บททั้งหมดของ The Alpha Rejected His Bride For Me: บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

 They walked fast.I kept up because the alternative was being dragged, and I had enough dignity left to prefer walking under my own power. My knee ached with every step, a dull persistent throb that sharpened whenever the ground dipped unexpectedly, but I kept my face neutral and my breathing even and I did not ask again where we were going.Cole walked ahead. Tyler walked behind me. Neither of them spoke.The forest thickened around us, the trees older and taller the further in we went, their roots surfacing above the ground in long gnarled ridges that I had to step over carefully in the dark. The path, if it could be called that, was clearly familiar to both of them. They moved without hesitation, without flashlights, navigating by some combination of memory and wolf sense that I didn't share.Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then what felt like twenty.The silence started to press on me.I didn't know what pack they were from.

 (Lena POV)I sat with what he'd said for a long moment.Varden sent the challenge yesterday morning. I walked out of Silvercrest yesterday evening. The challenge was about me, built around me, calculated to use the instability my existence created as a pressure point against Darius and Kai, and I had known nothing about it while it was happening. I had been sitting at Kai's desk reading a visitor restriction document and deciding to leave, completely unaware that an entire territorial chess move had been made with my name on it twelve hours earlier."I didn't know," I said.Ryan looked at me."About the challenge," I clarified. "I didn't know you'd sent it. I didn't know anything about it until you just told me."He was quiet."I know how that sounds," I said."Do you?" His voice was pleasant, which somehow made it more unsettling than if he had been sharp. "Walk me through how it sounds from your

 (Lena POV)The guard who came for me in the morning was not Ryan. It was a woman in her mid-thirties. She told me her name was Kate, that breakfast was available if I wanted it before the meeting, and that the Alpha would see me at nine.She said it the way a hotel concierge might confirm a reservation.I said yes to breakfast because I had not eaten since the borderland outpost and my body had started making its feelings about that known in a persistent way. Kate took me to a small dining room off the main corridor, left food on the table, and waited near the door without hovering. The food was plain, eggs, bread, sliced fruit and coffee that smelled like actual coffee rather than the approximation of it they served in the Silvercrest communal hall.I ate everything on the plate.Kate watched me do it without comment, which I appreciated.At five to nine she led me through two corridors and a heavy door into a

 (Kai POV) I crouched at the threshold and looked at the interior without entering it, reading it the way my father had taught me to read spaces before I was old enough to understand why the skill mattered. Dirt floor, disturbed in a pattern consistent with someone sitting against the far wall for an extended period. A depression in the dust where weight had rested. Scuff marks near the entrance where feet had moved quickly, outward, in a hurry.She had been here.I stood up and looked at Scout, one of the three men I had sent ahead at first light, a lean, quiet wolf named Daniel who had been tracking for the pack since before I was old enough to run patrols. He was crouched a few meters from the outpost entrance, examining the ground with the focused patience of someone reading a language most people couldn't see."How long ago?" I asked."Eight hours, maybe ten," Daniel said. "Ground's dry enough that t

 (Julian POV)By the sixth hour, the scouts were running on nothing.I could see it in the way Daniel moved with the slightly over-deliberate quality of someone compensating for a body that had been awake too long. Brett had stopped speaking entirely, which in someone his age meant he was past the point of social energy and operating on bare function. The two others, a wolf named Greg and a quieter one everyone called Sam, had been sitting on a rock shelf for the last forty minutes doing what looked like resting their eyes but was probably closer to sleeping upright.None of them had asked to leave.That was the problem.Kai was still moving. He had not stopped moving since we arrived at the borderland before dawn, covering the same ground the scouts had already covered, reexamining things Daniel had already read and reported, standing at the border marker and looking northeast with the focused intensity of a man who b