All Chapters of His Rejected Mate, Her Secret Twins : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

POV: ImogenThe Sydney sunrise had no respect for blackout curtains.By six-fifteen, pale gold light was already pushing through the gap in the twins' bedroom window and landing across Declan's face with the cheerful persistence of a force that had never once been told no. He scrunched his nose. Pulled his blanket higher. Kept snoring.Imogen stood in the doorway with her tea going cold and her patience doing the same."Hayley. Declan." Pleasant. Measured. The voice of a woman who had not already been awake for forty minutes was running through every possible way today could go wrong. "Up. Now."Nothing.She walked in, pulled the blanket off Declan in one clean motion, and watched him sit bolt upright with his amber eyes wide and his blonde hair pointing in four directions."I'm awake," he announced."Wonderful news." She moved to Hayley's bed.Her daughter was already sitting up, dark hair tangled, those grey eyes fixed on Imogen with a quiet focus that made the morning feel briefly

POV: ImogenSilvercrest Academy looked exactly like the kind of school that expected good things from you.The buildings were sandstone and dark timber, generous and unhurried, set back from a sweeping coastal lawn that caught the morning breeze off the water. Established trees lined the path from the car park to the main entrance. The whole campus carried that quiet confidence that came not from trying to impress anyone but from simply never having needed to.Imogen walked the twins toward the kindergarten block with one hand loosely holding Hayley's and the other keeping half an eye on Declan, who had spotted a painted yellow line along the path and was treating it as the edge of a deadly cliff. He walked it heel to toe, arms out, wobbling dramatically on the straight sections, which defeated the entire purpose but appeared to bring him significant satisfaction.She noticed the looks anyway.A cluster of parents near the kindergarten gate had the body language of those pretending

POV: ImogenThe yard was chaos.Not the loud, manageable chaos of children at play but the kind that happened when adults lost their composure and children caught it like a cold. Parents were talking over each other near the gate. Two kindergarten teachers were trying to create some kind of perimeter with their bodies and failing. A woman in gym clothes was on her phone, her voice carrying the focused urgency of an important call. Imogen cut through all of it.She reached Declan first. He was still where she had seen him from the corner, planted and certain, his small jaw set in an expression she recognized because she had seen it on someone else for years before forcing herself to stop looking. His eyes had settled back to amber. The claws were gone. To anyone watching without context, he looked like a perfectly ordinary five-year-old boy who happened to be standing very still.Then she saw Hayley.Her daughter was on the ground behind him, knees pulled to her chest, both hands pres

POV: ImogenShe didn't answer it.Standing beside the car, she let the Melbourne number ring until it stopped. The phone burned in her hand. Seven rings. Then voicemail. Then silence, broken only by the blood rushing in her ears. She waited.No message came through.Inside the car, Hayley had gone very still, the way she did when she sensed something she hadn't been invited to know. Her grey eyes found Imogen through the window. Wide. Uncertain. Her face crumpled, and she started to cry. Hayley had never been able to separate herself from what the people around her were feeling.Quietly. That was the worst part. Hayley cried the way she did everything, without performance, without demands. Silent tears tracked down her face as she looked at her mother through the glass, absorbing whatever Imogen was feeling without knowing what to do with it.Imogen pulled open the door and got in the car."Hey." She reached back and cupped Hayley's face, brushing the tears away with her thumb. "I'm

POV: LachlanThe view from the forty-third floor of Nightshade's Melbourne headquarters was designed to remind visitors where they stood in relation to everything else.The city stretched below in every direction, glass and steel catching the late afternoon light. Lachlan Pierce stood at the window with his back to the room, hands clasped behind him, and gave it almost none of his attention.He was listening to Rhys talk, which required focus because Rhys delivered information the way some people delivered furniture: methodically, piece by piece, in an order that made perfect sense to him and nobody else."Fourteen incidents across three states in six weeks," Rhys said.He was thirty-four, built like a man designed for physical confrontation who had leaned into it professionally, with close-cropped dark hair and the stillness of a person who had learned early that the most dangerous people in any room were the quiet ones. He was Nightshade's head enforcer and the best Lachlan had ever