All Chapters of After the Alpha Rejected Me, I Came Back with His Twins: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

"I left because four cars came up my road at two in the morning," I said, "and I have never once regretted it."Four hundred wolves in the Circle on the seventeenth of December, and the stone under my feet so cold it came up through my boots inside a minute.I stood where I knelt three years ago. I did that on purpose."Somebody in this valley decided I should be dealt with before the Council could rule on me. Some of you were on that road. One or two of you are standing in this Circle."Nobody moved. The murmur that went round was not one sound. It was four hundred people deciding at once not to look at their neighbors."I went up the col in the storm because it was that or be found. I got over it. I did not come back, and I want to say the reason out loud so nobody has to invent one for me."Careful now, Nyx said. This is the part where you tell them exactly as much as you meant to."I was carrying when I knelt on this stone," I said. "I did not know it yet. I found out six days late

Kai Ashford came in through the front door of the Blood Moon Pack House at ten in the morning on the eighteenth of December, in front of a hundred wolves, because Elder Mara sent for him and because that is the only way he was ever going to do it.He stopped four feet inside and took his hat off, which I have now seen him do twice."Elder.""Alpha Ashford. You will stand there, you will answer, and you will not sit down.""I hadn't expected to."He likes this, Nyx said. Look at his shoulders. He has been waiting three years to be asked into this room.Damien was at the far end of the hall with his back to the window, and he did not sit down either, and he did not sit down at any point in the next forty minutes."You are here as a witness to the poison," Mara said. "Not as an Alpha. Your Pack has no standing on this floor.""Understood.""Understood.""Do not say that word again in this hall. You are here because a wolf of this Pack was poisoned on a naming stone and because you are the

Elder Mara took Brack's whole year apart in four sentences on the morning of the nineteenth, and she did it without raising her voice once."The Council required the Alpha to take a Chosen Mate by midwinter," she said. "The requirement was laid because this Pack had no Luna and no heir.""Elder—""There are two heirs on the roll. They were entered the day before yesterday, in front of four hundred witnesses, in my hand." She turned a page. "A requirement that has been satisfied cannot also be enforced. The matter is struck."I was standing at the back of that hall with my collar up and I watched Elder Brack lose the only lever he had.He took it well. That is what frightened me.He did not argue and he did not go red. He inclined his head about an inch, and said, "The Council is served," and sat down, and I have thought about those four words more than I have thought about anything else he has ever said.He isn't finished, Nyx said. Men like that don't stop. They just stop in public.W

Damien's POV"Say all of it," she said. "Not the part you've decided I can take. All of it, in order, and I will tell you when to stop."So I said all of it.I have been carrying it for three years and one month and I got it out in about eleven minutes, which is the most obscene thing about the whole business — that a thing which cost that much can be said in the time it takes to boil a kettle."Sixteen hours before the Circle, Theo's Gammas took a Silver Ridge wolf off the ridge road at three in the morning, four hundred yards from your cabin.""Go on.""He had a satchel with a jar of ground coffee in it, and in the coffee, wrapped in oilcloth, a glass vial with a wax seal. Cole put it in my hand. It weighed nothing. It weighed about as much as a pen.""Wolfsbane.""A quarter of a man's dose. Cut for a smaller body." I made myself keep my eyes up. "It was not for me. It was never for me. Cole asked the boy four times and he said he'd been told to leave it in your water butt."Aria did

Damien's POV"Before this Council rules on anything," I said, "I am going to give something up, and I would like it written down before anybody talks me out of it."Four hundred wolves in the hall on the twenty-first of December, and the Council of Elders across the front of it, and Mara with the book open on her knees."Alpha," Brack said, "the petition before us concerns the clerk—""The petition can wait four minutes.""This is irregular.""It is," I agreed. "Elder Mara. Read out the law on the get of an Alpha."She did not ask me why. That is the thing about Mara; she has known me since I was four years old and she has never once asked me why in public."Pups of an Alpha are not the mother's," she read. "They are the Pack's. They are raised in the Pack House, and the Alpha names them. Set down in the fourth book, four hundred years ago, and not amended since."Say it while you still can, my wolf said, and he has not spoken in a hall since I was twenty-three. Say it before you work