping dates against payment records until slowly, painfully, a fuller picture began emerging from the wreckage of nineteen years of careful lies. We rarely spoke of the daughter's name we had found uncrossed at the bottom of that execution order, both of us circling it carefully in conversation the way you circle a wound too raw to touch directly, though I caught him watching me sometimes across the table with an expression that told me he was thinking of it just as often as I was.He also, without ever once asking whether I wanted it, began bringing

Neva's POVI found Mara alone in the school library again, the same corner table where I had first pressed her about the dress weeks ago, and this time I did not sit down across from her politely before I laid the folder on the table.She looked up, startled, then wary the moment she saw my face. "What is that.""Proof." I opened it slowly, letting her see the pages inside one at a time, copies I had made carefully over the past week from assignments I had once written for her, essays she had submitted word for word under her own name in three separate classes across two years. "Every piece of schoolwork you ever paid me to write, cross referenced against what you actually turned in. Dates, teacher's names, matching phrasing highlighted in case anyone doubts the pattern." I had spent two years watching her collect praise for work my own hands had produced, watching teachers smile at her and never once look twice at me carrying trays past their classrooms,