All Chapters of I Refused to Be His Sacrifice After Rebirth: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

When Celine Vail slid the obsidian bond ring across the counter, Nora Whitlock, the witch behind the deed registry, looked up."You're sure you want to trade your whole vow deposit for a refuge deed to Greytide Island?"Celine pinned her trembling right hand to the counter. "I am."She had saved the deposit for four years, never spending a cent of the basic stipend the Moon Council paid wolf-soul carriers. Rafe had given her a few trinkets; Gavin sometimes tossed her salt coins for errands. She had put it all into the same iron box. With the moon-map prize she had never dared touch in her first life, it was exactly enough for a one-way deed.Nora turned the parchment deed around and tapped the final clause. "Once you cross the Tide Gate, your Redridge pack mark goes dark for good. Greytide Island belongs to no pack's scent network. The Council keeps no wardens there, and no tracking spell can pierce the tide fog."She held Celine's gaze. "Once you cross, no one can find you. You won't

Early the next morning the whole Redridge pack went with Cassandra to the moon spring in Whitepine territory.Before they left, Delia made a point of locking the side door and leaving two guards behind to "protect" Celine. Within an hour, scent images from Cassandra started arriving one after another. She sat beside Rafe wrapped in Gavin's hunting cloak, and their parents were sorting a food chest in the row behind her.Every image was a reminder that the family was most comfortable when Celine was not there.In her last life she had cried over these pictures for half a day. This time she shut the links down one by one and packed the last three rolls of moon-phase maps into the tidesalt case.The maps held ten years of her own observations of moonwells and tide routes. Nobody at Redridge could read them, and Gavin had always blocked her from registering them with the Council. In her last life, on this very night, Silverclaw poachers had broken in, touched none of the jewelry, and burne

When Celine woke, the moon outside the window had moved only half a pane.She had been unconscious for three hours.A stranger was stitching the wound behind her shoulder with a bone needle. Her cloak smelled of wind and distant snow, and small silver vials of powder lined her belt."Hold still," the woman said. "I only just brought the poison under control. Another fifteen minutes, and you'd never have managed a full shift again.""Did you save me?""Evelyn Hart. Itinerant healer." The woman tied off the stitch, her tone flat. "I was passing through Redridge when I heard everyone in the healing den debating whether the heir could spare any essence. Imagine that. One woman was dying, and they were still calculating whether the other might miss a party."Celine closed her eyes for a moment. Rafe sat beside the bed, dark bruises beneath his eyes and his lips dry and cracked, as if he had kept watch all night. When he saw her wake, he jerked forward like a man breaking the surface after b

The whip wounds on Celine's back had not yet scabbed over when the North American Moon Council announced that she had won the art competition.Her Migration Chart of the Thirteen Moonwells of the North had taken first prize. The notice stated clearly that the original artist had to appear at the Council hall in person for sigil registration, and the prize was enough to keep her on Greytide Island for half a year.For the first time in ten years, an institution with authority had recognized that her maps were more than "useless paper."She pressed the fog cloak down into the tidesalt case, meaning to go straight to the Tide Gate after the ceremony. But Cassandra heard the news and insisted the whole family come along."Celine's honor is Redridge's honor too." She took Delia's arm, and her smile looked sincere. "I could miss anything but my sister's most important day."Celine did not object. She wanted to know why Cassandra had suddenly turned generous.Moon maps from every territory hu

Greytide Island had no roads—only a black-rock shore scoured raw by the tide.After crossing the Tide Gate, Celine walked until every familiar scent had faded. Only then did she sit behind a rock sheltered from the wind. The burn left by her extinguished pack mark crossed her wrist, throbbing so fiercely she could not hold her water flask. But for the first time, no one else's orders occupied her mind.She rested her forehead on the tidesalt case and listened to herself breathe.Without warning, the sigil on her deed lit. A Council warden's seal rose from the parchment, alerting her to new evidence in the independent investigation. Certified records were delivered automatically to an applicant's deed.Celine hesitated, then opened the images.The record began in the Redridge healing den.After Rafe came back from the Tide Gate, he found her renunciation of pack citizenship and the bond ring at the ruins of the ancestral fire. In the image, Warren tore the renunciation to pieces and sho