All Chapters of He Trained Me to Obey—So I Rejected Him: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

10 Chapters

Chapter 1

"Elena, the north-line surveillance upgrade has to be delivered tonight." The project coordinator set an encrypted laptop on my desk without quite meeting my eyes. "Kiara only just took over, and she doesn't know the core architecture yet. I'm afraid you'll have to wrap it up for her."The entire floor went quiet. Sentinel Dynamics was owned by Blackwood Pack, and nearly every employee on this floor answered to Rowan twice—once as CEO and once as Alpha. Everyone knew I'd designed the system from the first line of code to the final field test. It had landed Sentinel the largest inter-Pack border-security contract in company history.A month ago, Kiara had overwritten critical test data hours before a client demonstration. Rowan had protected her promotion by wiping the activity logs, then put me under investigation for "failure to supervise." After that, he'd announced that Kiara was the real project lead and reduced me to her technical support.I closed the handover checklist on my scr

Chapter 2

I had barely gotten my former mentor at Northstar Research Center on the phone when the front door opened."What was that about quitting?" Rowan stepped into the study, his gaze dropping to the phone in my hand.Before I could answer, his own screen lit up. Kiara had sent him a photo of herself in his motorcycle jacket, holding a mug of hot chocolate with a crescent moon drawn in foam.[The barista said I was extra sweet tonight. What do you think, the drink or me?]Rowan smiled as he typed back. [You. Not even close.]Only after he hit send did he seem to remember I was standing there. His smile vanished. "It's late. Why are you hiding in the study making calls?""That was my old mentor. A research position opened up, so I asked about it."His attention shifted to the autonomous-navigation papers spread across my desk. He picked up the top report, flipped through two pages, and dropped it again. "You haven't done research in five years. You honestly think they'll roll out the red carp

Chapter 3

On my last day, the head of Human Resources stopped me as I turned in my access card. "Alpha wants to see you in the executive office."My first instinct was to refuse. By the time my flight took off that night, I'd be gone from Blackwood territory for good. Still, five years deserved an ending, even if I had to draw the line myself.The executive-office door stood slightly ajar.Through the gap, I saw Kiara sitting on the edge of Rowan's desk with one leg resting between his knees. She claimed she'd twisted her ankle on her morning run. Rowan knelt in front of her, fastening a brace around it while she wore his suit jacket and idly wound his tie around one finger.I knocked twice.Kiara snatched her leg back with a theatrical gasp. "Elena? What are you doing up here?"Rowan rose too fast, and the flicker of guilt on his face hardened into anger. "Who gave you permission to enter the Alpha's office without being announced?""Human Resources said you wanted me."He called the department

Chapter 4

Rowan staggered back and clutched his chest.The pain of rejecting the bond tore through me too, a white-hot line drawn straight across my heart. I caught the doorframe and waited for the dizziness to pass. By the time I looked up, Kiara had hidden her flash of delight behind an expression of concern.She rushed to Rowan's side. "Are you okay?"He shoved her away without looking at her, his eyes locked on the documents on my phone. "This is impossible. I never approved your resignation, and I sure as hell never released you from my Pack.""You approved both twenty-nine days ago, at the second stop on your trip with Kiara."I'd slipped the documents into a batch of routine approvals. Rowan had been too busy taking road-trip pictures of Kiara to read the titles. He'd opened the list, used his Alpha key to sign everything at once, and gone right back to her.He snatched the phone out of my hand and enlarged his signature again and again. "This was a mistake. It doesn't count. I'll revoke

Chapter 5

Northstar Research Center had kept the door open for me. They restored my old position and helped me register with Northern Crown Pack before I'd even unpacked.Five years earlier, Rowan had told me Sentinel was barely surviving and needed someone he could trust with everything. I'd walked away from Northstar's autonomous-drone lab and followed him to Colorado. I built Sentinel piece by piece, from its first algorithm to its first major client.Standing in front of a lab console again, I realized the work I loved had never stopped being mine. I'd only buried it under somebody else's ambitions.Dr. Hayes didn't ask for the details of my breakup. He slid a dataset across the workstation. "The wilderness-rescue drones still can't adapt to shifting wind fields. That self-correcting route model you proposed years ago might be the only thing that saves this project."I pulled the file toward me. "Give me two weeks."During the first week, I practically lived in the lab. By the end of the sec

