บททั้งหมดของ Rejected Under the Blood Moon: The Alpha's Regret: บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

SERAPHINAWe came into Fenholt by the river, under the bridge, the way Hakon had said, in a fisherman's flat-bottomed boat that stank of eels.There were posters on every wall. My face, drawn in quick sure lines, looking down at me from doorways and gateposts and the side of a tavern. One thousand silver. Someone had drawn a moustache on one of them. Someone else had scratched out the eyes.Ilse kept my hood pulled well forward and her hand on my arm and walked me through the back lanes like a sister taking a sick girl home. Nobody looked twice. Nobody expected the most wanted wolf in the south to come walking through the fish market smelling of eels.Hakon met us at the water gate of the northern guest hall and hustled us inside before the door had finished opening."They've got him," he said, before I'd even pushed my hood back.I didn't have to ask who. The bond had been telling me since the boat. Somewhere under the town, below stone, below a great weight of stone, Kael was sittin

KAELThey came for Cassia an hour before noon.We'd talked through the wall all night. There was a crack in the mortar low down by the floor, about the width of a finger, and if you lay on the stones with your cheek against it you could hear the next cell as if someone were whispering in your ear. Cassia had found it in the first hour. She'd been talking ever since.About Wenna's herbs, and how badly she'd burned the last batch of salve. About the sea, which she'd heard for the first time from a room at the top of a stone house and had decided she didn't like. She didn't talk about her mother at all. Somewhere past midnight she asked me if I thought Sera would come, and I said yes, and she said, "So do I. That's what frightens me."When the guards opened her door, she didn't scream. I heard her stand up. I heard her say, quite clearly, "I can walk, thank you," in exactly the voice she used to use on the kitchen girls at home.Then, through the crack, just before they took her out, ver

RONANVarga didn't give anyone time to think. That was the first thing I noticed, and it told me more about him than anything he'd said on the steps.The sun had been back for barely the length of a breath when he turned to the guards behind him and said, in that thin carrying voice, "Take my granddaughter below. She'll be held until the council has voted." And before the murmur had even started up again: "The council of the south is in session. Now. Every Alpha to his door."He wanted it done while they were still frightened. Before they'd had time to look at three girls standing alive in the square and wonder why.Sorcha didn't fight. Two coast guards took her by the arms and she let them, walking between them up the steps with her chin high and her green velvet whispering on the stone. As she passed my bench she glanced down at me. Her eyes were grey again, and quite empty."Majesty," she said, as if we'd met at a dance.Then they took her in through the great doors and down, towar

SERAPHINAI've tried since to explain what it's like when a bond tears. Nobody who hasn't felt it understands, and everybody who has felt it would rather not talk about it.It's like a seam. A long seam, sewn by hand, being pulled apart one stitch at a time from the inside. Every stitch that goes, you feel go. And while it's happening, you can't tell which side of the cloth is giving way.I lay on the council steps with my cheek against cold stone and Cassia's hands in my hair, and tried to find out.The old thread ran from my chest to the man kneeling on my left. I knew it the way I knew my own hand. Torn once, in a clearing, and mended in the dark of the moon. It was humming so hard it hurt.The new one ran to the man on my right. Finer. Brighter. Barely a month old. It was humming too.And both of them were pulling. Each one leaning away from the other with all its weight, the way two dogs pull on the same rope, and the moon was coming up out of the sea behind them, white and huge,

SERAPHINAThe lane at Lowmere was full of light.I could see it the way I'd learned to see things in the dark, from very far off, the way you'd see a lit window across a valley at night. Small and unbearably bright. Five points of it, yellow and hard and steady, standing in a half circle round a house with a blue door.Lanterns.Sera. Mira's voice in the dark behind my eyes, so close she might have been sitting on the floor of the cell beside me. They're outside. Papa's put the table against the door. Tobin's got the bread knife. Pudding won't stop growling. She was trying very hard not to cry. Sera, the light's coming through the walls. It hurts. It hurts like the Hollow.I know, I told her. I know it does. I'm here.But I wasn't. I was a hundred miles south, kneeling on the floor of a cell in Fenholt with Sorcha's blood drying on my hands, and when I reached inside myself for something to send her, there was nothing there.I'd given everything back at noon. I'd nearly torn in half a