Lahat ng Kabanata ng Reborn After Rejection: I Chose the Alpha Everyone Feared: Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

Hallie stopped reading the incidents as separate events. That was the first useful decision of the morning. She and Caleb cleared the long table and built the sequence from the beginning. The cloth at the boundary. The questions carried into the neighboring pack. The unfamiliar wolves near Cedar Draw’s external contact routes. The attack at the exchange point.The public challenge to Grant’s legitimacy. The meeting where witnesses had been placed in advance and told what Grant would supposedly do before he arrived. Caleb wrote dates beside each item. Hallie added locations. Then witnesses. Then what had happened immediately before each provocation. Grant stood behind her chair, silent while they worked. Caleb looked at the first two columns.“Visibility,” he said.She gave a small nod. The original boundary message had appeared after Cedar Draw came out of the succession crisis with more regional credibility than it had before. The rumors spread after the neighboring pack began dealin

Grant knew exactly what he could do. That was the part she could not ignore. He could ask Hallie to leave Cedar Draw until the campaign broke. Not forever. Just long enough to remove the easiest pressure point from the center of it.The thought had been sitting behind his teeth since the representative arrived with a bruised jaw and a torn document strap.Now, after dark, Hallie stood at the table reading Caleb’s revised travel rules while Grant watched the door instead of the page. She noticed.“What?”“Nothing.”Her eyes narrowed. Grant almost let the lie stand. He crossed the room and stopped on the opposite side of the table.“If you were somewhere else for a while, you would be safer.”Hallie went still.“Somewhere else,” she repeated.“Yes.”“Where?”“I don’t know.”Her expression hardened. Grant felt the first pulse of fear from her at close range. Fear. No contempt. He forced himself not to use what he could perceive as permission to soften the truth.“They have already used y

Hallie knew the meeting had worked when people went back to asking about roads. It had not made them trust Grant.By afternoon, the long table in Cedar Draw’s main building was covered with the questions Caleb had collected after the representatives left. Some were practical. Shared crossings. Notice procedures. What would happen if another outsider created trouble near the boundary.Others had not changed. What could a Vael do to a frightened wolf? How much of the old stories were true? Could Grant’s restraint be trusted forever? Hallie read the last question twice. Caleb stood across from her, sorting witness statements by date.“They heard everything this morning,” he said.“Yes.”“And some of them still came back to this.”“Yes.”He set another page down harder than necessary.“So what was the point?”Hallie answered before Grant could.“The point was never to make them stop being afraid.”Caleb’s expression tightened. Hallie pulled the earliest warning toward her. GRANT MONROE CA

Austin received Cedar Draw’s evidence before the rest of Bellamy Creek’s leadership arrived. He read the chronology once standing. Then again after he sat down. The first pages were restrained enough to irritate him. No claim that every attack near Cedar Draw had come from the hunter.No accusation that could not be tied to a witness, a time, a place, or a statement someone had actually heard.The gaps were left as gaps. That made the pattern harder to dismiss. By the time the others entered, Austin had separated the witness statements into two stacks. One of the older wolves looked at them.“Cedar Draw wants us to remove him.”“From the shared political meetings and access points where he’s been operating,” Austin said.“That sounds like removal.”“It is.”The man sat across from him.“And you’re considering it.”Austin looked down at th

By the time they were alone, Hallie could stand without leaning on Grant. She was less certain about everything else.The last reports remained on the table in their room, stacked neatly because neither of them had wanted to look at them again. Outside, Cedar Draw had gone quiet after dark. No gathering. No argument waiting at the door.Grant sat in the chair opposite her. Hallie had expected relief. Instead, he looked unsettled.“What?” she asked.His gaze stayed on her.“I felt it the first day.”Hallie knew what he meant before he said more.“Your fear,” Grant said. “Of me.”She leaned back against the table.“You knew I was afraid.”“Yes.”“And you’re asking now?”His jaw moved once.“I’m asking why you kept defending me.”Not the hunter. Not the last few weeks. The beginning.