Chapter 6

The obsidian cuff slipped from Rowan's hand before the call ended. It struck the floor and broke cleanly in two.He didn't contact me for the next two weeks. Kiara, however, flooded her social feed with updates. She sat in Rowan's passenger seat, accompanied him to Pack events, and wore the management badge once reserved for the future Luna at Sentinel's annual meeting.She seemed desperate to prove that my departure had made her the winner.I stopped opening the pictures.While they celebrated renewing the north-line contract, I tested thermal recognition on a frozen ridge. While they gave interviews about Sentinel's exciting new era, my team and I spent three straight nights fixing the wind-field model. And while they announced they were officially dating, waiting for jealousy to drag me home, our first rescue prototype flew through a blizzard and found six missing climbers.A month later, Northstar held a press conference. Multiple emergency agencies adopted the system, and I was na

Chapter 7

Wind swept across the porch while Rowan stood silent."Kiara changed your security framework without authorization," he admitted at last. "She said she was only streamlining the interface. I didn't make the engineering team review it.""Because you fired or drove out everyone who raised a concern. You decided they were my followers trying to undermine you."Eight senior engineers had quit after I left. Rowan had been so certain they were pressuring him on my behalf that he'd handed their access to temporary contractors Kiara hired.The first breach should have been a warning. Their partner had given Sentinel one chance to fix the vulnerability, and Kiara promised she could do it. Rowan trusted her again. The second breach exposed member identities, including minors and survivors living in confidential safe housing.There was no one left to clean up the mess."I know I was wrong." Rowan's voice roughened. "If you come back, I'll hand you the entire company. You can take as much authorit

Chapter 8

Rowan didn't come back.At two in the morning, my phone rang. A Toronto police officer asked whether I knew the owner of a black SUV that had gone off a mountain road outside the city."Rowan Blackwood," I said. "Is he alive?""He is, but he's in critical condition. Are you family?"Five years ago, I would've said yes before he finished the question. I would've been pulling on my coat with one hand and booking the first ride to the hospital with the other."No," I said. "I'm not."Kiara's distress call had been bait. She knew the police were tracing the data breach, and she knew Rowan could bury her with one tap on his phone. She lured him to an abandoned ski lodge, poured concentrated wolfsbane into his whiskey, and tried to put him behind the wheel after it took effect. The plan was simple: let his SUV sail over the guardrail, call it an Alpha losing control of his wolf, then collect the life insurance and the Sentinel shares that named her as a beneficiary.Rowan woke up long enough

Chapter 9

Six months later, Northstar's rescue system passed its final trial.The trial just happened to be real.A blizzard rolled across the northern highway on launch day, swallowing road signs and knocking out two cell towers before noon. A convoy carrying thirty-seven passengers vanished between checkpoints. One vehicle was a school bus returning from a winter science camp.The command center fell silent when the alert came through.Old drones couldn't hold a route in winds that strong. Their navigation systems lost the road whenever snow covered the lane markers, and their batteries drained too quickly in subzero air. Those were the exact problems my team had spent months solving.Dr. Hayes looked at me across the room. "Your call."For one beat, all I could hear was Rowan telling me leadership meant knowing when to obey. Then the memory passed, leaving no ache behind."Launch the full grid," I said. "Pair the thermal feed with the Pack emergency database. Keep the high-altitude units abov

Chapter 10

I saw Rowan again one year later at the full-moon festival in Toronto.Northstar had spent the afternoon unveiling the second generation of our rescue grid. The new units could carry blood packs, medicine, and emergency cell relays into places ground teams couldn't reach. By spring, the network would cover four northern Packs and every public highway between them.At the reception, I moved easily between Council leaders, engineers, and the rescue crews who actually used our machines. Nobody introduced me as a former Luna or Rowan Blackwood's rejected mate. They knew my name because it was printed on the system that had brought their people home.He was there as a witness in the final settlement of the Blackwood data-breach case. The last compensation payments had cleared that afternoon, and the Northern Council had invited everyone involved to the public ceremony. No security detail followed him. No Pack members crowded around hoping for a word from their Alpha. He wore a plain charcoa

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