Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 08

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 08 – Homecoming

I walked back into Silverpine on a Thursday, in a coat that cost more than the Alpha’s car, with the Beast of the Ninth

Cage half a step behind my right shoulder.

The whole village came out to look.

They’d expected a beggar. That’s the truth of it – they’d expected me to slink home hollow-eyed and starving so they

could feel generous about taking me back as somebody’s kitchen help.

Instead I came up the main road with my chin level and Rhys behind me, and not one wolf on that street could hold

my eyes.

Damien was waiting on the hall steps with his war-second, four guards, and Cassie clinging to his arm like a growth.

“Wren.” He’d gone for stern. It came out strained. “You’ve been gone eight days.”

“Nine. And I’m not yours to count anymore, Alpha.”

Cassie’s eyes went straight past me to Rhys-up and up and up- and I watched her mouth actually fall open.

“Who,” Damien said tightly, “is that?”

“Mine,” I said.

Rhys’s shoulder brushed mine, warm as a furnace.

Damien’s nostrils flared. He’d caught the scent-old blood, silver scarring, cage. Rogue. Every wolf on that street

knew what it meant.

“You brought a Pit animal into my territory?”

“I brought a free man into a public road,” I said. “Get to the point, Damien. The elders summoned me.”

They had. And I knew why.

Inside the hall, under the same rafters where he’d rejected me, the Council of Silverpine laid out their grievance with beautiful, ancient hypocrisy.

Cassandra Vale had suffered a “shadowed womb.” A miscarriage at eight weeks. Grief, tragedy, terrible.

And Cassie sobbing, magnificent, one hand on her flat stomach-pointed straight at me.

“She cursed me,” she wept. “She said it at the ceremony. She knew. She knew I was pregnant before I did – ask

anyone, she announced it in front of the whole pack! Wolfless things carry the Hollow Sickness, everyone knows that, she stood next to me for twenty years and she rotted me-”

The hall erupted.

This is the moment. This is the exact moment where, in my last life, they stripped my name and my house and put me out with a bag of clothes, and I stood there and let them because I was twenty-two and grieving and I still thought if I was quiet enough, Damien might look at me kindly one more time.

I let the shouting run for fifteen full seconds.

Then I laughed.

It cut through that hall like a blade through wet paper. Silence dropped.

“Cassie,” I said pleasantly. “Which was it? Did I curse you at the ceremony – or did I know you were already

pregnant?”

She blinked. “What?”

“You can’t have both. A curse laid at the ceremony can’t retroactively make you six weeks along on the night I

supposedly cast it.” I turned to the elders. “Unless the Council would like to formally rule that Cassandra Vale was carrying the Alpha’s child before he rejected his fated mate on that dais.”

You could have heard a pin drop into snow.

Elder Marren, who was old and mean and had never liked me, leaned forward very slowly. “Six weeks, Alpha Thorne?”

Damien’s face was a masterpiece.

“That’s she’s twisting-”

“There are health records,” I said. “There are always health records. The clinic on Ridge Road keeps them for seven

years.” I smiled at Cassie. “Would you like me to request them, or would you like to sit down?”

She sat down.

The Council didn’t strip my name that day.

They adjourned in ugly, whispering disarray, and Damien Thorne left his own hall with two hundred of his own wolves

doing arithmetic behind his back and that, more than any knife, is how you kill an Alpha.

Outside, in the cold, Rhys looked down at me with something dangerously close to reverence.

“You didn’t even raise your voice.”

“I don’t need to.” My hands were shaking, so I shoved them in my pockets. “Rhys. In eleven days the Trials open on those grounds. Every pack in the province. Kaldrenn observers in the stands.”

“And?”

“And I’m going to put Solvaine’s name on that board,” I said, “if I have to break every bone in this village to do it.”

Behind us, a voice drawled out of the dark.

“Now that,” said Julian Ashgrove, “I’d pay to see.”