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All Chapters of Rejected as the Fat Mate: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

183 Chapters

CHAPTER 171_THE EMPTY VAULT

Tahlia's POV"The dust is wrong."Cassian crouched at the vault's threshold, his lantern held low, and I felt the hair rise along my arms before he explained. Behind us, the fortress courtyard lay silent under a flat gray sky. Kastor had posted fifty riders along the walls. The other fifty waited at the gate with their hands on their swords, and none of them had spoken since we passed the broken seals."Wrong how?" I asked."Look." He swept the light across the stone. "Centuries of dust, undisturbed along the walls. But down the center of the passage, a clean path. Boots, a lot of them, and something heavy dragged between them. Crates, maybe.""Someone carried everything out," Kastor said grimly."Or carried something in," Osric whispered. The old scholar stood at my shoulder, clutching his satchel like a shield, his face the color of tallow. "Luna, please. Let me go first. I've read about this door for forty years.""No.""I only mean...""I know what you mean." I took the lantern fr

Last Updated : 2026-11-07

Chapter 172_The Protector

Ronan's POV"He signed his own name."Priya laid the border post ledger flat on the war table, and I stared at the line she'd marked in red. It was the third night since Tahlia rode north. Alaric had four days left before the council's deadline, and my stepmother's empty hiding place still sat in my chest like a stone. I had read forty pages of watch reports. This was the first line that made my blood go cold."Who signs their own name when they're breaking into a vault?" I asked."Someone who thinks the order protects him." Priya turned the page toward me. "The northern scouts kept a gate log at the old fortress. Every visitor, every escort, every pass. Dawn on the day the vault opened, a royal guard entered with a sealed authorization. Teren Hask, escort detail.""Whose authorization?""It only says 'by order of the throne.' No signature.""The throne has two seals now.""Yes, Majesty." She didn't look up. "I've already checked which one. The wax impression in the log is smudged. It

Last Updated : 2026-11-07

CHAPTER 173_THE PRISONER IN THE WALL

Tahlia's POV"He won't speak to anyone but you."Ronan said it before I'd finished dismounting, before he kissed me, which told me how many sleepless nights he'd spent staring at that hidden room. Greywatch's courtyard lay silent under a sky the color of wet slate. I had ridden four days with a hundred soldiers and a note in my mother's handwriting burning against my ribs. The first thing my husband did was take my face in both hands, as though checking that I was real."Alive," I said."Two words would have done.""I'm told three is more romantic."A strained laugh escaped him. Then the exhaustion in his eyes turned grim. "I've questioned him for two days. Cassian's tried. Priya brought a healer and broth. He eats, he thanks us, and he won't say a word about who chained him.""Who is he?""He gave the name Garrick Vale. He claims he served in the royal guard twenty-six years ago." Ronan's jaw tightened. "He doesn't want me, Tahlia. He doesn't want a king or a council. He said, 'Bring

Last Updated : 2026-11-08

CHAPTER 174_THE ORDER TO KILL ME

Tahlia's POV"Get up, Garrick. Please. Get up off the floor and tell me why I'm alive."He didn't move. His forehead stayed pressed to the cold stone between my boots, and his thin shoulders shook. Behind me, I heard Ronan's sword shift in its sheath, and Cassian's quiet breath at the door. The healer had stopped packing her satchel.I knelt and took the old soldier by his bony arms. He weighed almost nothing. "Garrick. Look at me."He lifted his face. Tears had cut tracks through the grime on his cheeks. "I swore I'd say it to you first. Before anyone. Before I died, I'd say it to your face.""Then say all of it. Slowly."He let me help him back onto the cot. His hands shook so badly the healer pressed a cup of water into them, and he drank without tasting it. Ronan stepped closer and stopped, close enough to hear and far enough not to loom."The order came on the fourth night of the sweep," Garrick began. "Our commander called the sergeants into a farmhouse. Captain Doran Ketch, a h

Last Updated : 2026-11-08

Chapter 175_The Key My Mother Feared

Tahlia's POV"Put it on the table, Tahlia. Please. Slowly."My mother's voice had dropped to almost nothing. She sat in the small, bare room where the council kept her under guard, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on my fist. I hadn't said a word since I walked in. I had only held up the little iron key, still dark with Garrick's blood, and let it swing on its leather cord.I set it on the table between us.She didn't touch it. She looked at it the way you look at a snake that's gone quiet."Where did you get that?""From a man who died in my arms three days ago." I kept my voice level, though my hands wouldn't stop shaking. "Garrick Vale. A royal sergeant who followed you across the border twenty-six years ago and helped you forge my life. He had an arrow through his chest, and he used his last breath to give me this. He said you know who gave the order to kill me."The color left her face by degrees, as though someone were slowly draining it from her. "Garrick," she whisp

