All Chapters of Rejected Under the Blood Moon: The Alpha's Regret: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

They gave me until first light, which in Ironmoor, this late in autumn, isn't long.I walked back to the east cottages alone. Nobody offered to come with me and I didn't want anyone to. The bonfire noise thinned out behind me until all I could hear was gravel under my shoes, and somewhere along the path I noticed I was holding my scarred wrist in my other hand, as if it belonged to somebody else.My stepmother had got home before me.My things were already on the step. Not packed, just put there. My spare dress, my boots, my mother's hairbrush with half its bristles gone. The tin where I kept my kitchen wages sat on top, and when I picked it up it was light."There was eleven silver in here," I said.Hesta didn't come out. She spoke through the gap in the door. "Rent. For the years you ate at my table."I thought about pushing that door open. I thought about it quite seriously. But my arms still felt heavy and slow, the way they had since the clearing, and I wasn't sure I could have l

KAELI stayed in the old watchtower until the moon went down, because it was the only place in Ironmoor where nobody would come looking for me.From up there I'd watched her walk between the stones. She didn't look back. I'd have understood if she had. I'd have understood if she'd turned and screamed my name across two miles of frost. She just went into the trees, small and straight in Rowan's coat, and the forest closed behind her like water.The bond doesn't break when you say the words. People think it does. It tears, and then it keeps tearing, a little at a time, like a stitch working loose from cloth. By dawn it felt as if someone had worked a hook in under my ribs and was leaning on it.I deserved worse. I knew that.Rowan found me at sunrise. He came up the ladder slowly, the way you'd approach a dog that has already bitten someone."She's across," he said."I saw.""I gave her my coat.""I saw that too."He waited. Rowan has known me since we were six, and he's the only wolf i

SERAPHINAThey put me on Ilse's horse, behind her, and we rode north along the river for the whole of the next day.I'd never been on a horse before. Ironmoor wolves run; horses are for trade and for the old. By noon I couldn't feel anything below my waist, and by the middle of the afternoon I'd stopped caring, because the silverroot had started to work.It began as an itch somewhere behind my breastbone, where the bond had torn. Then it was more like a draught under a door, a thin cold thread of something that wasn't me. I kept going still to feel it, and every time I did, it went quiet again, like an animal that knows it's being watched."You feel her," Ilse said, without turning round."How did you know?""You stop breathing every time." She steered the horse round a fallen birch. "Don't chase her. She'll come when she's ready. Wolves are like cats that way.""Mine never did anything I asked.""Yours has been asleep for eleven years." Ilse's voice was dry. "Give her a day."We stop

KAELWe rode home in silence. Twelve warriors, eight hounds, and not one of them willing to ask their Alpha why he'd just walked into the Northern Reach and shouted at a riverbank.Rowan waited until we'd dropped back from the others, where the road bends above the mill and the wind carries voices away."You told her not to come back.""If she was there.""She was there." He said it flatly. "You knew she was. I watched your face."I didn't answer that. Below us, the valley opened up the way it always does on the last rise, the smoke from the kitchens and the long hall and the watchtower black against the evening. Home. It had never looked less like it."Kael." Rowan pulled his horse round across my path, which nobody in Ironmoor has done since I took the pack. "I've let you have your silence for three days. I carried my own coat up to that ravine and looked at it hanging off a rock. I'm done. Either you tell me what's going on, or you find yourself another Beta."He meant it. I could

SERAPHINAHe didn't hurry either. I was beginning to think nobody in the North ever did.He came up the length of the hall along the silver rivers of the floor map, and the guards by the door straightened as he passed them without his having to look at a single one. I saw him the way I was seeing everything in those strange sharp seconds: every line clear, every shadow edged in cold light.He was tall. Taller than Kael, and broader through the shoulders, and older, somewhere past thirty. His hair was dark red, cropped short, and there was snow still melting on it. A healed scar ran down from his left temple into his beard. He wore a travel-stained coat over plain leather, no crown, no chain, nothing to mark him out, and he didn't need any of it. You'd have known who he was in a crowd of a thousand.Then my eyes stopped being strange. It happened all at once, like a door swinging shut. The braziers flared back up to full height, the hall filled with ordinary orange firelight, and my le