Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 10

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 10 – The Reason

The King cleared the room.

Everyone. Except Rafe – and Dorian, who didn’t move and wasn’t ordered to, which told me something about him!

filed away to think about later.

“Sit down, Wren.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“Sit down anyway.”

I sat.

“You’ve been on my campus for over a year. Your family reported you missing eleven days ago. Did you know they

were searching?”

“They called sixty-three times the day I arrived. Zero times in the year before it.” My voice came out level. “I lived in a

boathouse on their territory for eight months, Your Majesty. Two hundred yards from my mother’s window. Nobody

knocked.”

Rafe swore under his breath.

The King pressed his fingers to his mouth for a long moment.

“Marcus Hale requested a private audience nine days ago,” he said finally. “He came into my house and he begged.

Marcus Hale has never asked me for anything in twenty-six years.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should. Because he told me why.”

He nodded at Rafe, who set a black lacquered box on the table and opened it.

A photograph in a cracked frame. A young woman, nineteen, in a high-collared dress. Black hair. My chin. My

eyebrows. My mother’s eyes.

“Seraphine Hale,” the King said. “Born 1889. The last daughter born into that bloodline before you.”

The floor went a long way away.

“She’s buried in a field between Thorncross and Greywater,” I said.

“Yes.” His face was grim. “You closed her case last week without knowing whose grave you were standing on.”

Then he told me the rest.

Every hundred years or so, the Hale line produces a daughter. Not often. Seven in three centuries. And every one of

them woke on the morning of her eighteenth birthday able to do something no wolf is supposed to do. Two heard

thoughts. Two could feel a lie at fifty paces. One had perfect recall of any room she’d ever stood in.

“And Seraphine?”

“Seraphine could hear a whisper from a mile away and a thought from the next chair.” The King’s voice was flat. “Her

family kept it secret. Then she was mated to an Alpha who swore on his blood to protect her, and within three years

he’d worked out what she was worth.”

Rafe said quietly, “He used her to strip nine packs. Trade secrets. Affairs. Debts. He’d bring Alphas to dinner and sit

her at the table.”

“When she resisted, he broke her. Slowly. When she fell pregnant with a daughter – a daughter with the same gift – she opened her wrists in a bathtub rather than raise a girl into that house.” The King looked at me. “That pack

still exists, Wren. It’s called Sablewood. And they have spent a hundred and eighteen years waiting for another Hale daughter to be born.”

I sat there listening to my own pulse.

“My father,” I said. “The morning after my seventeenth birthday. He shut his office door.”

“He called a meeting. Your mother, your brothers, his two most trusted men. He told them they had three hundred

and sixty-five days to prepare, because you’d receive your gift the moment you turned eighteen – and the second

Sablewood confirmed a Hale daughter existed, you were as good as sold.”

“So they stopped speaking to me.”

“They stopped speaking about you,” the King said. “In every room. On every phone. And most of all in the pack link, because your father found a bought wolf inside his own walls nine months earlier and never learned how many others

there were. So they scrubbed you. Out of the link. Out of the records. Out of the calendar. They never explained it,

because a seventeen-year-old who knows she’s a target behaves like a target.”

“And Kaine Drexel?” I said. “The rejection?”

The King’s mouth twisted. “That one was his own idea. He was offered a wealthier alliance and he took it. Your father

allowed it to stand because a rejected daughter is a worthless daughter, and worthless daughters don’t get stolen.”

I couldn’t breathe for a second.

“They could have told me,” I said, and my voice cracked straight down the middle for the first time in a year. “One

sentence. One. ‘Wren, we love you, we’re protecting you, be patient.”

“Yes,” the King said. “They could have. They were wrong, it cost them their daughter, and your father knows it.”

“And the party?” I said. “The fabric samples. The west clearing.”

“Eleven months of planning for your eighteenth,” Rafe said, almost kindly. “Every one of your brothers on a task. Your mother had a list she started the week you were born. They invited my father as witness they were going to present you to the Crown publicly, so Sablewood could never take you quietly.”

I thought about six wolves arguing over indigo swatches at a dinner table while their sister ate in silence.

I put my face in my hands and, for about four seconds, I let it hurt.

Then I sat up.

“None of that matters now,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”

“Explain.”

“Somebody’s been getting into my quarters. No forced entry, nothing taken.” I looked at Dorian. “Fourteen recruits were expelled from this campus last year and blacklisted from every pack on the continent, with nothing left to sell but information. One of them screamed my name in a courtyard.”

Dorian’s face changed. “Soren Ashby.”

“The Ashby pack,” I said. “Who do the Ashbys bank with?”

The King’s expression went to stone.

“Sablewood.”

The door banged open and Halloway stood there white as paper with a phone in his hand.

“Your Majesty. Commander. It’s Ironvale.” He looked at me. “They were ambushed on the coast road an hour ago. Two of her brothers are in surgery.”

I stood up.

“And Luna Elowen is gone.”