Reborn, I Rejected My Alpha First Chapter 05

The alcove audio filled the chamber.

On screen, Celeste held the phone to her ear, and the trembling little stray was gone. What came out of her mouth was flat. Bored. Transactional.

“It’s done. Dress is soaked, looks real. Briar’s in position by the hall door. Don’t lecture me. Just make sure Morwen calls the Elders before Sera gets an advocate. You said once she’s convicted, the Blood Clausetrips, and the lands and the kid-”

The voice on the other end cut her off. Male. Low. Muffled.

Not muffled enough.

“Not on the phone. Wait for moonrise and scream.”

Four hundred wolves heard it.

Four hundred wolves, and every single one of them knew that voice. It led the pack hunt every autumn. It gave the toast at every solstice. It had sworn the Alpha’s oath on my father’s grave.

Damon Blackwood.

The silence held for three full seconds.

Then the chamber exploded.

“That’s the Alpha-”

“He set up his own mate-”

“His own Luna, on her ceremony night-”

On screen, Celeste slipped her phone away, took one deep professional breath, and walked out toward the hall where she would, an hour later, let out a scream so raw it lifted the hair on my arms even now.

That scream cost me my mate, my daughter, and my life.

I closed the screen.

Damon stood by the fire with the night pressing against the windows behind him, and I watched seven years of careful architecture collapse behind his eyes. The devoted mate. The fair Alpha. The worried father.

“Sera.” His voice came out sanded down to nothing. “That’s out of context. Someone altered-”

“Eight hours,” I said.

He blinked.

“The camera went live eight hours ago, Damon. Nobody altered anything. You simply weren’t told.” I stepped closer, close enough to see his pupils shake. “Want to know the funniest part? I almost waited until tomorrow to install it. One day. That’s the entire distance between me in silver and you standing where you’re standing.”

Ravenna grabbed her son’s arm. “Damon, tell them! Tell the King’s Hand it’s a lie! Tell them-”

“Mother.” He shut his eyes. “Stop talking.”

That was his confession, and everyone in the room heard it land.

Celeste heard it too.

I watched it happen. The exact moment she understood the man who promised her everything had just cut the rope. Her tears stopped. Her spine straightened. The stray stood up, and underneath was something with

fangs.

“You coward,” she said to him, quiet and venomous. “You absolute coward.”

“Celeste-”

“Don’t.” She turned to Kael, and the tears came back. Different now. Angrier. Real. “I’ll tell you everything. It was his plan. He came to me last winter. He said he was sick of ruling a pack that only bowed to him because of her blood. He wrote it all. He picked the alcove. He told Rook to leave the camera broken. He promised Briar a mating alliance with his Beta if she’d swear she saw it-”

“You lying little-” Briar bolted for the door.

One of Kael’s enforcers caught her in two steps.

Celeste kept going, louder, throwing every word at Damon like a knife.

“And do you want the best part, Your Grace?” She smiled through her tears, wide and wrecked and terrible. “I

really am carrying his pup. He swore he’d make me Luna the night they chained her.”

Ravenna hit the stone floor in a dead faint.

And Damon turned to me. Desperate now. Reaching. I felt the mate bond pull between us like a hook behind

my ribs, the way it always had, the way it did in my last life right up until the moment he tore it out of me in front of everyone.

“Sera. My mate. Please. We can fix this. Think of what we are to each other.”

I had thought about it. For eight years in the dark.

lifted my chin so the whole room could see my face.

“I, Seraphina Vale, daughter of Alpha Aldric Vale, blood heir of Silverpine,” I said, “reject you, Damon, Blackwood, as my mate.”

The bond snapped.

I felt it go, a bright, clean tearing behind my heart.

Damon dropped to his knees on the stone, clutching his chest, and the sound that came out of him wasn’t

human at all.