บททั้งหมดของ Reborn After Rejection: I Chose the Alpha Everyone Feared: บทที่ 261 - บทที่ 270

Hallie found Saevren where she had left him. He had moved to the window. That was all.No papers in his hands.No attempt to make himself look occupied while waiting for her to decide whether she would come back.Hallie stopped several feet away. Same distance as before. Saevren turned.“You asked a question.”“Yes.”“And then left.”“I needed to know whether I wanted the answer.”His expression changed slightly.“Do you?”Hallie thought of Grant. I still want you. I know.She thought of the hope that had felt like betrayal until she named it.Quiet. Not Saevren. Not a different man.Silence from something she had never chosen.“Yes.” Saevren waited.Hallie forced herself to say it again.“Is there a point where nothing is left?”This time, he did not pause.“Yes.”

Hallie did not get to ask Saevren why almost no Vael ended mate bonds.Caleb opened the door before she could.“We have a problem on the road.”The question disappeared from the room without being answered. Hallie hated the relief that came with that. Work was easier.Work had rules. She followed Caleb into the main room. Grant was already there, bent over the corridor map.A traveling group had left under safe conditions but had not reached the next people waiting for them. The road ahead had become uncertain.Nothing had happened on the road itself.But movement near the territory had changed enough that the local guarantee could no longer be treated as reliable.Hallie looked at the notice.“Did they suspend?”“Not formally,” Caleb said.Grant’s hand closed around the edge of the report.“They stopped confirming onward passage.”“T

“Saevren answered me,” Hallie said.Grant had stayed where she left him after the corridor reroute, the completed notice untouched near his hand. He looked at her and waited.Hallie stopped a few steps away, close enough that his Vael sense would catch the pressure in her without telling him its cause.Grant’s jaw tightened.“The question from before the corridor problem.”“Yes.” Hallie forced herself not to begin with reassurance.Hallie resisted the urge to lead with love or reassurance. Grant needed the fact first.“He can weaken the mate bond.”Grant went completely still.Hallie continued before silence turned the sentence into something smaller than it was.“Not metaphorically. Not just the pull when Austin is close.”Grant’s eyes stayed on hers.“Saevren says he can take what moves through the bond.”&ld

“Why do almost no Vael do it?” Hallie asked when she returned to Saevren.The guarded look from earlier returned before he answered. Hallie had told Grant the truth before coming back; he had not given permission, only room for her to want the answer even when it hurt him. Saevren stood where the maps had been cleared away, and Hallie stopped at the same distance as before. She waited until the answer stopped sounding abstract.“You said the ability is known, uncommon, and not something Everen offers.”“It is.”“So what does it cost?”Saevren held her gaze.Then he said, “Because doing it once and doing it again and again are not the same.”“Why?”“Repeated contact changes the Vael too.”“On the Vael.”“Yes.” Hallie thought of Maeren saying Vael had choices about what they took and what they merely felt.

Hallie finished the corridor notices before she let herself return to the question.Finishing the work first mattered.By the time she and Grant left the main room, the last travelers were safely through and tomorrow’s list was stacked where Caleb would find it. Cedar Draw had not stopped because Hallie had learned something enormous about her own body.Outside, evening had settled over the buildings. Grant walked beside her without asking whether she was ready to talk.Hallie noticed that too.For years—across two lives, if she counted the one no one here knew about—Austin had been part of every definition she had built around the mate bond. First as the man it pointed toward. Then as the man who rejected her. Then as the man she had to keep choosing against.Grant had never asked to be the reward for winning that fight.Still, Hallie had begun to wonder whether she had made resistance part of the marriage without r