Rejected By My Alpha, Chosen By His Ruthless Brother. のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

"Where's the morning patrol report?" Kael's voice cracked across the hall, sharper than he meant it, and the young Beta holding the ledger flinched hard enough to drop it. "Apologies, Alpha. Luna Selene requested it first." "I didn't authorize that." "She said she didn't need authorization anymore." The Beta's eyes stayed fixed on the floor. "She said as Luna, pack records fall under her oversight now." Kael's jaw worked. Three days together, and already half his own council answered to her before they ever answered to him. He told himself it was efficiency, that Selene was simply capable, that this was what he'd wanted all along when he chose an alliance over a heart he'd spent years pretending didn't matter as much as it did. He didn't believe it. Not this morning. "Bring me the report the moment she's finished with it," he said, and dismissed the Beta before his frustration could show any further. He spent the walk to the training yard cataloguing every small thing he'd let

"You're late tonight." "I'm careful." The man stepped out of the tree line at the edge of Moonfang's northern border, hood low over his face despite the cover of night. "Careful takes longer than late ever will, and given how close we came to disaster tonight, I'd think you'd prefer careful." Selene didn't bother hiding her irritation. She'd slipped out of the pack house through a servant's passage only Kael's most trusted guards knew existed, and every extra minute spent waiting in the cold increased the odds of someone noticing her absence and questions she had no intention of answering, questions she'd spent months making sure no one would have to ask at all, not even the husband who was starting to watch her far too closely for comfort. "What do you have for me," she said, arms crossed tight against the cold. "Progress. Slower than promised, but progress nonetheless." The lieutenant's scent was wrong in the particular way all Hollow Fang enforcers seemed to carry, sour beneath

"You brought her to a gathering of Alphas?" The visiting Alpha of the eastern territories, a broad, silver-bearded man named Corwin, didn't bother lowering his voice. "Unproven. Untrained. And you expect the rest of us to simply accept her as your mate without question, after everything that happened at that ceremony three weeks ago." "I don't expect anything from you," Darius said. "I'm informing you of a fact, not requesting your approval." The great hall at Kingswood had filled with delegations from six territories by midday, banners hung along the stone walls, long tables set for a formal council meant to address the rising rogue attacks along every border. Servants moved between the tables with wine and roasted meat that no one had touched yet, the tension in the room thick enough to make even the food feel like an afterthought. Aurora stood beside Darius near the head table, acutely aware of every eye in the room that kept drifting toward her, weighing, measuring, deciding. "

"Where did you go?"Darius kept his voice low, but there was no missing the edge under it. Aurora stood in the doorway of his study, still catching her breath from whatever path had brought her back to him, and he'd been waiting long enough that patience had worn thin."I got lost.""You don't get lost in your own home." He set down the report he hadn't actually been reading for the last ten minutes and came around the desk. "Not after a council where half the room questioned whether you belonged here at all. Not right after an Alpha nearly said something he wasn't supposed to say in front of everyone."Aurora's chin lifted, the way it always did when she was deciding how much of the truth she could afford to give him. "I needed air. I walked further than I meant to."He studied her for a long moment, the tightness around her eyes, the way her hands stayed folded instead of reaching for him the way they usually did when she walked into a room."You went pale during the council," he sa

"Open the gate."The guard at the bar didn't move. "My lady, the Alpha's orders were clear.""His orders were given before he was dying." Aurora's voice came out harder than she'd ever used on anyone in this castle, and for once she didn't care how it sounded. "If you won't open it, I'll go over the wall instead, and then you'll have failed to protect me twice tonight instead of once.""You can't scale that wall.""Watch me try."Isolde caught her arm. "Aurora, think about this.""I have thought about it." Aurora pulled free, not unkindly, but without stopping either. "I felt him almost disappear a moment ago, Your Majesty. I'm not standing here waiting to feel it happen again."Something in Isolde's face shifted, some old grief surfacing and just as quickly buried again."If something happens to you out there," Isolde said quietly, "it won't just be Darius we've lost.""Then send guards with me instead of arguing." Aurora held her gaze, steady despite everything shaking inside her. "