Reborn, I Rejected My Alpha First Chapter 14

made him wait.

Exactly long enough for the sun to clear the ridge. Not out of cruelty. I just wanted to remember the light.

“You lied to me for a year,” I said.

“I withheld my title for a year. It’s a fine distinction. My advocates are very proud of it.”

“Every wolf in Silverpine bowed to you that night, and I thought you were only a servant of the Crown.

“I know.” His mouth curved. “You looked at me like an equal. Nobody’s done that in two hundred years. I wasn’t

going to ruin it with a crown.”

My wolf stopped pretending she had any dignity at all.

“Yes,” I said. “I choose you.”

He let out a breath like a male setting down something heavy he’d carried a long way. Then he put the little silver key around my neck, and he didn’t kiss me until I kissed him first.

The news came the following week, in a royal proclamation read in every pack hall on the continent.

Corvin Thorne, former Alpha of Ironfang, sentenced to six years for bribery, forgery, and the trade of wolfsbane. Separately, the Crown decrees that no pack council may convict a member of violence without independent review by a royal investigator. The decree shall be known as the Vale Law.

I had spoken once at the royal hearings. One afternoon. One sentence. They carved it above the doors of the Greyhollow court.

An accusation is the beginning of a question, not the end of one. And tears, in either direction, are not

evidence.

Lily read the proclamation upside down across the breakfast table, chewing honey bread.

“Is the wolf in the news again?”

“Last time, baby. It’s extinct now.”

Here is where they all ended, for the record. Because in the end, I kept records of everything. That was always

my gift. That, and dying once.

Damon served quietly. A model prisoner, by every account, which surprised no one. He was always excellent at performing for whoever held power. His letters came twice a year. I read them, filed them, answered none. When Lily turns sixteen, in a future I can finally believe in, she can decide what he is to her. That’s her inheritance from me. The choice I never got.

Celeste was released after three years and disappeared into the southern wilds. Rook offered to keep watch. I

declined, and meant it. She lived rent–free in my head for two lifetimes. The lease was up.

Morwen serves her time and, I hear, has taken up teaching law to the young guards. Her first lesson, apparently, is always about paper trails. I choose to believe someone in Greyhollow has a sense of humor.

Ravenna came to the waterfall on second Sundays. Around the eighth visit she stopped performing grief and started watching her granddaughter. Around the fifteenth, staring into the falling water, she said, “I asked him. Finally. Your question. Is it true. He said yes.” She didn’t look at me. “I’m sorry I needed him to say it.”

It wasn’t forgiveness she wanted, and I didn’t offer it. But the next visit, I stayed for tea. Some debts you never forgive. Some you just stop charging interest on.

My mother planted a garden behind the pack house and bullied the groundskeepers into total submission. Seventy–one and thriving. Every time she laughed at my kitchen table, some cold room in my memory, a stone floor, silver chains, a life that no longer counted, went a little quieter.

And Kael and I were mated under the full moon in that garden. No palace. No crowd of royals. Just my pack, my mother, and Lily, who appointed herself flower girl, ring bearer, and head of security, and growled at a visiting Duke for standing too close to the cake.

A second bond doesn’t arrive like lightning. It arrives like a house being built, one honest beam at a time, by someone who always walks on the cliff side.

On the last morning of that year, I stood in the courtyard before anyone woke, cider in hand, watching dawn

light up the silver banner above the doors.

VALE, AND HER DAUGHTER.

In my last life, I died believing kindness killed me.

It didn’t. What killed me was kindness with no gate, no lock, and no memory. Kindness anyone could walk into and strip for parts.

This life, I kept the kindness.

I just gave it a door. And I decide who gets a key.

My phone buzzed. Lily, from the kitchen. A picture of pancakes stacked into a lopsided crown. Underneath: For the ALPHA of EVERYTHING. Grandma and the King say come home before they get cold.

I looked up at the banner one more moment. Every wall, every alcove, every corner of my father’s house now bright, watched, and mine.

Then I turned and went inside, where everything I once died without was waiting, warm, at the table.