All Chapters of After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The morning my husband planned to reject me, I was carrying his heirs in the pocket of my dress, and I could not stop touching them.Not the heirs themselves — they were smaller than a fingernail, according to Dr. Quinn, two commas of light on a black screen. I mean the wand. The narrow ivory stick with its two solemn silver lines, which I had wrapped in a handkerchief and slid into the hidden pocket of my coronation gown, and which I had now touched perhaps seventeen times since sunrise, the way a woman touches a locket, or a knife.I made myself stop. I made myself breathe.Beyond the carved doors, the Crown Chamber was doing what it did best — being magnificent at other people's expense. Five hundred candles. Enough old silver to sink a ship. Every wolf of consequence in Avelune, dressed for a coronation that had been advertised, in gilt lettering, to begin promptly at eight.It was nearly nine.My husband had not come to my rooms since the previous evening. My stepsister was weari

I didn't leave. That was, I think, the first genuine mistake of the day — standing frozen on the steps with the wand still visible in my hand, watching attendants swarm forward with a second coronation gown that had clearly been waiting in the wings the entire time.They'd known. Someone had known long before I walked through those doors.Seraphina crossed to the throne with the unhurried grace of a woman who had rehearsed this exact walk in front of a mirror more times than she would ever admit. Pale gold pooled at her feet. Diamonds settled at her throat. And then — my mother's crown, lowered onto her head by hands that did not shake.The Moon Temple elders began their rites again, word for word, as though they hadn't spoken every one of them over me not twenty minutes earlier.I stood on the steps and could not make my legs remember how to move.My wolf was awake now — fully, furiously awake — and she wanted things my body wasn't equipped to give her. To run. To fight. To do anythi

The staircase went down for longer than felt architecturally possible.Each step carried me further from Darius's voice, further from the palace, further into whatever lay beneath the Crown Territory's foundations. My candle threw long, unsteady shadows across walls that had been cut, not built — old stone, older than the palace above it, worn smooth by feet that had walked this way long before mine.My hands wouldn't stop shaking. The wand was still clenched so tightly in my fist I would find the mark of it in my palm the next morning.The air changed as I descended. Cooler. Thinner. Carrying the faint, unmistakable sting of antiseptic — I'd smelled it before, in Lady Ashgrave's clinic, but never at this strength, never with this particular sense of having been here for a very long time.This was older than the clinic.This was older than my marriage. Older, I suspected, than me.At the bottom, the corridor opened into a chamber so vast my candle barely reached its far wall. What lit

The tunnels didn't end. They branched instead, multiplying like a heartbeat, each turn taking us deeper into the buried city beneath Avelune's polite geometry. Cassian moved through them like they were home — which, I was beginning to suspect, they were. His hand never left mine, a pressure somewhere between guidance and claim, and Lysandra, who objected to nearly everything, did not object to it.This is the trouble with finally having a wolf of your own. She has very strong opinions and absolutely no instinct for self-preservation."How are you holding the change?" he asked, not even breathing hard. I was still half-phased, bones too human and teeth too sharp, caught between two forms like a sentence nobody had finished."Badly.""That's to be expected. A first shift is a shattering. Yours arrived mid-treason, in front of the woman who engineered it, which is a great deal to ask of anyone's first afternoon as a wolf." He said it mildly, the way you'd discuss a garden. "Blackthorn wo

"Six years ago," Cassian began, which was not how I wanted any story about my mother to start, "House Thorne was running an intelligence operation in the Border territories. It was meant to be surgical. Proof that certain people inside House Ashgrave were trafficking in forbidden magic — the kind that needs blood, and consent, and never ends anywhere good."We had made a small camp, far enough from the Territory line that the Blackthorn patrols hadn't found it, close enough to the rogue circles that Rowan could come and go unremarked. Cassian sat across a low, dying fire, and Rowan had arranged himself as though guarding the two of us from the world, or possibly the world from the two of us.The ring sat warm in my palm. It had not cooled once since dawn."Your mother was the one who found it," Cassian said. "She was meant to. The whole operation was built around Aurora Vale-Thorne noticing what no one else could — because she was a scholar of the old magic before she was ever anyone'