All Chapters of After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Cassian was already at the chandlery stair at six exactly, having walked the last half-mile faster than dignity required, Seraphina's warning still settling across my shoulders with every step. The evening had turned cold — the kind that comes in through a coat's seams rather than announcing itself — and I was grateful for the excuse it gave my face."You're unharmed," he said, not quite a question, and crossed the room to confirm it with his own eyes before either of us said anything else. His gaze went over me the way I imagine he checks a ship after weather, then settled on my face and stayed."Watched. Not harmed. There's a distinction, and I have grown tired of living in the gap between them."I told him everything in order — Darius's warning dressed as tenderness, Seraphina's confession in the garden, the grey coat asking after correspondence in my father's hall as though he had a right to ask — and watched his composure come apart by degrees, until by the end he was standing cl

Mara found us at the fish market on the fifth day of the week we had been given, weaving low and fast between the trestles with the look of a woman who has run the entire distance and would prefer nobody worked that out. "They've moved patient one." No greeting. Mara has never seen the point of them. "Lowest entry on the register — Temple seal, the one I could never get near. Her file isn't in the cabinet. No transfer note. No discharge recorded. As though she was never catalogued." She pushed the hair off her face with the back of her wrist. "Except the space where her folder sat has a groove worn into the wood. Nine years of being pulled out and put back." "Moved where?" "I don't know. That's the problem." A gull went for something on the ice beside us and she didn't so much as blink at it. "I asked the way you taught me. Carefully. Boringly. Like a woman with no interest in the answer. What I got was a long silence, and then an invitation to take the rest of the week off. Paid

I came up the White Stair two at a time, the Keeper behind me the whole way, and reached the nave in time to see Brother Idris go backward into a pillar. Cassian was in the doorway beyond him. Blade drawn. Blood dark and wet at his temple. Shouting my name into a Temple that had gone mad in the space of one bell — candles down off their stands somewhere along the nave, the air thick with scorched wax and running feet. "The dock," he said, the moment I was close enough to hear it. "Rowan's people found the transfer. Tonight, dockside, under armed guard. The moment my watchers were spotted watching, somebody decided the cleanest answer was to make sure neither of us lives to describe it." "My mother." It came out as a fact, not a question. Some part of me had finished the Keeper's arithmetic on the stairs and simply hadn't asked permission to flinch yet. "I don't know that. I know they're moving someone. I know it's happening now. I know we have twenty minutes at most before that s

I crossed the room in three steps and put two fingers to the skin at her throat, the way Mara taught me weeks ago in the middle of a different emergency entirely. There. Faint, and slow, and perfectly real. A pulse that had gone on keeping its own time for six years without me. Six years. My mind did the arithmetic without being asked, the way it always does at exactly the wrong moment. Two thousand days and more. A whole first life finished inside that number, and a death, and most of a second one begun. And underneath every one of those days, in a room built to smell of nothing, this heart had gone on doing its work with nobody in the world counting it except the woman who wanted her kept that way. I stayed crouched longer than I needed to. Facts on a page had never quite managed to be true in the way a pulse under two fingers is true, and I wanted the physical version of it before anything else happened to either of us. The lamp guttered in the corner and did not go out. S

We came off that dock the way you leave a place you intend never to see again, which is to say badly, and at speed, and with somebody else's blood on at least one of us.Cassian met us at the seawall gate. There was a cut along his forearm that had gone through the sleeve and everything under it, and he was moving as though he had decided the arm belonged to somebody else and could be dealt with later.I have since learned that this is what he does with pain. He puts it in another room and shuts the door on it and goes on with the evening, and asks after everybody else first, and it is one of the several things about him I intend to argue with at length once we are both somewhere with chairs.He stopped when he saw my mother.I have thought about that moment a great deal since. He did not look at her the way a man looks at a rescued stranger, and he did not look at her the way you look at a legend confirmed. He looked at her the way you look at a person you last saw across a room when