Reborn, I Rejected My Alpha First Chapter 06

Chaos has a sound. It’s four hundred wolves all howling at once.

Enforcers were binding Briar’s wrists by the door. Another was reading Celeste the King’s charges while she alternated between sobbing and screaming details at the ceiling. Dates. The hunting lodge on Blackwater Lake. The exact words of Damon’s promises. A woman burning down a bridge with the man still standing on it.

Ravenna had been laid on a bench with a wet cloth on her forehead, moaning about her heart.

Damon was still on his knees. Rejection does that to an Alpha. It takes the legs out first.

And Morwen was trying very hard to become part of the tapestry.

“Don’t move, Morwen,” I said without turning. “You’re in this too.”

“I have no idea what you-”

“Six thirty–one.” I held up my phone. “Celeste hadn’t even walked back into the hall yet. Nobody had screamed. And you were already messaging the Elders. Urgent. Blood heir. Possible pup murder. Convene at moonrise.” I smiled. “You taught me that, Aunt Morwen. Messages are forever.”

Morwen’s face went the grey of wet stone.

Kael stepped in front of Damon. He didn’t help him up.

“You’ll come to the King’s holding at Greyhollow tonight. Not in chains. Yet.” His voice was mild. “I’d think very carefully about the next hour of your life.”

“I want an advocate,” Damon rasped.

“Smart,” Kael said. “Get a good one.”

As the enforcers walked Celeste past me, she stopped. Up close, mascara flooding down her cheeks, performance stripped away, she looked young and vicious and lost all at once.

“How did you know?” she whispered. “Nobody fixes a camera for nothing. Nobody refuses to pour a cup of wine for nothing. You looked at me this morning like you’d already watched me do it.”

I leaned in, close enough that only she could hear.

“Because you already did,” I said. “Once.”

Her eyes went huge. The enforcer pulled her away, and she twisted to stare at me the whole length of the

corridor, as if I were the monster.

Maybe to her I was.

Gould live with that.

Literally. This time, I got to live.

They took Damon out through the Great Hall. He asked for the back stairs. Kael said no.

So the man who had ruled my father’s pack for seven years walked past the altar he’d stood at that evening,

past the Vale banners, past four hundred staring wolves, shoulders hunched around the hole where I used to

be.
At the doors he stopped and looked back at me, and for a moment he looked the way he did at seventeen,

before I was a bloodline he needed and a clause he could trip.

“Sera. Whatever you think happened between us-”

“Damon.” I kept my voice pleasant. “In my worst nightmare, you stood right here and rejected me in front of the whole pack. In front of our daughter. And you never looked back once.”

His brow furrowed. “That never happened.”

“No,” I agreed. “It never did.”

I turned away first.

It was near midnight when I climbed the stairs to the nursery. My mother had let Lily fall asleep in the rocking

chair waiting for me, a picture book about the moon open on her chest.

Six years old. In my last life, by eight she’d stopped asking where I was. Celeste made sure of that.

I lifted her into bed. She stirred.

“Mama? You smell like outside.”

“I was hunting a wolf, baby.”

“Did you win?”

I tucked the blanket under her chin.

“Almost,” I said. “There’s one more.”

Because there was. At 11:47 my phone had buzzed with a number I didn’t know, and I knew exactly whose it was before I read a word.

You have no idea whose daughter you just put in silver. Release Briar Thorne by the new moon, or omfang closes the southern border. No trade. No passage. No allies. Silverpine starves by winter. –

Thorne.

Alpha Covin

Ironfang controlled every road south of our territory.

And in my last life, Corvin Thorne was the Alpha who gifted the Council the silver to build the Pit.

The one where I died.