All Chapters of After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

The news came with the supply wagon that brought goods to Greymere from the capital.The merchant who brought it did not know us. He simply told the story to anyone who would listen because it was the kind of story that traveled: the Lady of House Vale had disappeared from Moonfall with her mother, under the protection of Cassian Thorne, a man who had been presumed dead for thirty years.There was more, but it was speculation and fear and all the things that people say when they do not understand what they are looking at.Cassian listened to the story from behind a cup of tea, his face showing nothing.When the merchant had finished and moved on to other gossip that did not concern us, Cassian set down the cup and said very quietly, "It has begun.""What has begun?""The reckoning. The moment when what we did in secret becomes public, and the world decides what to do with that information."He was right. Within two days, there was a second letter. This one came not from Rowan but from

The second letter from Rowan arrived by a method I did not understand. We had been in the cottage for nineteen days. Long enough to learn which shutter banged in a north wind and which floorboard complained if you stepped on it before dawn. Long enough to rehang the door and scrub three decades of mouse out of the only cupboard. Not long enough for anyone to know where we were. That was the whole point of a mountain. So when someone knocked, I had a kitchen knife in my hand before I had finished turning round. A hiker had appeared at our door in the mountains with a sealed letter and instructions to wait three days to see if we wanted to respond. He was lean and weathered, with a walking staff worn pale at the grip and the kind of boots that had been resoled more times than they had been replaced. He did not give a name. He looked at the knife, then at me, and nodded politely, as though he had been greeted with worse and considered this a warm welcome. "Three days," he said. "I'll

The letter that came in the deep winter was written in Darius's own hand, and it was long. By then the path had been closed for a month. The snow lay to the sills on the north side of the cottage, and we had dug a trench from the door to the woodpile and another to the stream, and those two trenches were the whole of our kingdom. So when a figure appeared on the white slope below the pines one grey noon, wading thigh-deep and leaning on a staff, I stood at the window and watched him come for the better part of an hour before I was sure it was the hiker. He would not come in further than the door. He shook the snow off his shoulders, gave me the packet, accepted a cup of tea standing up, and said he would wait in the lean-to until morning in case there was anything to carry down. The packet was thick. That was the first strange thing. Before that winter, Darius had never written me more than a few lines at a time — a summons, an instruction, a time and a place where I was expected to

We expanded the house in the spring. There was a small building behind the main house that had been a workshop or a studio once, and Cassian began to repair it. He worked slowly, not out of lack of skill but out of deliberate choice — he was choosing how to spend his time, and he was choosing to spend it carefully. It had a slate roof with half its slates in the nettles and a floor of wide elm boards that had silvered under years of weather. The builder lent him tools on the understanding that they came back sharper than they left. Cassian worked on it in the long light after his day's work was done and on the mornings when the library opened late, and I learned the sounds of it the way I had learned the woodpile on the mountain: the rasp of the plane, the pause while he checked a line, the three short blows that meant a nail had gone home. I did not only listen. On the second Sunday I climbed the ladder with a bucket of mortar and pointed the chimney myself, badly at first and then

The years passed in Riverside. Not all at once, the way years do in books. But gradually, in the accumulation of small choices — which books to shelve first in the library, which students to encourage toward reading, which nights to spend alone and which to spend with Cassian. I learned the town by its seasons. The spring the river took the lower footbridge and the whole street turned out with ropes and planks and opinions. The summer the baker's oven cracked and she sold loaves from a borrowed hearth for a month, burnt on the bottom and perfect on top. The autumn I finally persuaded the old librarian that the atlases did not belong beside the cookery books merely because both had pictures of places he would never visit. He moved them himself, grumbling, and never admitted I had been right, which was how I knew I had. I learned the weight of a borrowed book coming back late, and the particular silence of a child who has just discovered that a story can be about someone like her. I l