Rejected By My Alpha, Chosen By His Ruthless Brother. のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

"She just stared at me like I'd grown a second head."Aurora sat on the edge of the infirmary cot, watching Darius's color slowly return while a healer checked the bandage over his side for the third time that morning. The wound had closed enough overnight to stop needing constant pressure, though it still looked raw and angry along the edges, a stark reminder of how close the silver light had cut it. The healer pressed gently at the skin around it, checking for the heat and swelling that would mean infection setting in, and Aurora found herself watching the woman's hands as much as Darius's face, tracking each step out of habit she hadn't quite managed to set down."Who did?" Darius asked, voice still rough with sleep he hadn't gotten enough of."One of the kitchen girls. I walked past her this morning and she dropped an entire tray of bread." Aurora managed a tired smile. "Not the reaction I expected after saving your life.""Give it time." He caught her hand before she could pull i

"Lady Aurora. What a pleasure to finally meet the woman everyone's talking about."Selene's smile arrived a full second before her eyes did, warm and carefully practiced, the kind of expression Aurora had learned to distrust on sight after growing up around court politics she'd never wanted any part of. She swept into the receiving hall in pale blue silk, every inch the picture of a gracious visiting Luna, two attendants trailing behind her carrying gifts wrapped carefully in ribbon."Lady Selene." Aurora kept her voice even, matching the performance if not the warmth behind it. "Kingswood welcomes you.""Does it?" Selene's gaze flicked briefly toward Darius, standing rigid beside his father at the head of the hall. "I confess I expected a cooler reception, given everything that's happened between our packs lately. How refreshing to be wrong.""We extend hospitality to all visiting dignitaries, as is expected of us." Darius's voice carried none of the warmth Selene's did, precise and

The study door didn't creak. It slammed, hard enough to rattle the shelves lining the far wall and send a stack of maps sliding off the edge of a side table, and King Alaric looked up from his desk with the calm, unhurried patience of a man who'd survived far worse entrances than his own son's. Firelight caught the gray threading through his beard, the deep lines around eyes that had watched three decades of border wars and council betrayals without ever quite losing their composure until tonight. Papers he'd clearly been avoiding sat untouched beneath his folded hands, as though he'd been waiting for this exact conversation longer than Darius had known to expect it. "I take it the visit with Lady Selene didn't end well." "She said whatever happened to Aurora's mother belongs to you to explain. Not my mother. Not some old castle rumor. You." Darius crossed the room without slowing, planting both hands flat on the desk between them. "So explain it." Something changed behind his fathe

Darius's jaw worked once before he finally spoke, and Aurora watched him choose his words the way a man chooses footing on ice, testing each one before he committed his full weight to it. "The Purge wasn't an accident. It was ordered, generations ago, by someone in my bloodline." His voice stayed level, controlled in a way that told her exactly how much effort the control was costing him. "Your mother survived it. That's the truth I have. I don't have all of it yet." Aurora searched his face, waiting for the rest, for the details that would make the vague shape of what he'd just said solid enough to actually hurt properly instead of just sitting there, heavy and unfinished, in the space between them. She'd expected names. Dates. Something with edges she could hold onto and examine, not this smoothed-over version that told her just enough to confirm her worst fear without giving her anywhere to put it. "That's it? That's everything?" "That's everything I'm certain of." "You're lyi

Silence came first. Then cold. Then the slow, disorienting realization that she was on her knees in frost-hardened grass with no memory of kneeling down. The moon had shifted position overhead, further along its arc than it should have been if only minutes had passed, and that small, cruel detail frightened her more than anything else so far. Time had simply gone missing, and she had no way to account for where it went. Aurora blinked hard, trying to force the world back into focus. Her hands didn't look right. She lifted them in front of her face and found her fingertips tipped in silver, claws where nails should have been, faint light pulsing beneath her skin like the last embers of a fire that had burned much hotter only moments ago. The last clear thing she remembered was the claws coming down. Everything after that lived in fragments only, a scream that hadn't sounded like hers, a strength that had moved through her body without asking her permission first. Then she saw the ro