Last Updated : 2026-11-09

Chapter 176_Two Birth Certificates

Tahlia's POV"One of these is a lie."I held both certificates up to the lantern, side by side, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. Same parchment, same crimson wax, same registry stamp. Same name, written twice in the same careful hand.My mother stood on the bottom stair with her fingers pressed against her lips."Which one?" I asked."Read them again.""I've read them four times.""Read them properly, Tahlia. Not as a daughter. As the woman who found Corliss's forged betrothal in an afternoon."Cassian had crept down the stairs behind her, and I felt him hover at the edge of the lantern's glow. I didn't turn. I lowered my eyes to the first certificate and made myself see it the way I saw ledgers, as a column of figures that either balanced or didn't.Tahlia Osadebe. Daughter of Seraphine Osadebe and Corvin Osadebe, of the pack of Briar Hollow. Born the fourteenth night of the harvest moon, at the fifth hour before dawn.Corvin was the man who raised me, the one who'd sat at

Last Updated : 2026-11-10

Chapter 177_The Child Who Disappeared

Tahlia's POV"Twenty-five years. You had twenty-five years to tell me I had a sister."My voice echoed off the cellar walls. The lantern flame shivered between us, and my mother sat on the bottom stair with her hands over her face. Cassian had retreated halfway up the steps, as close to invisible as a man his size could manage."I know.""I asked you about my birth a hundred times. I asked why Corvin never looked at me. I asked why I had no baby pictures, no stories, no one who remembered me small. You told me the midwife died and the records burned. You let me think there was nothing to find.""I let you think what was safest.""Safest for whom?" I crouched in front of her. "Don't say me. Say it plainly."She lowered her hands. Her eyes were swollen, and for the first time in my life she didn't look away. "For me. Partly for me. If I told you, you would have gone looking, and I couldn't survive losing a second daughter."The honesty hit harder than a lie would have."Who took her?""

Last Updated : 2026-11-10

Chapter 178_The Face in the Photograph

Ronan's POV"Nobody paints a scar that carefully from memory, Majesty. Whoever sat for this sat still for hours and let him work from her face."Pelham Orr, master of the Miniaturists' Guild, held the little portrait an inch from his nose, a jeweler's glass screwed into one eye. His shop in the lower city smelled of linseed and crushed lapis. Cassian stood at my shoulder. Outside, six guards pretended to admire the street.I had given myself one hour. A rider waited at the palace gate with his horse already saddled, and every minute I kept the painting from Tahlia felt like theft. But I couldn't send her a face I didn't understand."Can you tell me who made it?""Not by name. The good ones never sign." Orr turned the frame over. "But I can tell you where. This blue in the window is ground from a mineral found only in the Greyfen marshes, three days' ride north. And the brass carries a reed hallmark. One smith in Greyfen stamps it.""Greyfen," Cassian said. "They haven't paid tribute i

Last Updated : 2026-11-11

Chapter 179_My Other Half

Tahlia's POV"One of us will never leave. I'd like it noted that I read that sentence too, and I'm still saying no."Ronan stood in the stable yard at dawn with his arms folded and his jaw set. I tightened my saddle girth and didn't look at him. Cassian waited by the gate with twenty riders, pretending to inspect his reins."Wray found a procedural delay," I said. "Alaric's hearing is postponed ten days. You told me so yourself.""Which means I have ten days to keep the council from hanging him, and I can't do that from a swamp.""She asked for me alone.""She threatened to kill one of us.""She threatened a hypothetical." I turned to face him. "If I bring an army, she disappears again. She's spent twenty-six years learning how."He stared at me. Then he crossed the yard in four strides, caught my face in his hands, and kissed me hard enough to make me forget the horses."Three words," he said against my mouth. "Every night.""Still alive. Miss you.""Better."Greyfen was three days o

Last Updated : 2026-11-11

Chapter 180_The Sister Who Chose My Enemy

Tahlia's POV"Maren."She flinched as though I'd struck her. "What did you say?""Maren. It was written on the bottom of the second birth certificate, in the margin, in our mother's handwriting. I didn't understand it until now." I kept my eyes on her, not on the moonstone gleaming on the table between us. "She named you before they took you. Maren Osadebe."She said nothing for a long time. The kettle hissed. Beneath the floor, black water slapped the stilts."I've been Wren Calloway for twenty years," she said at last, hoarse. "Dace gave me the name. Nobody here has ever called me anything else.""I'm not asking you to take it back. I'm telling you it was yours first.""I know whose it was." She pulled the black velvet over the stone as though hiding something obscene. "Sit. You're making me nervous."I sat. She remained standing, arms folded, her bare feet planted on the boards."You said I have no idea what's in the treaty," I said. "Tell me.""I read it three weeks ago. Every pag

Last Updated : 2026-11-12

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