All Chapters of The Alpha's Rejected Mate Returns for Revenge: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The Ash Pact lives in Ruth's archive for three days before I ask her to bring it to the lodge.She carries it in a flat oak box with both hands, the way you carry a sleeping animal you do not trust. She sets it on the long table and lifts the parchment out with a cloth under it, so her skin never touches it directly."Original?" I ask."A copy old enough to be rude about it," she says. "The North holds the first skin. Smell it."I lean in. Smoke. Iron gall ink. Something sweet and rotten underneath, like apples left in a sealed room."That is the preservative," Ruth says. "Do not breathe it for pleasure."Kade stands at the window, watching the yard because watching the parchment makes him want to burn it. Jonas is at the door. Rhys, who rode in at noon with road dust still on his boots, leans over the far end with his spectacles low on his nose.He has been quiet too long, for Rhys."Wren." He does not look up. "Come and look at your witnesses."The bottom of the parchment is a thick

They carry him into the clinic after dark, on a door taken off the smokehouse, because the clinic's stretcher is under Jessa's boy, who has a fever and a mother who will not be moved.Celeste meets them at the step with a lamp in one hand and shears in the other, cutting the stranger's shirt away before the bearers stop moving. That is Celeste now. No greeting. No flinch. Hands first, questions later. The clinic runs the way she runs, stiff and exact, and half the town that cursed her name in spring now knocks at her door at night.I get there ten minutes after her message does. She does not write this down. She sends Tomas at a run with three words: Come. Alone. Quiet.The man on the door is northern. I know it the way you know weather. Pale as a fish belly, big in the frame gone starved thin, hair cut short against lice. His left shoulder is torn down to a red ruin that smells of iron and rot. Wolf bite, gone bad. Days old, walked on, slept on, walked on again."Found him at the low

The clinic smells of yarrow and hot iron at dawn, and nobody in Ashford is awake to see their queen slip in through the back door like a thief.Sanna is waiting. Of course she is."Sit," she says, pointing at the cot. "Before you fall. Queens fall harder. More noise.""I don't fall.""You fainted on my step Tuesday and called it kneeling." She warms her hands at the stove. "Off with the shirt. Spare me the face, Majesty. I delivered half this town."The linen is cold through my skin. Sanna lays her palm flat on my belly, low, and goes still the way she goes still: completely, like a pond giving up its ripples.She waits. Frowns. Moves her hand a finger's width and waits again."Well?" I say."Hush." Her eyes are closed. "Breathe out. Slow. Slower. There."Selen is awake. I feel her rise, not toward the shift, never toward the shift these past weeks, but around, always around, that curled guard she keeps at the center of me."Am I pregnant, Sanna?"Her hand does not lift. "You come at

Millbrook announces itself by smell before it shows through the trees: woodsmoke, pig, and the iron tang of the mill race, running brown and fast.Kade rides at my left, close enough that our stirrups knock when the track narrows. He has said perhaps forty words since dawn, thirty about the road. Through the bond I feel him banked down like a stove, heat held, waiting. He knows I am keeping something. A completed bond is a door that opens both ways, and mine, lately, has a room in it I keep shut."Whatever it is, Wren," he says at last, eyes on the village ahead. "When you're ready.""When I'm ready," I say, and hate how grateful I am. "Thank you."Millbrook is the last village before the border stones: forty roofs, a mill, a chapel with no bell since the Hunger Winter took it for arrowheads. People come out as we ride in, and they do not cheer. They measure us the way you measure weather over the ridge: what will it cost, and can the roof hold.The headman is a miller named Tomas Ree

The bride has a name, and Ruth finds it before the lamp burns down to its socket, because names are what archives are for."Isolde," she says, with her finger under a line in the marriage roll, in the cramped hand of a clerk dead a hundred years. "Isolde Halloway. Marked, the roll says, with the crescent at the brow, same as yours, child. Nineteen years old. Sent north in the year of the Broken Stag, with forty mules of dowry and a copy of a certain scroll, to wed the heir of Blackmoor and seal the peace between mountain and moor.""My ancestress," I say."Your great-great-aunt, by the roll's reckoning, and the last Moonmarked before you. The mountain gives her up like a tithe and calls it a wedding, because the Hunger Winter is eating the packs alive and Blackmoor has grain, salt, and soldiers, and Blackmoor's price is the marked blood joined to the moor." Ruth turns the page with terrible gentleness. "Here is her departure, witnessed. Here is the road money paid. Here—" her finger s