All Chapters of From Cast-Off Daughter to Lycan Queen: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

“Is something bothering you?” Nathan's voice came from behind me. “Did someone upset you? Don't tell me that scumbag is pestering you again.”The bag split on the seventh hit, right as I turned to answer him.I stared at the tear in the leather, knuckles throbbing, breathing hard. A week of avoiding him, and I still couldn't hit hard enough to make it stop mattering.Beside Nathan stood the person I'd been successfully avoiding all day.Julian.Our eyes met. He didn't look away first.“Running again?” he said, quiet enough that it was almost just for me.“I'm not running. I'm leaving. There's a difference.”“Is there?”It wasn't, and some traitorous part of me knew it — different training times, different routes through the house, a week's worth of careful, deliberate avoidance dressed up as a busy schedule. I didn't have an answer that wouldn't give that away, so I muttered something about needing to shower and made my exit as fast as dignity allowed.Nathan's gaze flicked between the

Within hours, the gates of Ashcroft were in an uproar of shouting and growling. Emilia had done what she did best — turned the Callahan brothers against me all over again.They were there demanding an explanation, all three of them crowded at the gate like their fury alone could force it open. Emilia had apparently gotten so worked up that she couldn't get past me at the boutique that she'd been rushed straight to the pack hospital afterward. But the truth she'd told them, as always, bore almost no resemblance to what had actually happened.In her version, I'd pushed her. I'd hurt the baby. She'd already been having complications for days before that, and my anger, my cruelty, had simply added the stress that pushed everything over the edge — as if I'd engineered a confrontation, as if I'd laid a hand on her at all, as if any of it had started with me rather than with her walking up and calling me a charity case in front of a room full of strangers.I reached the gate to find all three

The silence after they left was somehow louder than all of Ben's shouting had been.I stood there in the corridor, Julian and Selina still positioned protectively in front of me even though thethreat had been dragged away in restraints. My hands were shaking — not from fear exactly, but from something I couldn't quite name. The adrenaline that had kept me upright through the entire confrontation was draining away, leaving behind something raw and unsteady.Uncle Damon turned toward me, and the fury that had filled the corridor moments ago had shifted into something else entirely. Concern, maybe. Or something deeper than that — something I didn't have a name for because I'd never seen it directed at me before."Are you alright?" he asked, and the question landed differently than it would have from anyone else. Hewasn't asking for a polite answer. He was asking for the truth.I opened my mouth to give him the automatic response — *I'm fine* — but the words stuck in my throat. Because I

The Lycan royal court didn't so much host a ball as stage one.I'd thought the shopping district Selina had taken me to was the most light I'd ever seen spent for no reason but beauty. I'd been wrong. The palace grounds swallowed that entire district's worth of gold and multiplied it by a hundred — chandeliers strung between the trees of an outdoor ballroom that had no visible ceiling but the night sky, a floor of pale stone polished to mirror the stars, and enough wolves and dignitaries from enough territories that I couldn't begin to guess how many packs stood represented in one place.“Close your mouth,” Selina murmured, echoing herself from days ago, though there was less amusement in it now and more nerves that she was doing a poor job hiding. “You look like you've never left the woods before.”“I haven't seen anything like this,” I admitted, for the second time in a week.The emerald dress she'd chosen fit like it had been sewn onto me rather than for me, and I'd caught more tha

“Are you decent?” Selina's voice came through the door before she did, and she didn't wait for an answer before letting herself in.I'd barely managed to get out of the emerald dress and into something that actually let me breathe. I was sitting cross-legged on the bed, hair still half pinned, when she dropped down across from me with the particular gravity of someone who'd spent the entire drive rehearsing and still hadn't landed on an opening line.“Just say it,” I told her. “Whatever it is. I've had enough of tonight being handled around me.”Selina nodded slowly, like she was agreeing to that as a fair terms of engagement. “Do you know what a second-chance mate is?”“No.”“Most wolves don't, because most wolves never need to. The moon usually gets it right the first time — one bond, one mate, done. But sometimes the first bond breaks before it ever should have been able to. Betrayal severe enough. A mate who marks someone else while the first bond's still active, which—” she stopp