All Chapters of My Alpha Mate Rejected Me : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

"Damian Hale, your son is dying, so put down the glass."The quartet played on for two more bars because nobody had told them to stop, and then the cello gave up and four hundred heads turned toward the doors. A woman in a wet dress stood there with a five-year-old hanging over her shoulder, one of his shoes missing, a paper crown sliding down over his ear.Up on the stage Damian lowered his champagne and smiled the way he smiled for photographers, as if she were something the planners had arranged. Vivienne Ashgrove stood at his elbow in silver, her fingers resting on his sleeve. Iris looked at those fingers, and then she started walking.Nobody stopped her. The carpet was so thick she couldn't hear her own steps, only Theo's breathing against her neck, a thin high whistle like a kettle in another room. She had been listening to it since six o'clock."He can't get air," she said at the foot of the stage. "I called you five times."Damian covered the microphone with his palm and bent

"By sunrise Iris Hale will be dead."She said it standing at the window of Aldous's office with her back to the glass, and Aldous dropped his pen. Vance, who had been staring at the empty inhaler, looked up as if she had thrown something at him."Iris, you've been awake for twenty hours.""That's why I can see it." She kept her voice low, for the door. "Eleanor filed before he collapsed, so the judge is already hers. Somebody emptied his inhaler, so he isn't safe in any building they pay for. If I'm alive they take him. If I'm dead there's nobody to file against.""And Theo?" Aldous said."Theo too."Nobody breathed."Not really," Iris said. "On paper. In the river, in front of the people who matter. You told me my father's trust can't be touched until I'm thirty-five, Mr. Vance. It never said I had to be seen."Vance said nothing for a long time. Then he took a folded map from the briefcase and put a finger on a bridge. "Kessler Crossing. Sixty feet of water, and it runs fast enough

Five years later the dead walked into the Hale Meridian ballroom, and for a few seconds nobody noticed, because she waited until the speech was nearly done."Damian Hale, put down the glass."The quartet stopped in the middle of a bar, same as before. On the stage, beneath a banner that said Fifteen Years of Hale Meridian, In Memory of Those We Lost, Damian stood with champagne halfway to his mouth. He was thinner, grey at the temples, with the face of a man who had learned to look at a river without flinching.He turned toward the doors, and the glass slipped out of his hand and broke on the stage.A woman stood in the doorway in a charcoal suit, hair cut sharp at the jaw, heels planted as if the floor were hers. A tall boy of ten stood on her left, straight-backed, with a careful look and Damian's stubborn eyebrows. On her right a little girl in a navy coat held a paper doll wearing a tiny crown."Iris?" It was a breath, not a word.The room came apart. Chairs scraped, a woman screa