All Chapters of Rejected By My Alpha, Chosen By The Lycan King: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The older woman composed herself quickly.She lowered her hand from her mouth and straightened her spine and looked at me with those sharp dark eyes that were still wet at the edges but no longer threatening to spill over. There was a dignity to the way she pulled herself together that made me respect her immediately."Forgive me," she said. Her voice was steady now. "That was not the greeting I planned.""It is alright," I said."It is not," she said simply. "You have just arrived and you are still on your feet from whatever happened on the road and the last thing you need is an old woman falling apart in front of you." She looked at Rowan briefly. "She needs to eat and rest. The rest can wait until morning."Rowan nodded once like she had said something he agreed with completely."This is Cora," he said to me. "She served your mother from the time your mother was a child. She has been with the kingdom since before I came to it."I looked at her.She looked back at me with an express

Three days into training my body stopped complaining quite so loudly.It did not stop entirely. I woke up every morning with stiffness in muscles I had not known existed before Gareth introduced me to them. But there is a difference between the sharp protest of a body encountering something new and the deeper steadier ache of a body beginning to adapt and by the third day it had moved from the first into the second.That felt like progress.Gareth noticed too. He did not say so directly. He simply began correcting me less on the things he had corrected me most about in the first two days and started introducing new things to be corrected on instead. I understood that was his version of a compliment and I accepted it as such.Finn had made himself a fixture.He appeared every morning at the edge of the training ground with two cups of something hot and handed one to me without asking and positioned himself somewhere nearby for the session. He was technically there for his own training

The rain stopped the following morning.I was up before it did, sitting at my window watching the last of it thin out and disappear while the sky went from dark grey to lighter grey to the pale uncertain colour that comes just before actual morning. I had slept well, which still surprised me every time it happened. Something about the thickness of the walls and the steadiness of the fires and the particular quality of silence in this place made sleep come easier than it had in years.I was at the training grounds before Gareth.That had not happened before. I stood in the cool damp air of the freshly rained on morning and waited and felt the quiet of the grounds settle around me. The stone was dark with moisture. The air smelled clean in the way air only does after a long rain.Gareth arrived and looked at me standing there and said nothing. He simply unlocked the equipment store and handed me what I needed and we began.It was the best session I had yet.Something had shifted overnig

I wrote to my mother that night.Not my birth mother. My mother. The woman who had pressed money into my hands and watched me walk out of her house with one bag and had not tried to stop me because she understood, in the way she understood most things about me, that stopping me was not what I needed.I sat at the small writing table in my room with a lamp burning beside me and I told her where I was. Not in precise detail, not the name of the kingdom or its location, because I did not yet know who might read a letter in transit and caution had become a habit I was not willing to drop. But I told her I was safe. That I was somewhere real, with real people, and that what she had told me in her letter had led me to something I was still trying to understand but that was beginning to feel, in ways I could not fully explain, like the place I was supposed to be.I told her I had found out my birth mother's name.I told her that the woman she had taken me from had been brave and that I under

Gareth's something new turned out to be a test.He did not call it that. He simply arrived at the morning session with three senior warriors I had not sparred against before and arranged them at intervals across the training ground and told me to work through all three in sequence without stopping between rounds.I looked at the three of them.They looked back at me with the neutral professional expressions of people who had been asked to do a job and intended to do it properly."Now?" I said."Now," Gareth said.I went.The first warrior was fast and technically precise. He came at me with combinations I had practiced but had not faced at this speed and I had to abandon clean form in the first thirty seconds and work from instinct instead, reading what was coming and responding before I had fully processed it. I got through him. Not elegantly. But I got through him.The second was bigger and slower but hit harder when he connected, which he did twice. Once on my left shoulder and onc