Reborn, I Rejected My Alpha First Chapter 12

He was sitting on a flat rock at the top of the ridge in the snow, as if he’d been sitting there every day for a month.

“It’s Wednesday,” I said.

“I know.” Kael didn’t stand. “I’ve been coming every day. Saturdays seemed optimistic.”

My wolf practically threw herself against my ribs. I held her back with both hands.

“You know what you are to me,” I said. “Don’t you.”

“I’ve known since you walked into that chamber with blood on your cheek and laughed at four people trying to bury you.” He looked up at me. “I also know you tore out a bond four months ago, and a she–wolf doesn’t owe

the Moon a second one. So I’ve been waiting. I’m a patient wolf.”

“Why?”

“Because the Moon can pick whoever she likes,” he said. “But I’d rather be chosen.”

I sat down beside him on the cold rock. Neither of us said anything for a long time. It was the best

conversation I’d had in two lives.

Morwen took the Crown’s offer in February. Five years in Greyhollow, full confession, no appeal. Her statement was read into the royal record in a flat voice while she stared at the table.

I identified a female suited to the purpose. I placed her within the household. I arranged the Elders‘ proceedings to ensure a determined outcome.

A determined outcome. Eight years of my last life, rendered in law–keeper’s language.

The magistrate asked if she had anything to say to the one she’d wronged.

Morwen found me in the gallery and said the only honest thing I ever heard her say.

“I didn’t think it would work if she fought back. They never fight back. They’re too ashamed.”

“Thank you,” the magistrate said dryly. “That is the most useful sentence spoken in this court all winter.”

Spring came. The pack grew.

The northern pass with Stormridge and Hollowmere brought more trade in three months than Ironfang’s road had in three years. Two Elders who had wanted to bow to Thorne retired early, with my warm encouragement and my cold eyes.

Thorne himself awaited trial in the royal cells. Briar was released early for her cooperation, went west, took her mother’s name, and, according to Rook, whom I really needed to stop paying for gossip, began training as a

healer.

Fine. Good, even. I wasn’t running a vengeance service. Some wolves you ruin. Some you simply put outside your border and let the current carry away.

And Saturdays, at dawn, I ran the north ridge.

Kael was always there first. He never once asked why I flinched at the clank of a metal gate, or why I always kept my back to a wall. He just started taking the outside edge of every path, so the drop was on his side and

never mine.

I noticed. She–wolves like me notice everything now. It’s the tax on survival. And sometimes the reward.

By April he’d met Lily, who interrogated him for forty minutes about whether the King’s Hand was allowed to have a puppy (yes), whether he had one (no), and whether he was, in her exact words, “the biggest wolf in the

whole entire world.”

“Close,” Kael told her. “Second biggest.”

“Who’s first?”

He glanced at me, eyes amused. “Your mother.”

Lily accepted this as obvious fact.

In May, Ines handed me a letter. Paper. Damon had discovered that I couldn’t refuse what came through the

Law–Keeper.

Three pages. Apologies laid out like flowers on a grave he dug himself. Except one paragraph near the end.

I keep going over it. The camera. The ledgers already copied. You moved like you’d seen the whole thing before it happened. Some nights I become certain you knew. That you let me walk into it. And then I understand what that means. It means I did all of it. Exactly as charged. The only question was ever whether you’d survive. I

hear you did more than survive.

It was the closest thing to truth he ever sent me.

I didn’t burn it. I put it in the chest with the trial records and my father’s land charter. The archive of a war.

That night, Lily padded into my study.

“Is that from the wolf?”

Children forget nothing.

“From the wolf,” I said.

She leaned on my arm with her father’s eyes and none of his heart. “Did you keep its teeth?”

I laughed, really laughed, and kissed the top of her head.

“Every single one, baby.”