บททั้งหมดของ Rejected Bride: The Alpha's Biggest Mistake: บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

The trucks broke through the tree line just as the blood moon began its slow fade back toward ordinary silver, headlights sweeping wild across the ridge before finding her standing there, still as carved stone, Magnus seated calmly on the fallen log behind her like a man who had known exactly how this moment would look before it happened.Damian was out of the lead truck before it had fully stopped, boots hitting the dirt hard, and for one long second neither of them moved, the distance between them suddenly feeling far greater than the twenty feet of open ground actually separating them."Elena." Her name came out of him rough, stripped of every careful wall he usually kept around it. "You're alive. You're safe. I thought, when Rhea said you were gone, I thought—""You thought what," Elena said, and her voice did not shake the way it once might have. "That I'd run off to die quietly somewhere so you wouldn't have to look at what you did? Or that I'd already been found by whoever paid

Damian returned to Ashwood three hours later, bloodied but alive, the hunting pack's soldiers gone as suddenly as they'd appeared, retreating into the dark once their leader apparently judged the cost of continuing not worth the trouble. He arrived at the pack house limping, one arm wrapped tight against his ribs, and found Elena already awake in the medical wing, her shoulder stitched and bandaged, Kade dozing in a chair beside her bed.Neither of them said much that first night. There wasn't room for it, not with Rhea fussing over bandages and Magnus dictating instructions for herbal poultices from his own cot two beds over, still recovering from his earlier injuries on the forest path. But Elena caught Damian's eyes across the room more than once, and each time, the look on his face told her everything his exhausted silence couldn't yet manage to say out loud.Kade filled in the gaps of what happened after the truck disappeared into the trees, speaking low so as not to wake half th

They made the return journey in a single hard push, driving through the night rather than stopping to rest, Damian's jaw set the entire way in the particular grim silence Elena had learned meant he was holding something dangerous very tightly together. Rowan came with them at Thessaly's insistence, the young survivor practically vibrating with nervous energy at the idea of leaving the ruins for the first time in his life, though his presence, Elena suspected, was less about curiosity and more about Thessaly quietly ensuring Elena did not return to Ashwood entirely surrounded by people whose loyalty ultimately answered to someone else.They arrived just before dawn to find the pack house unnervingly quiet, staff moving through their usual routines with no sign that anything at all had happened three nights earlier on a ridge two hours away."Where's Bianca," Damian asked the first staff member he encountered, a young guard stationed near the entrance who startled visibly at his Alpha's

The council chamber dissolved into chaos after the runner's announcement, elders arguing over troop counts and old treaty clauses, Odette snapping orders about border patrols and messenger wolves to allied packs who might still answer Ashwood's call for aid. Elena stood at the center of it all feeling strangely calm, the eye of a storm she had, however unwillingly, caused.She thought, watching the chamber scramble around her, of every year she had spent trying to be small enough that nobody in Carla's house would notice her, and understood with a strange, dizzying clarity that those years were now entirely, irreversibly behind her. There was no shrinking back into a corner from a war threat with her own name attached to it. Whatever came next, she would have to face it standing in the open, whether she felt ready for that or not."Three days isn't enough time to prepare a real defense," Kade said grimly, once the immediate panic had settled into something closer to organized planning

Damian was moving before the guard finished shouting, already barking orders that sent staff and warriors alike scrambling into practiced defensive positions across the grounds. Elena followed at a run, her heart hammering, the pendant at her throat warming steadily with every step closer to the estate's outer wall.From the top of the eastern watchtower, the tree line looked alive, dozens of shapes moving through the dark with the same disciplined coordination Elena had seen on the ridge, though this force was larger, far larger, more of Hale's silver fist insignia visible now in the moonlight than Elena could easily count. Torchlight flickered between the trees in careful, evenly spaced rows, the unmistakable sign of an army that had drilled this exact maneuver many times before, in places far from Ashwood's borders where nobody would have thought to ask what they were practicing for."That's not a raiding party," Kade said grimly, joining them at the wall, already stripping down in