All Chapters of Rejected, Then Wanted by My Triplet Alphas: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Neva's POVArdenfall swallowed me whole within a single day, and I had never once in my life been so grateful to disappear.Eight million people moved through those streets without once glancing twice at a pale, exhausted young woman dragging a single bag behind her. Nine years in Nightpine had taught me to read every face in a room, to calculate exactly how much danger each stranger represented before they ever came close enough to matter. Here, nobody looked long enough for me to calculate anything at all. The city simply absorbed me, one more anonymous body among millions, and after everything I had survived to reach it, that anonymity felt more like safety than any locked door ever had. I walked the first few blocks in a daze, half expecting warriors to materialize from the crowd at any moment, and slowly, gradually, allowed myself to believe that perhaps, for the first time since the night of the ascension party, no one in this city knew my name or cared to le

Neva's POVRuth's warning about hospitals settled into my chest like a stone I could not quite swallow, and yet she offered no further explanation, simply returning to the sheets she had been folding as though she had commented on nothing more significant than the weather. I studied the careful set of her shoulders, the deliberate way she avoided my eyes while folding, and understood that whatever knowledge Ruth carried about girls in my particular situation, she had no intention of surrendering it easily or without cause."I need this job," I said finally, when the silence stretched too long to bear on its own. "And I need somewhere to stay. If you're offering both, I'm not going to ask too many questions about how you know what you seem to know.""Good policy," Ruth said, not looking up from her folding. "I won't ask you too many either. Seems fair, given the circumstances."She hired me properly that same week, a real position at the laundry ra

Neva's POVI had gone to the bus depot for something almost embarrassingly ordinary, a package Ruth needed collected from the shipping counter, cloth for the laundry she had ordered from a supplier three towns over. It should have been the safest errand imaginable, a crowded public building full of strangers too busy with their own lives to notice one more pregnant woman moving through the rush hour chaos. I had come to enjoy these small errands over these past weeks, brief tastes of an ordinary life I had never once been permitted to have inside Nightpine's walls, and something in the mundane simplicity of standing in a shipping line had felt, for a few precious minutes, almost like healing.I felt him before I saw him.The sensation crawled up the back of my neck the way it always did now, some instinct sharpened by months of careful vigilance, and I turned casually, scanning the crowded depot for whatever had triggered the warning. Nothing seemed obviou

Cassian's POVBeing nobody turned out to be an education I had never once expected to need.I had spent twenty one years as a Kane, my name alone opening doors, softening tempers, drawing smiles from strangers who wanted nothing more than proximity to power. I had never once, across two decades of that easy, borrowed influence, stopped to consider what it might actually feel like to walk into a room and be judged solely on my own merit, without a family crest smoothing the way ahead of me before I even opened my mouth. I understood, somewhere around my third week wandering human cities with nothing but a bad photograph and a duffel bag of clothes, exactly how much of my life had depended entirely on a title I no longer possessed.Rankless, I was simply a man. Unremarkable, easily dismissed, the kind of stranger clerks and travelers barely glanced at twice before returning to whatever occupied their attention more fully. It should have infuriated me, this s

Neva's POV The bleeding started without warning on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday, sharp cramping followed by a wetness I felt immediately in my underclothes, and terror overrode every one of Ruth's careful warnings the moment I understood what was happening. Every ounce of the careful discipline I had cultivated across these past months, the patient, methodical way I had learned to navigate danger without ever letting panic drive my decisions, evaporated entirely in that single terrified instant, replaced by nothing but the desperate, animal need to protect the life inside me. I did not think about her rules, about back street clinics paid for in cash, about whatever careful precautions she had spent months teaching me to follow. I simply ran, one hand pressed against my stomach, toward the nearest walk-in clinic I could find, three blocks from the laundry, its lights still burning despite the late hour. The intake nurse took one look at me and moved with