Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Alpha Rejected the wrong Luna: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

They kept me in the old grain cellar beneath the west tower, the room the pack used for wolves who lost control during a full moon and needed somewhere to wait it out. Stone walls three feet thick. A door with an iron bar on the outside, not the inside. I sat on the cold floor and pressed my palm flat against my chest, right over the place the bond had hooked into me, and it still ached even now, hours later, a phantom thread stretched too tight and pulled toward wherever Damon was. I didn't know how long I'd been down there when the bar finally scraped back. It wasn't Damon. It was Elder Cole, flanked by two warriors, and behind him, hanging back in the doorway like she wanted witnesses to remember she hadn't wanted to come, was Vivienne. "Sit up," Elder Cole said. "The council wants answers before the sun sets." I stood instead, because I refused to answer him from the floor. "I don't have answers. I don't know what you think I've done." "Convenient." He circled me slowly, the w

The Ashwood guards dragging me to the border stopped dead the moment the three hooded figures stepped onto the road. I felt the shift in the men holding my arms, the way their grip tightened, the way their bodies angled instinctively into a fighting stance and their hands reaching out for their sheathed swords "Crimson Hollow," one of them muttered, and the other spat on the ground like the name itself was something dirty. The figure in the center lowered his hood. He was older than me by maybe a decade, with a scar cutting through one eyebrow and eyes the same unusual amber shade I'd caught in my own reflection a thousand times without ever knowing why it looked wrong for an Ashwood orphan to have them. "We're not here for a fight," he said, his voice pitched low and even. "We're here for her." "She's no more Ashwood's business," the guard on my left snapped. "Banished tonight by the Alpha's own word. She's no one's concern now." "That's where you're mistaken." The scarred m

After the report came in My father rose up and refused to let the scouts through the gate. instead he met them at the border himself, and I rose up and went to the border wall to watch from there as he sent them back with nothing but a message that I was alive, unharmed, and should no longer be any concern of the Ashwood's pack. Whatever answer they reported to Damon, I never heard it directly, and some stubborn, wounded part of me refused to ask. The weeks that followed after my arrival reshaped me in ways 8 months of scrubbing the Ashwood's pack floors never had. I stopped flinching at loud voices. I stopped apologizing for taking up space in a room. Something in me that had spent years making itself small was finally being allowed to stand up straight. Rowe took over my training personally, starting before dawn each day in a stone courtyard behind the manor. I learned quickly that whatever bloodline I carried came with more than a name and a claim to old power. The first time Ro

I read the letter alone in my room, my father and Rowe waiting outside the door because I'd asked for that much privacy at least, whatever it turned out to say. Damon's handwriting was rougher than I thought. Rushed, pressed hard enough into the page to nearly tear it in places, like he'd written it in one sitting and hadn't trusted himself to slow down. *I know about the letter you tried to show the council. I know Vivienne removed it from the evidence table before I could see it again. I know a servant girl gave you a piece of it and that I let three hundred witnesses watch you dragged out of my hall while I said nothing to stop it. I have spent days trying to find a version of events where I was right to do that, but I couldn't find one. I'm writing because I believe Vivienne is still moving pieces I don't fully understand, and because whatever the bond meant, it meant enough that I'm asking you to trust me one more time. Meet me at the border stones, three nights from now, at m

Damon didn't waste a single second on disbelief, even though every instinct in him must have wanted to. He turned to the Ashwood guards still standing uncertain in the clearing, still visibly unsure whether to trust a word coming out of their own Alpha's mouth, and started giving orders in the same voice that had once condemned me, except now every word of it was aimed at protecting instead of destroying."Sound the horn," he told them. "Full muster at the northern wall. Now."My father emerged from the treeline as the guards scattered, Rowe and Mara at his back, and for one strange, charged moment two Alphas who had spent three generations at war stood facing each other across a clearing lit by dying silver fire."Bloodmoon," Corin said, not a question."Massed a day's march from your border," Damon said. "Waiting on a signal from a woman who's supposed to be my luna which my own guards are currently dragging back through my gates in chains."My father's jaw tightened, old instinct c