All Chapters of The Alpha's Rejected Mate Returns for Revenge: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

11The ceremonial hunt starts at dawn, which is exactly the kind of stupid that makes me miss the rogue lands. At least out there the sunrise didn't come with a dress code.Bloodmoon does the whole thing up like a festival. Drums in the square. Children with pine boughs in their hair. Wolves in human skin everywhere, all of them pretending this isn't a dominance ritual wrapped in autumn leaves. I'm supposed to be here as Nightbane's envoy, which means I stand on the reviewing platform with the other dignitaries and look important while Rhys's orders sit in my back pocket like a hot coin: watch, learn, don't bleed in front of them.Kade stands three yards away. He hasn't looked at me once since the platform was raised, which is fine. I haven't looked at him either. That's what I keep telling my skin, which is doing a lousy job of listening. Every time he shifts his weight, the thing under my ribs turns over like an animal in its sleep.Celeste, of course, finds me within the first ten

13I don't sleep. I lie in the envoy's quarters at the Bloodmoon guest lodge and stare at the ceiling beams and listen to the bond hum under my skin like a struck wire.I know that scent. From three years ago. From the claiming night.Three years. He remembered my scent for three years. Not my face, not my name — I was a wolfless healer's daughter, forgettable by design. But the scent. The claiming night was supposed to be the happiest night of my life. Instead it was the night he stood in front of the whole pack and said the words that cut me out of his life, and I walked into the rogue lands with nothing but a healer's kit and a dead bond.Except the bond isn't dead. The treaty stone proved that. My blood on the granite next to his, and the old magic woke up like it had been waiting.I get up at four in the morning and write the letter.It's coded the way Rhys taught me — trade figures on the surface, questions underneath. I give it to the Nightbane courier who rides with the supply

He comes through my window at midnight, which is so like Rhys that I almost laugh before the knife is at his throat."Password's changed," I say.He smiles in the dark. Rhys Calder, deposed Alpha King, leader of the Nightbane, the man who pulled me out of a snowbank three years ago and taught me how to be dangerous. He looks tired. There's a new scar along his jaw I haven't seen before."Let me in properly and I'll tell you the new one," he says.I lower the knife. He climbs through the window like a man half his age — he's thirty-four and moves like weather — and stands in my room in a traveler's coat, smelling of pine and road dust and the rogue lands. Home, my hindbrain says, stupid and traitorous. He's the closest thing to home I've had in three years. The dead white rabbit on my doorstep feels very far away and very close at the same time. I lock the window behind him and draw the curtain, hands steady out of long practice."You shouldn't be here," I say. "If Bloodmoon catches th

I don't sleep. I lie in the wreckage of my bed and stare at the ceiling and try to hate myself, and the worst part is I can't even manage that. My body hums like a struck tuning fork. The bond, the dead bond, pulses slow and smug in my veins, and every time I think about his mouth I have to bite my own lip hard enough to bleed.What I keep coming back to, while the gray light crawls across the ceiling, is the arithmetic. It doesn't work. None of it works. A severed bond doesn't flare. A severed bond doesn't drag an Alpha through the rain to your door. A severed bond doesn't hum.Rhys is gone. He left before dusk with his guard and his broken heart, and some cowardly part of me is glad, because I don't want to see his face right now. I don't want to see anyone's face. Especially not the one person who might have answers, because asking Rhys would mean admitting what happened last night, and I am not ready to say it out loud.By dawn I've stopped pretending I'll rest. I get up, I wash

I don't open it at the ruins. I wrap the box in my jacket and carry it back to my quarters like it's a live coal, past the stares, past the ash still in my hair, and I lock the door, and I sit on the floor with my back against the bed, and for a long time I just look at it.For Wren.My mother's handwriting. Looped and sure, the hand that wrote a thousand remedy labels. My throat closes.The latch is stiff with soot but it gives. Inside, wrapped in oilskin, is a journal, leather-bound, small enough to hide in a flour bin. I know this book. I remember it on her desk. I remember thinking it was remedy notes.I was wrong about a lot of things.The first entry is dated twenty years ago. My mother's hand, younger, hurried with excitement:"Wren is six today. Bright as a spark, fierce as a wolverine. The old healer says no wolf. I don't believe it. I felt her kick in the womb when the moon rose. Something is wrong, and I am going to find out what."I turn the page with hands that shake.It