All Chapters of Rejected Tribrid Wolf: Her Four Alphas' Curse: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

46 Chapters

After the Collapse

When I woke up the whole room was dark and quiet, I lay still for a moment. Just breathing. Letting my brain figure out where I was and what had happened and in what order. The penthouse. Brecken's place. The couch on the floor. The collapse. All three natures going to war inside me at once while Brecken sat on the floor and held me together with both arms.And then the voice.MINE.I pressed my hand over my face. Tried to push it away. One word. One single word spoken into my skull like Lucian owned the space in there and was just reminding me of the fact. My vampire side hummed low at the memory. She liked the way it felt. I hated that she liked it.It was just a hallucination. Had to be. The collapse had been the worst one yet. Three natures fighting that hard could make anyone hear things. Brecken had probably been right that Lucian was reaching for me through some kind of vampire channel I didn't understand. But that didn't mean it was real. Didn't mean it meant anything atall.M

The Gift Pendant

The black box had been sitting on the kitchen counter since Gareth brought it back.Nobody touched it. Nobody talked about it. It just sat there with that silver clasp catching the light every time I walked past and my vampire side doing that low hum she always did when something connected to Lucian was nearby.I avoided the kitchen for most of the morning.By afternoon I was hungry enough to stop avoiding it.I stood in the doorway and looked at the box. My wolf was quiet. My witch side was watching it. My vampire side was already leaning."You don't have to open it," Sarah said from behind me. She was carrying a tray with tea and bread. She set it on the dining table and looked at the box the way everyone in this penthouse looked at it. Carefully. From a distance."I know," I said.But something about it was different today. The pull from before was quieter. Last night's collapse had burned through the worst of the vampire surge and left something calmer behind. I could look at the

Scent Shift

I smelled it before I understood what it was. Something different in the air when I walked down the hallway. Sharper. Heavier. Like pine but wilder. More dominant. I stopped outside the bathroom door and stood there for a second trying to figure out where it was coming from.Then I realized it was actually coming from me.I went back to the room and stood in front of the mirror. My face still same face. Same dark circles. Same too-thin frame in Brecken's oversized shirt. But my scent was wrong. Or right. Depending on how you looked at it.The suppressants had been failing slowly since the rejection. I had known that. But what was coming off my skin now wasn't just the three-layer blend of pine and copper and ozone anymore. Something underneath all of it had shifted. Something older. Stronger.My Alpha wolf.She had been pressed down for twenty-two years. Hidden under omega performance and bitter herbs every single morning. And now she was leaking through. Not fully. Not a flood. But e

The Panic over my scent

It happened so fast. That was what kept me thinking afterward. How fast it happened. How little warning there was. One second everything was tense but controlled and the next it wasn't.The pack council had gathered in the living room. Six wolves. Senior members. Brecken had called the meeting himself to address the Alpha scent situation head on. I was not supposed to be in the room. He had asked me to stay in the bedroom. I had agreed and then stood in the hallway just outside the open door because my vampire hearing made walls basically pointless.It was going badly from the start."She is destabilizing the pack," Elder Rowe said. His voice was dry. Like he was reading from a list. "Dominant wolves are having submission responses to a tribrid they don't know and don't trust. That kind of instinctive conflict is dangerous. Wolves don't know whether to protect her or challenge her and that confusion breeds aggression.""Then they learn to sort that out," Brecken said."Alpha. With re

The Mark

I woke up screaming like a baby. It was'nt a nightmare scream. Not a slow climb out of dark place. Just darkness and then my own voice tearing out of me before I even knew I was awake.Brecken was in the room before the sound finished. The door hit the wall. He crossed the space in two steps and grabbed my shoulders. "Aria. Talk to me. What happened."My left wrist was on fire.Not burning or bleeding. Just the pain. Deep and specific. Like something pressing into the bone from the inside. I grabbed my wrist with my other hand and held it tight and the pain kept going anyway."My wrist," I got out scared. "Something's wrong with my wrist."He took it carefully. Turned it over in the lamplight. And then he went very still.I looked down. On the inside of my wrist, glowing faint and blue-white against my skin, was a mark. Not a bruise. Not a burn. Lines. Clean and precise. Circular at the center with three branches extending outward. Each one ending in a different shape.The Triskelion.

