Reborn After Rejection: I Chose the Alpha Everyone Feared のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 10

Grant heard the argument before he reached the cluster of people gathered near the work sheds.That was normal.What was not normal was the silence that followed.Caleb walked beside him, one hand hooked through his belt, his pace unhurried. “Looks like somebody got here first.”Grant said nothing.He had been told two men were close to fighting over a damaged supply cart and the work hours needed to replace what had been lost. Cedar Draw had rules for that. Simple ones. The person who caused a problem fixed what he could, and the people affected got a voice in what happened next.Usually, the difficult part was getting angry wolves to remember the second half.Grant stepped around the last building and found the crowd already breaking apart.A young woman stood between the two men.Honey-brown hair had escaped whatever attempt she had made to keep it tied back. Dust marked one sleeve of her shirt. She had a solid, healthy build, and her shoulders were straight with the kind of contro

Grant had spent years learning which problems could be solved by giving people room and which ones grew teeth if ignored.Hallie was becoming the second kind.The trouble would come from everyone else deciding what her presence meant before Hallie got to define it.He stood outside the storage shed after the evening work rotation ended, watching people cross the yard with tools, empty crates, and the tired impatience that came before dinner. Hallie emerged last with a sheet of figures folded in one hand.She saw him and slowed.“Did Caleb send you?”“No.”Her eyebrows lifted.Grant had spent half the afternoon considering whether this conversation was his business.It was now.“Walk with me.”She fell into step beside him without asking where they were going.Cedar Draw lacked Bellamy Creek’s polished paths. The ground between the buildings was packed hard by boots and weather. People had built what they needed, repaired what broke, and added to it when they could.Hallie looked at th

Austin read the message twice.Then a third time.The words stayed the same.Hallie had agreed to marry Grant.For several seconds, Austin simply stared at the page.It had to be wrong.Cedar Draw was real enough. Hallie had gone there. He had already been forced to accept that much, even if every instinct in him still rejected the idea of her sleeping, eating, working, existing somewhere outside Bellamy Creek.But marriage?No.She had known Grant for days.Austin set the paper down and stood.The mate bond remained exactly where it had always been.Alive.He could feel the quiet pull of it beneath his skin, a certainty older than argument. Hallie was his mate. Rejection had hurt it. Distance had stretched it. Neither had erased what she was to him.That should have made the report impossible.Instead it made it worse.Austin crossed the room once, then turned back.She was angry.That was the explanation.Angry enough to leave. Angry enough to choose the one place people at Bellamy

Austin looked exactly as Hallie remembered him.That was the first problem.The second was the way the mate bond reacted to having him close again.It tightened under her ribs, warm and immediate, as if the days apart had been nothing. Her body knew him before thought could intervene.Austin took one step toward her.“Hallie.”She stopped where she was.Behind her, Cedar Draw remained quiet in the particular way a place became quiet when everyone was pretending not to watch.Grant stood several yards away.He had followed only after she asked him to be there.He had not moved closer.Austin noticed him anyway.His face hardened.“You brought him.”“I asked him to stay.”Austin’s gaze snapped back to hers. “Why?”Because Grant had offered her marriage without pretending it could erase Austin.Because he had given her the choice to come here alone.Because Hallie knew exactly how easily this conversation could become about two Alphas measuring territory around her.She refused to let it

Austin returned to Bellamy Creek before sunrise.The mate bond returned with him.He had known it would.Still, the first quiet pull beneath his ribs when he crossed the boundary felt like an accusation.Hallie was married now.Grant’s wife.The words remained wrong in his head no matter how many times he repeated them.Yet the bond had not changed. It reached toward Hallie exactly as it had before the rejection, before Cedar Draw, before she stood under moonlight and made another man her husband.Austin had spent the drive back trying to make that fact mean something useful.It meant Hallie was still his mate.It meant fate had not changed its mind.It meant—Nothing about what she had chosen.That was the part he could not get around.He entered the main building expecting work to help.Work had always helped.Bellamy Creek was orderly because people knew what was expected of them. Austin had grown up inside that structure. He had prepared for years to inherit it.He was Alpha now.