All Chapters of The Alpha Queen They Once Threw Away: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I don't know how long I walked before my legs finally gave out beneath me, but when I opened my eyes again, the sky had turned that strange shade of gray that comes right before sunrise, when the world hasn't decided yet whether it wants to be night or day.I was lying in the middle of a clearing I didn't recognize, surrounded by trees taller than any I'd ever seen inside our pack borders. My feet were raw and caked with dried blood. My dress was torn at the hem from catching on branches I didn't remember passing. Every part of my body screamed at me to stay down, to close my eyes and let the cold finish what heartbreak had started.But something in my chest wouldn't let me.That pressure from the night before was still there, humming low beneath my ribs like a second heartbeat that didn't belong to me. I pressed my palm flat against my sternum, half expecting to feel something physically different, though of course there was nothing to see. Just skin. Just bone. Just a girl who used

Three months passed before Marla decided I was ready to be tested against something more than her own training drills, and when the test came, it arrived exactly the way real danger always does, without warning and without mercy.We were returning from Ashgrove territory after a meeting with Alpha Corwin, cutting through the northern woods along a path Marla swore was safe, one she had walked a hundred times before without incident. The late afternoon light filtered gold through the trees, and for once my mind wasn't tangled up in grief or memory. I was thinking about nothing more complicated than the ache in my calves and whether Marla would finally let me rest for a full day once we got home.The attack came from the east, fast and silent, the way only trained wolves move when they don't want to be heard until it's too late.I smelled them before I saw them, a sharp, unfamiliar scent cutting through the pine and damp earth, and every hair on my body rose at once. Marla stopped walki

I felt him before I saw him.It was strange, the way my new instincts worked, senses sharpened by blood I hadn't even known existed inside me a few months ago. I was walking back from the eastern training grounds near Ashgrove territory, my muscles sore from a full day of drills, when the air itself seemed to shift, thick and heavy, the way it does right before a storm breaks.I stopped walking.Marla, a few steps ahead of me, stopped too, her whole body going rigid the way it did whenever real danger was near."Someone's here," she said quietly, scanning the treeline.I already knew who.I could feel it in the low pull behind my ribs, an ache that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with a bond that was supposed to be severed the night I was exiled. Bonds like that weren't supposed to still exist. Reyes had declared it broken in front of the entire council. And yet, standing there in the fading afternoon light, I felt it flare to life like a struck match, undeniable

We didn't have to wait long for the opportunity Marla predicted.Four days after the confrontation we'd overheard outside the Great Hall, Talia returned from another scouting run with news that changed everything, the kind of news that made Marla set down her tea without drinking it and made me forget entirely about the training drill we'd been about to start."Kade left the pack," Talia reported, slightly out of breath from her run back to Ashgrove territory. "Three nights ago. No warning, no explanation given to anyone except a brief message left for Damien.""Left as in exiled, or left as in walked away," Marla asked sharply."Walked away," Talia clarified. "Voluntarily. According to what I overheard from pack gossip, he told Damien he couldn't keep living inside a lie he no longer believed in."My chest tightened in a way I didn't fully understand, some tangled knot of vindication and old grief pulling tight at once. Kade, who used to press his forehead against mine before every h

For a long moment, nobody in that hall moved.Then, slowly, one by one, council members began rising from their seats, not to challenge me, but to kneel, the same way Alpha Corwin's warriors had knelt the very first day I arrived at Ashgrove territory. It started with an elder near the back, an old wolf named Bertram who had served on the council since before I was born, his knees creaking audibly as he lowered himself to the stone floor."Blackthorn blood," he said, his voice trembling with something between disbelief and reverence. "I never thought I would live to see it confirmed with my own eyes."Reyes' composure shattered completely at the sight of his own council abandoning their seats. "Sit down," he snapped, though the authority that once made an entire hall fall silent with a single raised hand now sounded thin, desperate. "This proves nothing. A power display does not erase the evidence presented against her.""Evidence you personally admitted was fabricated," Alpha Farris