Reborn, I Rejected My Alpha First Chapter 10

didn’t go to the north ridge that Saturday.

Or the next.

Because a second–chance mate is a myth told to rejected she wolves to keep them from walking into rivers, and I had not survived two lifetimes to believe in fairy tales. My wolf sulked for a week. I ignored her an

signed paperwork.

The final dissolution of the Blackwood claim took nine minutes in a cold stone office with Ines and a royal clerk. I expected to feel something enormous. Instead I felt a silence where he used to live. The most peaceful thing I’d felt in either life.

Between the Blood Clause, the forged security logs, and the six years of pack gold Ines’s clerks traced from the treasury into Damon’s private accounts, he had nothing left to trade. His holdings came to me. Full custody of Lily came to me. Ravenna contested the east wing of the house for six weeks, until her own advocate explained, gently, that her name had never been on anything.

The banner came down that Thursday, as promised.

Half the pack stood in the courtyard in the rain to watch the Blackwood crest lowered. An hour later, they watched the new one rise. A silver wolf and a small cub beneath one moon, and words stitched underneath in

my mother’s hand.

VALE, AND HER DAUGHTER.

Lily held my hand and stared up at it for a long time.

“Is that me? The cub?”

“That’s you.”

“But I’m six. I can’t even shift yet.”

15

“It’s a promise, not a job. It means the pack is yours if you want it. And if you’d rather study whales, we’ll find you a boat.”

She considered this with the gravity of a high court magistrate. “Can the boat have a slide?”

“Two slides.”

“Okay,” she said. “Deal.”

Ravenna made her last appearance in December.

She was waiting outside the pack house at dusk, and the furs were gone. What she wore was plain and slightly creased, and it told me more than Rook ever could. Damon’s advocates had eaten the last of the Blackwood gold. The Blackwater lodge was sold. The she–wolves who had lunched with her for forty years had all discovered other plans.

“Seraphina.” Her chin was still high. Give her that. “I’ve come about Lily. A pup needs her grandmother have rights.”

“You have exactly the rights the Crown gave you,” I said. “One supervised visit a month. You’ve used none of them.”

“Supervised! As if I were a criminal!”

“Ravenna. Before the King’s investigators, you swore you saw me threaten Celeste the week before the ceremony. On a day you were at the Lakeshore Gathering two hundred miles away. There are forty witnesses.” I pulled my cloak tight. “You lied under royal oath to help put your granddaughter’s mother in silver. Supervised is a gift.”

Her mask slipped. Underneath was something I didn’t expect. Not rage.

Fear. Old, cold, running–out–of–time fear.

“He’s my son,” she whispered. “What was I supposed to do?”

There it was. The question every enabler asks, as if love were a summons.

“You were supposed to ask him one question,” I said. “Is it true. You never did. Not once. Because you already

knew the answer.”

I walked past her.

“The visit is the second Sunday. Lily likes the waterfall.”

At the gate I glanced back. She stood alone beneath the new banner in the rain, staring up at a crest that wasn’t hers anymore..

I felt something. I examined it carefully, the way you test a healed bone.

Pity. Small, manageable, and completely nonrefundable.

That night, a royal courier delivered a sealed envelope. The prison seal of Greyhollow.

An inmate has requested correspondence: BLACKWOOD, DAMON.

One line was visible through the paper where the ink had bled.

Sera, there are things about that night you still don’t know-

In my last life, I would have opened it at two in the morning and read it forty times.

I wrote REFUSED across the seal and gave it back to the courier.

But I’d be lying if I said that line didn’t follow me up the stairs.

Things you still don’t know.