Reborn, I Rejected My Alpha First Chapter 11

tasted eleven days.

Not because I doubted my choice. Because on the twelfth day, Ines came into my study with a strange note in her voice and closed the door behind her.

“The King’s investigators inventoried Damon’s belongings at Greyhollow. They found a second phone, Hidden in the lining of his trunk.” She sat. “Mostly calls to Celeste, as expected. But one number matches no one in

the case.”

“Whose?”

“Unregistered. But it pinged from Ashmere.”

Celeste’s hometown.

“So he called her birth family. So what?”

“The calls start eighteen months ago.” Ines let that land. “Seraphina, that’s six months before Celeste ever started visiting Damon’s study. Before she showed any interest in him at all. He didn’t stumble into her. She

was delivered. Someone introduced them.”

I sat down slowly. Even reborn, even armored in two lifetimes, a floor can still tilt.

“Who bought the phone?”

“Paid in gold, no name. But the King’s men questioned the trader. He remembered the buyer. Older she–wolf. Silver cane. Sharp tongue. Asked a lot of questions about a certain Alpha’s son in Ashmere who once paid forty thousand to make an accusation disappear.”

Silver cane.

Morwen.

Damon’s aunt. Keeper of pack law. The woman who called the Elders before Celeste had even screamed. And who had, I now remembered with a cold, sliding click, been the one to insist, last winter, that Celeste be given

a room in the Alpha’s wing. “She’s family, Seraphina. Don’t be so territorial.”

The picture rebuilt itself, and it was worse and better than the one I’d carried through two lives.

Damon hadn’t found a weapon and aimed it at me.

Morwen found the weapon. A girl with a proven playbook and nothing to lose. And she sold her to her nephew like a service. She brokered the destruction of my life in exchange for a seat she’d wanted for thirty years.

In my last life, Morwen became High Elder of Silverpine one month after I went into silver. I always assumed it

was a reward.

It was an invoice.

“Celeste confirmed it this morning,” Ines said. “Once the Crown offered to reconsider her term. She says Morwen approached her first. Quote.” She read from her notes. “She told me Seraphina was cold and proud and easy to hate. She told me the pack would always believe a bleeding girl.”

The pack would always believe a bleeding girl.

I stood at the window for a long time, looking down at the frozen lake.

Things you still don’t know. Damon had been trying to sell me his aunt. His last bargaining chip. One final trade from a male who had never, in seven years, given away anything for free.

The King’s enforcers took Morwen at dawn. I didn’t go to watch. I sent a basket of winter pears to the King’s investigators instead, which Ines called “legally questionable and extremely funny.”

That afternoon, Morwen used her one message from the holding cells.

She sent it to me.

Seraphina. I can make this simple. I know things about this pack. About certain Elders. About how your father really won Silverpine from the Greymanes forty years ago. Speak for me to the Crown, and it all stays buried.

Two lifetimes ago, a threat like that would have kept me awake for a month.

Now I typed slowly.

Morwen. Let me tell you what I’ve learned about buried things.

I looked out at the pale sun on the ice.

They come back. I promise you. They always come back.

I sent it, blocked her, and went downstairs.

And then, for the first time, I did something I had been refusing to do for weeks.

I pulled on my boots, kissed Lily goodbye, and walked out the gate toward the north ridge.

It wasn’t Saturday.

He was there anyway.