Semua Bab THE CHUBBY LUNA THEY REJECTED : Bab 1 - Bab 10

He starts walking, and everyone seems to hold their breath with me.Osborne Cliff doesn't push through the crowd, because he doesn't need to. Wolves step aside before he even reaches them, heads dropping, bodies angling out of his path like the ground itself is warning them to move. I've seen him from a distance before, always alone, always watched the way you watch something that hasn't decided yet whether it's dangerous. Up close, walking straight toward me with that same terrible calm, I understand for the first time why nobody in Silver Crest ever tests him.He stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes.He doesn't look at Dylan. He doesn't look at the crowd still murmuring behind me, still tasting the scandal on their tongues. He looks only at me, like the rest of the clearing has simply stopped existing."This woman is under my protection." His voice doesn't rise, doesn't need to, instead it's low and absolute, cutting straight through the last of the l

Osborne doesn't move for a long moment.I don't either. The room feels too small suddenly, his breathing too loud in the quiet, and I don't know if I'm supposed to speak first or simply wait him out the way I've learned to wait out every difficult silence in my life.Finally, his jaw tightens, like whatever he almost meant to say has decided against itself."Rest," he says instead, rough and clipped. "You're safe here."Then he's gone, footsteps already fading down the hall before I can answer, and I'm left standing alone in the half dark with my pulse still too fast and no real answers, only the low, steady hum of the new bond settling deeper into my chest where it wasn't before.I didn't sleep well.By morning, Kade, Osborne beta, is waiting for me in the hallway outside my room, arms crossed, voice carrying the flat certainty of a man who has already decided the conversation is finished before it starts."You'll remain here," he says. "For your protection. Until the fallout from la

I didn't go near his wing of the house. Not out of politeness, but out of curiosity, cold and deliberate, the same instinct that made me start sorting these storerooms my first morning here. If I don't know something, I find a way to test it until I do. So today I decide to test him, or rather, whatever it is between us that made his wolf go quiet the moment my old bond broke. I stay on the far side of the house from dawn onward and wait to see what happens. But nothing happens. At least nothing I can feel from here. No pull, no ache, no sense that distance alone is enough to unravel whatever's settled between us. That tells me something, though I'm not sure yet what to do with it. Maybe it isn't nearness he needs. Maybe it's only knowing I exist somewhere inside his walls. I keep my hands busy the rest of the morning, the same way I've kept them busy every day since the rejection. The medical stores still need real order, not just the surface sorting I managed my first week, s

Aina's POV I find the claw marks first thing in the morning.Deep gouges torn into the soft earth beneath my window, four sets close together, one heavier than the rest, dragged so hard the dirt is thrown up in ridges. I crouch beside them for a long moment, studying the shape, and something cold settles low in my stomach. Whatever left these marks stood here most of the night, close enough to hear me breathing on the other side of the glass.My first instinct is to go straight to Osborne. The note is still folded in the drawer by my bed, *he only needs you quiet, leave before the next full moon*, and now this, claws deep enough to gouge stone-hard ground, right beneath the one window in this house that's supposed to be mine alone. Someone wants me gone badly enough to threaten me twice in two nights. I want to know if he already knows that, and if he does, why he hasn't said a word.I don't get the chance. A servant finds me before I've even brushed the dirt from my knees, telling m

Aina's POV Sleep doesn't come, not with Osborne's blood still fresh in my mind, not with Kade's cousin and his ruined shoulder sitting heavy in my chest.I give up trying somewhere past midnight and walk out into the cold instead, drawn back to the east garden the way I've been drawn there every day since Osborne first named the line. I walk it slowly this time, testing the exact point, step by step, where the low, steady hum in my chest begins to strain.I find it easily now. A precise, invisible seam in the dark, one step of nothing and the next of tension threading tight behind my ribs. I stand right on that edge for a long moment, neither in nor out, and let myself finally think through everything I've been avoiding since the rejection.Dylan's voice comes first, cruel and careless in front of three hundred witnesses. Two years of trying to earn something that was never going to be given freely, no matter how patient or useful or quiet I made myself. Then the notes, two of them n