The Vampire King

LUCIAN'S POVThe city looked different at three in the morninsaid Most things looked different too. Three in the morning was when the performance dropped. When most people stopped pretending to be what they had decided to present to the world and just existed for a few hours. I had always preferred this version of things. The unguarded version. I stood at the window with my hands behind my back and looked at the lights below and thought about the tribrid.Killian came in without knocking. He knew better than to wait to be invited. Waiting implied uncertainty and I don't tolerate uncertainty in my inner circle."The seal activated," he said."I know. Hmm.""The pendant made contact again. She held it longer this time. The binding script made itself more visible my lord.""I am aware." I turned from the window. "What I want to know is whether she understood it."Killian hesitated. "Our source inside Ironveil says the healer translated part of it. The debt of blood does not expire."I lo

The woman in the vision

It hit me in the middle of the afternoon with no warning at all.I was sitting on the couch with Sarah's mother's notes spread across the coffee table. Old pages. Some of them brittle at the edges. Handwriting in three different languages crammed into margins. I had been trying to cross-reference the coven seal description with anything Sarah had flagged when my witch side just pulled the floor out from under me.Not a bleed. Not a surge. More like a door swinging open from the other side.One second the penthouse. The next somewhere else entirely.Ancient streets. Stone. Narrow and dark and smelling like rain that had been falling for centuries. Torches mounted on walls. Not electric light. Actual fire. The kind of light that moves and breathes and throws shadows that shift.I was'nt in my body. I was watching. Like standing at the edge of a very long room looking in. The street was full of people. Not normal people though. Supernatural ones. I could tell by the way they moved. Wolve

Ironveil Divides

The council meeting I was not supposed to know about happened at seven in the evening.I knew about it because my vampire hearing picked up Gareth's voice through two walls and a closed door and fourteen feet of hallway. He was not shouting. He didn't need to.I sat on the bed with Sarah's notes in my lap and listened to the pack tear itself apart.There were eight of them in the room this time. More than before. A few names I recognized from the hallway. A few I didn't. The young wolf Brecken had slammed against the wall was there. He was quiet this time. Smart.The arguments came in waves.She's attracting enemies. The vampire king. A coven seal nobody can identify. All of it landing on Ironveil territory. We didn't ask for this.She's the Alpha's mate. His wolf chose. That means she belongs here.His wolf chose wrong. No wolf in this pack submitted to an omega before she arrived and now half the pack is having dominance responses to a tribrid who has been here less than two weeks.

The Escape

I decided at 4 AM. Well not dramatically or in a burst of emotion. Just quietly, in the dark, with the city lights coming through the window and Brecken asleep in the chair for once and all three of my natures finally settled enough for me to think clearly.I was going to leave.Not because I wanted to. That was important. I needed to be honest about that with myself at least. I did not want to leave this room or this penthouse or the way Brecken's arm felt pressed against mine on the couch. I did not want to leave Sarah and her mother's notes and the small strange safety of having someone bring me tea without being asked.But I was destroying things here.The pack was splitting. Half and half. Brecken had put a wolf against a wall with his eyes fully shifted in front of his own council. Someone inside his own territory had left me a note telling me to run. Someone else had sent three words to my phone in the dark.'You don't belong.'They weren't wrong. I didn't belong here. I didn't

The Hunter

CADE POVI had been tracking her for eleven days.Not continuously. The Tribunal didn't know I was still on assignment. As far as my handlers were concerned I had filed a preliminary report, flagged the target's location as Ironveil territory, and was awaiting extraction authorization. Standard protocol when a target was inside another faction's borders. You didn't go in without clearance.I had clearance. I just hadn't used it.Instead I had been doing what I did before every elimination. Watching. Building the pattern. Learning the edges of the subject before I moved on the center. Eleven days of surveillance logs and perimeter walks and exactly two moments when I had her in the scope and did not pull the trigger.I told myself the first time was positioning. Angle was wrong. Wind variable. Responsible shot placement required better conditions.The second time the conditions were perfect. Clean line. Empty street. Subject stationary for six seconds. I had made harder shots than that

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