All Chapters of Rejected Under the Blood Moon: The Alpha's Regret: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

SERAPHINAI stood in the river with the page in my hands until the cold got into my bones and Ilse came and took me by the elbow and walked me out.Two daughters. One sent to the coast. One sent to Ironmoor.I'd always thought my family started with my mother. With her hands, and her singing, and the burn on my wrist. Before her there'd been almost nothing I knew about: a grandmother who'd died before I was born, whom Hesta never mentioned, and a grandfather who'd been an omega's son and kept bees.And before that, a woman in a locked house on a hill, with sunstone in the walls, giving birth to two girls she'd never be allowed to keep.Sister, said the cold thread.I stopped on the bank.You've read it, said Sorcha. Her voice in the dark was very quiet. I felt you read it. All the way from here.You knew, I said.A pause.Yes. Hesta told me. Years ago, in her letters. Her mother told her the st

CASSIASigrun was waiting for us at the first ford north of Fenholt.I don't know why I was surprised. She'd said she'd keep the sea-witch alive, and Sigrun, I was learning, did exactly what she said she'd do and not one inch more. She'd sat on the north bank for two days with her four guards, eating hard bread and glaring at the water, until our little cart came down the road and she could see for herself that Sorcha was still breathing."You took your time," she said, when we'd splashed across."She can't sit a horse yet," I said. "She tried. She fell off.""Twice," said Sorcha, from the back of the cart, with her eyes shut. "Do tell everyone."Sigrun looked at her for a long moment. Then she turned her horse and rode on ahead without another word, and we followed, and that was how the three of us came north together. The King's cousin, the sea-witch, and me.***It wasn't comfortable. I won't pretend it was.

SERAPHINARonan sat by the water all night.I watched him from the trees. He'd come up out of the lake after the last boat had gone, and shifted, and put on the clothes Erling brought him, and then he'd gone back down to the edge of the shingle and sat there with his arms round his knees, looking across at the far shore, where a single yellow light still burned at the foot of the black hills.Nobody went to him. Hakon would have, if Hakon had been there. Ilse started to, once, and then stopped and came back and sat down again beside Liv.Kael didn't sleep either. He sat with his back against a pine and the Book of Names across his knees, and every so often I felt the bond hum, low and steady, the way it did when he was thinking about me and trying not to.A little before dawn, I went down.Ronan didn't look round when I sat beside him on the stones. He didn't say anything for a long time."He taught me to swim," he said at last. "In this lake, as it happens. I was seven. He threw me o

KAEL"The well," Ilona hissed. "Go."Erling was already moving. He went over the stone lip head first, the way a seal goes off a rock, and the black water closed over him with hardly a sound.I didn't follow.I'd like to say I decided not to. The truth is my body decided for me. My lungs were still burning from the swim in. My legs were shaking. If I'd gone back into that water then, I'd have drowned halfway down the tunnel, and Erling would have had to choose between dragging a dead man and saving himself.So I did the only thing left. I rolled sideways off the lip of the well into the deepest black I could find, behind a great knuckle of rock that jutted out of the cellar wall, and pressed myself flat, and stopped breathing.Above us, the door at the top of the stair swung open.Light came down. Not the hard yellow of sunstone. An ordinary lamp. Oil and wick, warm and smoky and flickering, the kind my mother used to carry up to bed.And footsteps. One man. Slow. Unhurried.***He ca

CASSIAThe second time in my life I woke up tied in the back of a cart, I was a great deal less polite about it.I bit the man who checked my ropes. Not hard. Just enough to make the point. He swore and cuffed me across the ear, and I lay back against the sacks with my ear ringing and thought, well, Cassia, that's three Watch men you've bitten now, and not once has it helped.It was grey dawn. We were moving. I could hear hooves all round us, a great many of them, and the creak of harness, and the jolt of wheels on a rough road. And there was light. That was the worst of it. Hard yellow light, coming from just above my head.I turned my head.They'd driven a pole into the bed of the cart, between the sacks, and hung a lantern from it. A little iron cage with a candle in it that didn't flicker. It hung right over Sorcha.She was lying on her back in the straw with her eyes half open, and her face was the colour of ashes. Her lips were moving, very slightly, as if she were trying to tal