Alle Kapitel von The Alpha Rejected Me, His Father Claimed Me: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 8

The crowd parted for her the way crowds part for something they'd rather not touch; a slow, instinctive drift of bodies angling their shoulders away as she and Nyra pushed toward the amphitheater's edge, dozens of eyes sliding across her and then quickly, carefully, elsewhere.She had expected the humiliation to feel loud. It didn't. It felt like walking through a room where everyone has just stopped talking about you the instant you entered it.A memory surfaced, unbidden: an hour standing in sleet outside the war room two winters ago, waiting for Valthor because he'd asked her to and then forgotten. The apology, when it came, had gone to the men waiting alongside him, not to her. Another followed close behind it; a solstice feast, his hand introducing her to a visiting Alpha as one of the household staff, the phrase so smooth she'd understood even then that he must have practiced it. A hundred moments like that, small enough alone to swallow, arriving all at once now in a flood she

Hollow Court sprawled across a low ridge at the meeting point of three territories, neutral ground by ancient agreement, its great hall built tall enough to seat every allied Alpha in the region beneath one roof without any single pack's banner hanging higher than another's. Aeloria had heard of it all her life and never once seen it, and even exhausted, even hollowed out from the day before, she couldn't quite stop herself from staring as the delegation rolled through its gates, stone halls pale as bone, banners from a dozen packs snapping in a wind that smelled of unfamiliar mountains, servants and guards moving through the courtyard with the brisk, practiced efficiency of a place that hosted gatherings like this one several times a year and had long since perfected the choreography of it.There was no time to stare for long. The moment the carriages stopped, the household staff were pulled immediately into service, folded into Hollow Court's own small army of servants preparing the

Kaelen still hadn't let go of her hand.He stood at his full height now, and the hall that had been loud with banquet chatter only minutes before had gone so still that Aeloria could hear the distant clatter of a kitchen somewhere behind the walls, utterly indifferent to the fact that history was rearranging itself in the room above it."By the old rites," he said, and the hall was so silent that even a King's quiet voice reached every corner of it, "a bond is not a request. It does not ask permission. It does not wait for a convenient season, or a tidy explanation, or the comfort of everyone watching." He paused. "It asked nothing of me thirty years ago, when I met my first Luna. It has asked nothing of me tonight."Somewhere behind her, Aeloria heard a cup hit the floor and shatter. No one moved to clean it up. Every face in that hall was turned toward the second-tier table, dozens of Alphas and dignitaries who had traveled days for polite diplomacy now watching something conside

The banquet ended early.There was no formal announcement of it, simply a slow, uneasy exodus as allied Alphas and their retinues found reasons to retire for the evening, murmuring to each other in low voices that didn't quite manage to be discreet. Aeloria caught fragments of it as she passed, ‘unprecedented’, someone said, and ‘scandal’, and once, from an older woman she didn't recognize, a delighted whisper of ‘I haven't seen anything like this in decades', as though the whole evening were simply the finest entertainment Hollow Court had offered in years.She was ushered away by a steward before she fully understood what was happening, deposited in a small guest chamber off the great hall with instructions to wait, and it was there, sitting alone on the edge of an unfamiliar bed with her heart still hammering, that she heard the raised voices carrying faintly through the wall. The chamber Kaelen had been given, she realized, must share a wall with wherever this argument was happeni