Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 13

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 13 The Trial of Wren Calloway

They tried me in the capital, in a white marble hall, in front of the twelve realm Alphas of Solvaine.

I was permitted no advocate, because Hollowborn have no legal standing. Rhys was made to wait outside, and I watched him being walked out and thought that if this went badly, that building would not survive it.

“Wren Calloway.” The First Alpha’s voice rolled down at me. “You unsealed a Ninth-Order beast. You unleashed it on a

sovereign force. Do you deny it?”

“No.”

Uproar.

“You admit it.”

“I admit all of it. I opened the seal. I made the deal. I did it with four hundred wolves at my back and six hours to live.” I

looked up the length of that hall. “Would you like to hear what I’d like to admit next?”

They should have said no.

“At 3:00 a.m. on the night of the attack,” I said, “the Realm Council voted eight to four that the northern province was

not defensible and should be surrendered as a delaying measure. Eleven thousand people. Sold, in your sleep, without

a vote from anyone who lived there.” I pulled out my phone. “I have the minutes. I have the vote count. And I have this.”

I hit play.

Julian Ashgrove’s voice filled that marble hall, silky and pleased, exactly as he’d sounded on the phone with me eleven

hours before the fog.

“-they’re prepared to make you a queen, darling. They’ve asked me to broker it.”

Then the recordings I’d bought at 4 a.m. with nine million coins from a Kaldrenn quartermaster who liked money

more than his country: eight months of correspondence. Gate schedules. Patrol rotations. The northern wall’s ward

keys.

Sold, every one, by the heir of Ashgrove.

The First Alpha’s face went grey.

“Julian Ashgrove sold this realm the same way you sold the north,” I said into the silence. “The only difference is he

got paid and you did it for free.”

They arrested Julian in the gallery. He didn’t even run. He just looked at me across the hall with that pretty, calculating

face and mouthed one word: how?

And I mouthed back: you paid for it.

One point eight million, Julian.

Everything I’ve built, I built with your money.

They didn’t execute me.

You can’t execute the woman who just saved eleven thousand people and exposed a traitor in front of the entire realm

broadcast, not while her name is trending in every province and eleven thousand northerners are standing outside your

marble hall howling it at your windows.

The vote took four hours.

What they gave me instead was worse, and better, and I should have seen it coming.

“Wren Calloway,” the First Alpha said, with the expression of a man swallowing glass. “By emergency instrument, the

northern province is severed from Silverpine and granted, whole, to Pack Hollow. You will hold the northern line. You

will answer to this Council.” A pause. “You are recognized as Alpha.”

Eleven months ago I was a wolfless bookkeeper who got dumped in front of two hundred people.

I walked out of that hall with a province.

Rhys was waiting on the steps. He’d broken a marble bench in half at some point, which someone was going to bill

me for.

“Well?” he said.

I held up my hand, showing him the black iron Alpha’s band they’d jammed onto my finger.

He looked at it. He looked at me.

Then he went to one knee on the steps of the Realm Council, in front of a hundred cameras, and took my hand and

kissed the band.

“Alpha,” he said, loud enough for the entire realm.

And a hundred journalists lost their minds, and I turned crimson, and somewhere in a healer’s ward in Silverpine, a

wolfless man named Damien Thorne watched it on a screen.

That night, in the north, in the house I’d bought that morning, I finally slept.

At 3:00 a.m., I woke up with silver in my mouth.

–

THE MOON’S LEDGER AUDIT UPDATED.

Rank: FORBIDDEN.

Note: You have been dead once. The Moon does not forgive twice.

Amendment: A second life was purchased on your behalf. The debtor has been located.

The debt is now due.

I sat bolt upright.

Beside me, Rhys wasn’t breathing.

His scars were glowing white, and there was frost climbing the walls, and standing at the end of my bed with its head

bowed beneath my ceiling, folded impossibly into the room, was Vaelith.

“I told you I would come back north, little thief,” the serpent whispered. “I lied.”