All Chapters of After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

It took three days to locate her. Not because she was hiding. Ashgrave had never learned to hide, because her entire life had been built on the assumption that she was too necessary to be touched. The secret program she ran was secret only by virtue of being below the city, not above it. She moved through Moonfall with the same confident stride she had worn in the stone chamber beneath the palace, as though she owned everything she walked through and was simply deciding which parts to keep. I found her in Glass Quarter, in a clinic that bore her name on a silver plate. I did not bring anyone with me. My mother had wanted to come. Cassian had wanted to come. The Keeper had simply inclined her head in that way that meant something like permission to make my own mistakes. But I understood, by then, that there were certain conversations that could only happen between two women, one of whom had spent her life trying to break the other. The clinic was clean. Efficient. Staffed by people

My mother asked me one question after I returned from the Keeper's room. "What will you do now?" We were sitting in the garden again, in the place where we had sat all night waiting for morning to come. The season had turned while I was moving through the city, and the garden had begun to prepare itself for frost. The grass was still green, but it had taken on that particular quality of holding its breath. "I think," I said slowly, "I want to find my grandmother." "She's dead, Elara." "Not in the way that matters." I turned to look at my mother. "If your mother can reach forward through time and file a protection for a granddaughter she'll never meet, then somewhere in this city there must be a way to reach backward. There must be a door to the past, marked the same way as the door to the future. And if the Keeper guards the door to the future—" "Then someone else guards the door to the past," my mother finished. "Yes." She sat with this for a long moment. "If you find her," s

We crossed out of Avelune on the fourth day, and nobody wrote it down. That is the part I keep coming back to. There was no post at the border, no brother with a ledger, no officer asking for the name of the house I was travelling under. There was a cart track, and a stand of birch that had gone the colour of old paper, and at some point in the middle of it we were in one country and then we were in another, and the only record of it anywhere in the world was in the three of us. I stopped walking. "What is it?" my mother said. "Nothing." Then, because I have been trying to stop doing that: "I am not in anything anymore. There is no file with me in it, on this side." Cassian, who had been half a length ahead with the horse, did not turn around. He has a way of listening that does not require him to look at you, which I found unnerving for the first month and now find restful. "No," he said. "There is not." "I thought that would feel better than it does." "It will. In about six d

We went back by the ridge, because the ridge is nine days and the road is sixteen, and because I had nineteen. My mother did not come. That was not a discussion, whatever I may have told myself at the time. I opened my mouth in the yard at Halloway to begin arranging it, and she said, "No," in the voice she uses perhaps twice a year, and then, more gently, "I would slow you by four days and you would not say so, and I would know, and we would both have to live with me knowing." "I am not leaving you in a border town." "You are not leaving me anywhere. I am going to Thornlea." She had it ready. Of course she had it ready; she had been awake since three. "Cassian's people will have me. I will be four days behind you and inside the border, and when you need a witness who was in that chamber, you will need her standing up in the Crown Chamber and not dying in a pass." That is the argument that ended it, and she knew it would be, and she played it last. So we went up. The ridge is no

The letter arrived on the twenty-second day.It came by a rider who did not ask our names and did not wait for payment. Cassian accepted it with the kind of practiced calm that suggested this was not the first letter that had found him in places where he had deliberately been unfindable.The seal was Rowan's."Do I want to open this?" he asked me."Yes," I said. "Because not opening it means you will spend the rest of your life wondering what he needed to tell you."He broke the seal.The letter was not long. It was written in Rowan's careful hand, the hand that had run ahead of the pen when he was hurried, now deliberate and slow.The Keeper confirmed what I suspected. You did not betray her.I did. I signed for your mother because I was afraid, and because someone offered me a way to be necessary instead of just being born into a family that was already broken.The Temple has accepted my penance. Seven years in the cellars, reading our family records until I understand what it means