All Chapters of THE ALPHA’S REJECTED BLADE : Chapter 21 - Chapter 25

KAIA VELEN POVThe ritual chamber felt like a tomb.Iris lay in the center of the circle, her body completely still. Her skin glowed faintly silver, and I could see her heartbeat—slow, steady, but there. The other six females who'd participated in the ritual were unconscious too, but their breathing was even. Their wounds were already starting to heal on their own.Iris was the only one who looked like she'd been drained completely dry."Is she alive?" Damien asked from behind me. His voice sounded strange—rough, pained."Yes," I said. "But I don't know for how long."---The healers worked through the night.They brought salves and old magic and knowledge passed down through generations of werewolves and cursed females. They worked on Iris first—channeling gentle power into her, trying to coax her body back toward consciousness.Then they turned their attention to me.When they removed my shirt, I realized my left side was worse than I thought. The warrior's claws had raked deep—deep

KAIA VELEN POV The delegations started arriving two weeks after the charter was sealed. First came the Northern Territories pack, led by Iris’s father. I watched him arrive with an entourage of warriors, and I realized he looked smaller in person than he had in Iris’s stories. Like fatherhood and exile had worn him down to a smaller version of what he’d once been. Iris met him in the courtyard, and I held my breath watching them embrace. Their reunion was stiff at first—years of exile and misunderstanding between them—but by the end of the first evening, they were talking in low voices like they were trying to rebuild something that had broken. “He wants to formalize an alliance,” Damien told me as we watched from the shadows. “Wants the Northern Territories and Blackmoon to stand together. Wants to present a united front to any other packs that might oppose cursed females.” “Is that a good thing?” I asked. “It’s complicated,” Damien said. “It’s good for us. But it also mea

KAIA VELEN POVThree months after Iris left, we had forty-seven cursed females in the compound.That sounds like a success. And it was. But it was also the beginning of problems we hadn’t anticipated.The training grounds that had been sufficient for seventeen females was now cramped for forty-seven. The quarters we’d prepared were overflowing. The healers were working double shifts trying to tend to all the trauma-related injuries and the ongoing magical strain that came with channeling Moonfire.And food. Nobody had mentioned food being a problem, but suddenly we were going through supplies twice as fast as we had before.“We need to expand,” Senna said at the council meeting, laying out the numbers on the table. “We need more living space. More training grounds. More storage. And we need to do it fast, because more females are coming. Word is spreading. Every cursed female in the region knows they can come here and be safe.”“How many more?” Damien asked.“Hard to say,” Coun