All Chapters of THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS DAUGHTER : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTERChapter Twelve — The Cost of Being SeenDamon POVThe healer works quickly, quietly, his hands moving over Sophia with the efficient calm of someone who has done this a thousand times and still takes it seriously every time."Severe exhaustion," he says finally, straightening. "Exposure. Her body's been pushed further than it should have been allowed to go." He doesn't look at me when he says it, but he doesn't have to. "She needs rest. Real rest. Warmth, food, and no labor for several days at the least.""Is there anything else," I ask. "Anything unusual."He hesitates — just slightly, just long enough that I notice it. "Her recovery isn't quite what I'd expect, given how depleted she is. I can't tell you why. It isn't anything I have a name for." He shrugs, an honest, unsatisfying gesture. "Rest will do more for her than I can."I don't push him further. Whatever it is, he doesn't know either, and I'd rather have his honesty than a gu

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTERChapter Fourteen — The Things They Never Told HerSophia POVThe voice is gone the moment Mara steps through the door, and I don't tell her what I heard. I'm not sure I could even if I wanted to — how do you explain a voice inside your own head to someone who has never once looked at you like you might be more than what you appear to be?"Eat," Mara says, setting the tray down without ceremony. "You look half a ghost already. No sense making it worse."I do as she says, mostly because it gives me something to do with my hands besides trembling."Mara." I keep my eyes on the bowl in front of me, my voice as light as I can make it. "Was I always here? In Moonridge, I mean. Or was I brought here, as a baby?"She goes still for just a second — barely anything, the kind of pause someone else might not even notice. Then she picks up the empty cup from the tray and busies her hands with it."You were very young when you came to us," she says. "

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTERChapter Sixteen — The Reaction He WantsDamon POVI notice it before I understand what I'm noticing.Sophia crosses the courtyard most mornings now, carrying whatever the healer has permitted her to carry while she finishes recovering, and she doesn't look toward me anymore. Not a glance. Not the flicker of attention she used to give me even in the worst of it, even when she'd already decided I didn't deserve it. She simply moves through her day as though I'm one more piece of the estate she has to walk past.I tell myself I should be relieved. Fewer complications. Fewer moments where the bond makes something in my chest twist toward her before I can stop it.I'm not relieved. I keep watching for her to look, and she doesn't, and something about that absence sits worse in me than her anger ever did.I don't examine that feeling too closely. I know what waits underneath it if I do.Seraphina finds me near the training yard that afternoon

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTERChapter Eighteen — The Question He Shouldn't AskDamon POVI don't go back to the boundary.I've stood on that ground three times now, and each time it's given me the same thing — a story that doesn't quite fit, evidence I can't fully read, questions with no one left to ask. Elias gave me the last piece the ground itself can offer. What I need now isn't dirt and scent trails. It's people.So I start with a simple question, asked quietly, to the right ears rather than the loudest ones: who knew Seraphina was going to the eastern boundary that morning?It takes two days to get anything close to an answer, and even then, it isn't one.The warrior who assigned the eastern patrol that week tells me he didn't know Seraphina intended to walk that stretch at all — that as far as he understood, she rarely went near it. The servant who prepared her morning meal remembers her leaving earlier than usual, though she couldn't say where, only that Ser

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTERChapter Twenty — The Distance Between ThemSophia POV The healer clears me for light duties on a grey, unremarkable morning, and I step back into the ordinary rhythm of the estate feeling like someone wearing my own life a size too loose.People look at me differently now. I notice it in the way conversations pause a half-second too long when I pass, the way servants who once looked straight through me now glance twice, unsure what to make of a wolf-less omega the Alpha Prince carried through his own front door. Some of it is curiosity. Some of it, I think, is caution — as if I might be something more complicated than they'd decided I was allowed to be.I don't spend much time wondering what they think. There are larger questions occupying the space that used to be filled with worrying over other people's opinions of me — my father's secrecy, the trips no one was meant to speak of, a voice that knows things about me I don't know myself